“And so this is Christmas, and what have we done? Another year over…”
The time between the end of the Christmas festivities and the start of the new working year is always a weird one for me. A time for reflection on the year that has past, and speculation on the year which is to come. I always maintain that if I had any idea what the new year actually held in store for me I would immediately decide that I was unable to cope and refuse to leave my bed on January 1st. Certainly, I would have refused to get out of bed for 2007 had I had any inkling of the twists and turns it was going to take.
And what a year it has been! Some days I feel it has been the best year of my life, other days I feel it has been the worst, and perhaps ultimately all I can conclude with surety is that it has been the strangest. It has been a year of firsts for me. The first time I have been abroad on my own, the first time I have called in sick to work for dubious reasons, the first time I have drunk five glasses of wine in one evening. It was the first time I have been in charge of a company audit, and the first time I have ever eaten a kebab. It has been a year when I have done the craziest things, and there have been points throughout it, perhaps whilst wandering round the back streets of Düsseldorf in the dead of night without anybody knowing where I was, or sitting in a pub in Essex and maintaining a conversation about wedding planners with a colleague whilst pretending the guy sitting a few tables away was a complete stranger as opposed to someone I had secreted in my room, when I have stopped for a moment and thought, “How the bloody hell did I end up doing this?!”.
It has been a year which has in some ways been dominated by the start of a new relationship. A relationship so special to me that every morning I wake up and am amazed that it exists. Even eleven months on, I haven’t quite succeeded in believing that this isn’t all some life-like dream which could burst at any minute if I pinch myself too hard. It is very far removed from a fairytale romance, and perhaps to other people it would not make a terribly impressive story at all, but to me it still seems too good to be true. Despite all the superficial wrongness which might seem apparent to the casual observer, to me it feels incredibly right. With my previous boyfriend, the idea of settling down was something which made me feel sick and trapped, an ordeal which I was constantly steeling myself to go through with. With this boyfriend, however, it feels so unexpectedly natural that I can almost begin to understand why people want to buy houses, get married, have children.
It has been a year in which I have learnt a lot, both about myself and about the world. I have learnt that to be more positive about my own capabilities. I have learnt that if you want something badly enough, you should never let dignity prevent you from fighting for it as hard as you can, and not give up unless you are certain that there is nothing else you can physically do. Less profoundly, I have learnt how to decline French regular verbs in the present tense 
It has been a year in which I have become far more confident than I could ever have imagined. I still lag far behind other people in the confidence stakes, of course, but by my own personal standards I have improved tremendously, and it is really quite a rare thing now for me to be visibly shaking through fear. I have learnt to defend myself just a little bit more when people are criticising me for things I don’t consider myself to be guilty of. Learning to believe in myself is something which it will take more than twelve months to accomplish, but I think I have made significant progress recently. I have learnt to accept that even if I can’t quite believe something is real, can’t fathom why someone as wonderful as my boyfriend would want to be going out with me or something similar, if that thing appears real then it is real until there is substantial evidence to the contrary. I have learnt not to assume the worse, that people do not necessarily have to be drunk to say the things they mean or mean the things they say and, more importantly, that refusing to believe in reality is the surest way to bring about the cessation in the existence of the said reality. I have learnt that life does not have to be regarded as a mathematical proposition, in which it is not possible to trust without a comprehensive proof, and that it is perhaps better to approach life like a physicist, who bases his decisions on circumstances which he does not understand the reasons for, without finding that fact concerning.
These are not things which I have learned as quickly as I probably should have done, but I am getting there in the end, and hopefully that is the main thing. Some of it, in fact, only came to me relatively recently. Looking through conversations which had taken place pretty much this time last year, it struck me with some force quite how much has changed in twelve months and suddenly I felt rather silly, nay incredibly silly, for some of the things I had been thinking and worrying about, and for the shadowy doubts, both expressed and unexpressed, which I had been harbouring somewhere in my hidden depths.
For those, if Babel is reading this (and I suspect he will because he’s a nosy bugger 
) and various other episodes of the last twelve months which can be read between these lines, I apologise. My hope for the next twelve months is that they will run a bit smoother. To a certain extent that depends on circumstances outside of my control, but as far as the circumstances inside my control go, there are a lot of failings which I have been guilty of during 2007 which I hope not to be so guilty of in 2008. I am a much more secure, independent and confident person than I was twelve months ago, and I don’t think there is much doubt what I have to thank for that.
It might be overambitious to say this was the year in which I grew up, but I hope it is the year in which I have started.
Tags: new year, random thoughts