2014 Had a Mind of Its Own

Reclaiming 2014

I spent much of my year trying to forget, trying to move on, trying to think very little in the hopes of coping. I didn’t really want to reflect on 2014 because even though it was one of the most amazing years of my dreams coming true, a few heartbreaking events seemingly spoiled the rest. 2014 was supposed to be a masterpiece, the realization of things I had been anticipating for the past year, the past decade, really. But it’s an inescapable truth that not everything goes to plan, that simply making plans does not guarantee you anything.

Perhaps because I’m young and naive, I find it cruel that a contradiction to this extreme could exist. In this one year, at time simultaneously, I have made both the most beautiful memories and the most crippling. I have gained my most valuable life skills and lost some of the most important people to ever grace my life. Perhaps I find it so unbearable because I am young, or perhaps this contradiction in life will be just as brutal when I realize it again later in life.

As much as I did not want to face reflecting on this year, I more so did not want to forget what I have been through, both the painful and beautiful. I feel like I painted this lovely picture, each memory a single stroke, and a series of events spilled their way across my canvas, coffee stains ruining the image I meant to create. But in an attempt to be more optimistic, I thought about it a little harder. Gave it a second look. And what I saw was not a painting ruined by black coffee stains, but merely changed, altered, added to.

My painting of 2014 may not look like what I had intended, but it does not mean it is a failure.

It is what it is. And it’s okay.

Ashley