It’s probably utterly bizarre to be doing a retrospective of 2023 more or less halfway into the new year, but I’ve been busy and waylaid with life and more importantly, this is my blog so I’ll have my way with it. If this displeases you, then maybe start your own blog. And definitely share the link when you do - an alternative to endlessly scrolling through Netflix with zero inclination to actually watch any of the offerings would be a most welcome change
After a full review of all statements and records, the working papers indicate that the final audit opinion for 2023 was that it was a disappointing year. There were a lot of things that happened last year both good and bad, yet the only word that I can isolate with any certainty when looking back at 2023 is the word disappointing.
The country I’d left my beloved homeland for was disappointing. The guy who professed seemingly sincere feelings for me was disappointing. The new job I had hoped would be a fantastic opportunity to learn and grow professionally was disappointing. The new friends I’d initially thought to be good people with kind hearts were disappointing. The academic courses I’d been eagerly anticipating for many months were disappointing. A steady stream of disappointment for days.
Now it’s quite possible for one to speculate that maybe I had held expectations far too high about the aforementioned disappointments, but let me be very clear about this - no, that was not the case. I simply went off what was relayed to me by the accounts of people already living in the country, the sweet caramel eyes that made the rest of the world disappear, the detailed job description, the kind gestures of friendship and what was written in plain English in the course summaries.
Probably a product of being brought up on Disney fairytales and just genuinely having an overactive imagination, I’ll admit that there are times when I get swept away into a land of fantasy and fiction, but in general I am a pragmatic and practical girlie with an evidence-based approach to life. It’s rare that I make an assumption about anything without a folder of facts to back up my conclusions. This extent of hoodwinkery I’d experienced (sounds like a word? yes? no? oh well.) is probably a tough pill to swallow for anyone, but for someone like me it had left me feeling as though said pill had firmly lodged itself in my respiratory tract without any signs of being dislodged leaving me in this strange state of suspended animation - struggling for air and in survival mode.
My boisterous, confident and giggly self was replaced by this husk of a person who took to second-guessing herself as though it were an Olympic sport and she was the captain of the national team. Of course, a bit of indecisiveness and back-and-forth on a decision should be quite normal, but I had felt as though I had lost my ability to make a reasonable judgement. Like my mostly perfectly functioning faculties were compromised by some virus that had sneakily installed itself overnight - the Trojan horse kind. And oh what a widespread infection it was.
Being so wrong about so many things of such immense magnitude in such a short time span has a very destabilising effect on a person. For a really long time, I struggled to comprehend what had happened and when it finally became clear that the picture frame had indeed shattered into something irreparable, the more important question that plagued me was why had it happened?
Endless hours of soul-searching and fact-finding yielded an odd result. While for some of the disappointments, I concluded that perhaps my naivety played a part in how things played out or that incompetent and inconsiderate humans made for a sour outcome, but for others I genuinely had no explanation for why things turned out the way that that had.
For avenues where there were no answers, blaming myself for the deep dark hole I’d sunken into followed. Thankfully, the self-criticism was not a long-lasting wave and receded when I stopped to properly consider things within the context in which they took place and soon enough, after a short spell of self-blame, I was back to not knowing why things had happened as they did. Not having clear answers to questions is a difficult thing for me. I was hands down the ‘why’ kid with my older brother being my favourite target to hone in on. He’d always humour me which obviously fuelled my incessant need to know why things happened and so not having answers to questions far bigger and more important than childhood musings about sea creatures was anything but a fun experience.
With all the torment and torture of trying to figure out how things had gotten so messed up, I’d realised that I could let this unknowingness haunt me or I could instead let it go and accept that life unfortunately doesn’t have a series of encyclopedias like the ones I used to pour over as a child and that it’s okay for things to just happen as it does without needing to attach some cosmically profound reason as to why it even happened at all. I had a choice between stubbornly continuing my post-mortem examinations and being surrounded by all the deathly misery that comes with that while hoping for some semblance of closure or I could choose to give myself the closure by gracefully turning over to a new page and ending this unpleasant chapter.
Something that made the latter decision an easier one to make was my contemplation of disillusionment which to me has to be the scheming sister of disappointment or at least first cousins. I think that making peace with the fact that my expectations were all illusionary somehow liberated me in a strange empowering way to not just turn the page in defeat, but rather reach for a beautiful fountain pen with unreserved gusto and start sketching a new outline of an image of what I want for myself with more control and conviction.
I guess part of life is realising that sometimes bad things are going to happen in the most inexplicable of ways and so disastrously timed you’ll start looking around for what could be cameras to a live-stream of you being the main star of another Truman Show (I’ve genuinely done this). In my opinion, when these times inevitably come around, the best that you can do is tally up and honour your losses but then move on hopefully having learnt a thing or two about the world, yourself and your spirit.
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