This was the craziest year of my life.

Now, I wish I could state that more eloquently or with better vocabulary use. But in review, the only word I can find to encompass what has occurred in my life since the ball dropped last January is—crazy. 

It seems ludicrous that I would pick up my life three times this year and move to different continents. 

It seems insane that I would quit my first real job out of college after just a few months.

It doesn’t make sense that I would go from being perpetually single to madly in love.

This year was crazy

I started my year riding a motorbike in Thailand, to driving around a 15 passenger van in Silicon Valley, to toting around a little danish boy on the back of my green Raleigh 3-speed bicycle. 

Months seemed like years, yet the New Year has never creeped up faster.

I did not set resolutions this year. Through my yoga practice, I have learned to forego resolutions and focus on intentions. This year I set an intention for honesty. It is not that I am a compulsive liar, or struggle to tell the truth. But I think somewhere in adulthood, I was made to believe that I should ignore and block out the messy parts. It seemed to me that being vulnerable or needy was a sign of immaturity. But this year, I decided to tell the whole truth - To be honest in every facet; to be honest in my mind, honest to my heart, honest about my feelings and honest with my words.

This year has not been the most comfortable for me, and this blog won’t be either. Here is the most honest reflection I have in me.

My year began with an unexpected twist. Upon leaving my mountain-top journey in Thailand, I began to experience some health problems. I would have random moments where I felt my breath leave me, as if I’d been kicked in the gut. Upon a simple request at my new job, my heart would race and my palms would sweat. I had a constant rock in my chest that left me feeling this strange heaviness. Some days, this would result in tears, other days in vomit. It was rarely the same and harshly inconsistent. I went to doctors but received no answers.

When I finally began expressing these episodes, I was met with dozens of people that shared my same struggle. They called it “anxiety”. I heard this word throughout my life, but could never grasp the power that it had over people, until it happened to me. I did not know that anxiety could take a simple task and turn it into a mountain or take a normal day and turn it into a battlefield. I immediately felt regret for the friends and family that had come to me with their moments of anxiety, to which I shrugged off or considered to be “just an emotion”. I am eternally grateful for the people who heard my shaky voice over the phone, the co-workers who saw me even in my dishonest strength, who encouraged me to dig myself out of the quick sand and move on. 

This year was redeeming

I made the decision to move to Copenhagen and began to engage in what used to make me happy. It has been six months since I have had a panic attack. Anxiety no longer controls my every day. It took a simple change of location, a lot of prayer, and a new journal to turn my year around.

This year I saw parts of the world I never knew existed with a boy who continues to find the good in me. 

I deepened my craft behind a camera. 

I wrote blogs for myself and never posted them. 

I got outside once a day even in the dead of winter. 

I wrote handwritten letters and held nothing back. 

I got back on the volleyball court.

I wrote a shameful amount of to-do lists and delighted in marking off each one.

Most of all, I decided to be honest.

I am stamping 2015 with both bravery & anxiety — as a reminder that I won’t hide the darkness within me anymore but I won’t dwell in it either. I will take the good with the bad and allow it to make me a messy 24 year old who still feels growing pains. 

Here’s to 2016

Yours & mine.

Messy & brutal, crazy and honest.