23

My birthday has officially passed. I gauge this by the fact that the parties in my honor are now over. I had a fabulous run of events devoted to my mother having her stomach cut open, and me being pulled out wailing in such a way that was deemed "sassy," and I was named Kimberly because the other option, Rachel, was too mild for such a spunky little baby. Foreshadowing?

This is the first year in many that I have not specifically made a list of things I want to accomplish in the next year, or thought hard about attributes that I want to make an effort to emulate. It seems that this year, the reflection is happening in a more broad, vague, all-encompassing sort of way. I don't feel the same urge to quantify my progress this year. I just want to grow. I just want to feel honest, in every aspect. I want to assert myself and defend others and love people really well. What does that look like? I know what it has looked like, but I also know that it will change indefinitely. The older I get the more clear it becomes that quantifying everything is as incomplete as leaving everything in an intangible, theoretical form. Life is both. Life is everything.

Interestingly, I feel both the most hopeful I have been and the most pessimistic I have been. I'm feeling very Buddhist about everything in the sense that I am consciously letting things go, and letting them be. My high-strung, misdirected energies that I have exhausted on stressing out about the state of the world and the state of people's lives around it are shifting. My tension between what I consider to be mainstream culture and the values that are what we should be focusing on is becoming less upsetting to feel. If we use up the very finite resources that our infrastructure and civilization rely upon (read: water, top soil, fossil fuels) and people die off (with the exploited people at the bottom of the class hierarcy being first by way of natural disasters caused by climate change, such as the absolutely devastating flood in Pakistan) until there are only some humans left, or none for whatever reason, and the other species that once existed plentifully (word?) die off for the most part....whatever. I hope that doesn't happen and I will work my whole life to make things better in all capacities I can, but if it does? Fuck it. The complete disappearance of life on this planet would still be pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. And if I'm wrong and our planet holds the only forms of life in the universe and then it's all gone to shit? Whatever! What the fuck ever. History is full of beginnings and ends. We should've done  a better job.

So, it's doom and gloom, but I am also content. I will do work and have fun and enjoy my life and help as much as I can, and that's all. I can't worry about the future of our planet constantly, and stress out about people not acting on this or that. I'm going for feeling good, and taking advantage of the fact that I am ridiculously lucky and privileged by way of taking opportunities, educating myself, making other people's lives better, and keeping love in all forms at the top of the priority list.