Ending 2024

Published on 31 December 2024 at 00:09

A small love letter to 2024

This year has been one of the best years of my life. There were many positives to the year as well as many negatives. I am grateful for the experiences the universe had offered me in order to grow into the person I am today. Here's to 2024, I love you.

Love & Hatred

It all started the first day of freshman year in college. I am the type of person who claims that they embrace change but in reality resents everything about it. I find comfort in things that I am used to. Entering college was a huge change. I was hours away from home, my boyfriend at the time and I had just broken up, and I knew nobody. I had decided on my first day that I wasn't going to stay. I wanted to drop out and go save the turtles on some random island. I wanted to go school closer to home. I had spent my entire first semester refusing to make friends, there was no point if I wasn't going to stay right? I ended up staying for second semester but still planning to transfer to a different school. At the beginning of second semester I began to make friends with a few of my teammates and some men's lacrosse players. One of the girls I had considered my closest friend (the Gremlin) would begin to make my life miserable.

Flash forward to January 2024, I was days away from leaving to go back to school and lacrosse season was a couple of weeks away. My mom had brought up something to the affect of me leaving soon to play lacrosse in the car ride home from the gym and I had just started sobbing. It was in that moment I knew that I was once again feeling the same way I had felt on day one. For months I couldn't pin point the exact reason why I wanted to quit lacrosse or transfer schools, after all I had adjusted to the college life and had a good core group of friends. As my season went on, the more problems arose within the team. Each problem was stupid and petty but they all had a common denominator: the Gremlin. For the most part I kept my distance from her but she seemed to want to stay close to me. Eventually I realized that I too had to play the game. I kept my friends close and my one enemy closer. In April she had told me in confidence that she hates nursing school and that she was planning to transfer to a school closer to her home. I took this information with a grain of salt. There are a few things we should know about the Gremlin: she loves to lie about random things to make herself the center of attention and if she tells you a secret that she "hasn't told anyone else" that means that everyone in the North-Eastern region of the country knows. However, this time what she had told me was true. I called my mom the day I got the news and she told me that she hadn't seen me smile the way I was in a very long time. It wasn't until then that I realized my wanting to leave and quit lacrosse wasn't because I really wanted to do that, it was because I had let this girl ruin something in my life that has always been a love of mine.

The lesson within this story is to NEVER let anyone control how you feel about the things you love. There will be people out there who will encroach on something that you love and it is important to ignore that they are there even though it may be hard at times. Never quit something that brings you joy just because of one person.

Friendships & Heartbreak

I want to start of by saying that I have so many beautiful and wonderful friendships in my life and I am so fortunate to even know these people. I have met so many interesting people this year who have forever changed my life. I have rekindled friendships that had fizzled out in the past. I have maintained and strengthened friendships from previous years. Lacrosse has always been my main way of making friends at college. If you see me on campus I am either with my roommate or my teammates. Each girl that has joined the team this year has made an impact on my life that I am forever grateful for. I could not imagine a life without any of them. This year I joined a sorority and made some friendships that I am so excited to continue to develop in 2025.

Relationships both romantic and platonic have never been my strong suit. I don't do well with commitment and sharing emotion, I am not sure why but that is something for me to discuss with my therapist once I stop lying to her (you should never lie to your therapist). This year especially I have struggled with my closest friendships. As a twenty-year-old girl, I am still learning so much about myself and who I am. I am planning for the future but in a way where I understand that I am still young and my dreams and plans will change often. My best friends are also twenty and twenty-one and have reached a point in their lives where they are ready to "settle down" and "mature". I tend to butt heads with the two of them on this topic often and maybe it is a one sided feeling and I am absolutely insane (I am not insane and my feelings are completely valid), but it feels like walking on eggshells sometimes with them. They say that I can tell them anything but when I express something that I do or think is fun my one friend tends to go "mother mode" and discipline me in a way for acting in an non-serious way while the other talks to me as if I am a five year old who made a terrible self portrait and she's my mother who hangs it on the fridge so I don't feel bad. I am aware that they don't mean to make me feel this way and at the end of the day it is just genuine concern because in retrospect I do not always make the best decisions but that is how we grow. If you don't live, you'll never learn. Sometimes I feel upset that they don't embrace their twenties and I wonder if it is because they are in relationships so they hold themselves back but there is nothing I can do to control what they do, I can only control what I do and how I feel. I do feel like I tend to restrict myself when I am with them which is no way to live.

This summer my boy best friend reminded me what it is like to live out your twenties to the fullest. He dragged me to bars, introduced me to new people, and went on so many side quests and I am so glad he did. I was able to learn so much from this. I now know how to order at the bar for when I go for my first legal drink next year. I didn't feel guilty for going out and drinking until 5 AM before a 9 AM shift at work and showing up hungover. I was introduced to the most wonderful man I have ever met because of one night I stayed out on the fair grounds until 4 AM. This man too became one of my close friends and I quickly developed a crush on him. Because of him, I was reminded of my self worth and that just because a guy may like me a little bit I have to sleep with them because I am more than that. I have recently learned that if you sleep with a guy on the first date it is bound to fail as a relationship. You are young and you have so much time to have sex in the future (unless you're just there for a quick fuck, then go ahead I've been there too). So I went on dates with this guy for several days over the span of a month and I started to catch real feelings but we never even kissed. Maybe I just enjoyed the guessing and the excitement of not knowing what we were but at the end of the day I hurt myself more when he posted that he had a girlfriend a few months after we stopped talking. This was the first time in three years that I had felt heartbroken to the point of crying over a man. I pride myself in never crying over men because the only man I had ever cried over was in high school and it had turned my life around in a completely negative way. This time it was different. I cried, I enjoyed a little retail therapy so my wallet was hurting just as much as I was, I wallowed for a few days, and then I was fine. I had made it through a real (self inflicted) heartbreak and I am still alive to tell the story.

Heartbreak is never going to be easy, it may linger for a few days, weeks, and sometimes months. I am not familiar with relationships but I am familiar with heartbreak and disappointment. It is okay to cry when bad things happen but we have to remember that your feelings are not the only ones involved in the situation and you cannot control how that other person is feeling about you. Knowing this, you have to continue to value yourself! Just because someone else may not have seen everything you have to offer, it doesn't mean that it's not there. Take yourself shopping, eat your feel good, comfort foods, and just take care of you. Every experience is a learning lesson and every person in your life is there for a reason. Each friendship, each relationship, and each heartbreak will teach us more about ourselves than we ever could find on our own. Text your best friend and tell them you love them and whatever you do don't text the boy who broke your heart because he is gone for a reason.

Health & Healing

For the past few years health has been something I have struggled with a lot. For a while it felt like I couldn't find a happy medium between being extremely happy or extremely sad. I could not for the life of me figure out what was wrong with me. I had started birth control to help with my irregular periods since I had only been getting about two a year since my first one. My doctor had told me that this was normal for the first year or so but it got to the point where I figured there was something actually wrong. From the age of 17 to 20 I had my health issued chalked up to infertility and an eating disorder. It wasn't until August, when I got a new doctor, and found that I have Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). All of the problems I had been having with my periods, hormonal acne, mood swings, etc. was just a simple hormonal imbalance that can be regulated and maintained.

Since this diagnosis, I have made some changes to my diet. I cut gluten out of my diet since I found that it one, causes severe bloating, and two, can trigger many symptoms of PCOS making life just a little bit harder. Since eliminating gluten, I have never felt better. I have less bloating, my mood has been more stable, I feel more energized, and I am happier. Now don't get me wrong, it is not easy at all and I do find myself eating gluten here and there (usually as a 2 AM drunk snack on a Saturday) nonetheless, it is challenging finding vegetarian options that also have no gluten. At the end of the day what I learned from this experience is that you know yourself better than anyone else, if you feel something is wrong with your health do not hold back. Figure out what helps to make you feel better in your skin because you will never feel better.

Going into 2025

While 2024 holds many great memories for me, I am ready to let go and jump into this new year as the new Morgan I have molded into over the past 365 days. I encourage everyone to create a list of goals, aspirations, or visions for this coming year. Resolutions are out, no one ever sticks to them but if we go back to Marketing 101 and set a few SMART goals for the year it is easier to stay on track and motivated.

My Goals for 2025

  • start and finish a new book (I picked out eat, pray, love since I loved the movie so much)
  • run a 5k (probably the turkey trot)
  • attend yoga / pilates classes
  • make deans list

Eat your 12 green grapes under the table at midnight, drink your champagne, and spend time with the ones you love the most. Create your goals, do your new years cleaning, and have a glass of wine. I hope you all had a wonderful 2024 and here's to an even better 2025. See you all next year! KISSES.

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