The Year Half Full

New Year’s Eve dinner was all you can eat carbs with friends. It was also never ending question time from me. The year of 2011 was a world-class roller coaster for me and I was curious to see how everyone else fared.

Some of the questions I forced people to voluntarily answer:

What was your most memorable moment of 2011?

What is a 2011 moment you’d most like to forget?

What is a wish you have for 2012?

The first proved pretty easy and the responses involved some kind of move or vacation for almost everyone. For me it was the dreamy trip to Europe that I still brag about to anyone that will listen. (Don’t worry I still have a pending blog about England to be posted soon). The second question was a little more challenging. It seems most of my friends are refreshingly optimistic, so much so that it was only slightly awkward when I pulled out my lengthy list of events I would love to never happen again. Finally, the wishes were surprisingly large, life changing things like new jobs and babies (again don’t worry, that’s not me).

Over the next 24 hours I watched people, tweet, text, blog and instagram their way into 2012. Perhaps it’s standard to feel exhausted at the end of a year and eagerly welcome the many possibilities a new year presents, but I noticed more cries of relief at the close of 2011 than any year before. Or perhaps I noticed it because that is how I felt. I couldn’t wait to kiss 2011 goodbye. It was simply terrible. I wanted 2011 to be torn into little pieces, locked in a box, burned, buried far in the ground and burned again.

Then I remembered how difficult it was for my friends to come up with the moments they’d like to forget. At the time I thought they just might be hesitant to share potentially embarrassing things or worse, nothing went wrong!!! Later I realized it’s not that their year was perfect, but that they chose to only remember the good and the bad just sort of faded away from memory. Then it slapped me, like perspective often does, a year can only be remembered the way you want it to be.

Thanks to my optimistic friends, a year of horror started to turn upside down. Instead it was a year of survival, self-awareness, escaping death, superior strength, adventure, learning, supporting friends, not going broke, and finally a year that ended with great friends just enjoying all that is good in life.

So there it went - 2011 was quite the roller coaster. But now instead of wanting to jump off and run to the nearest trash can to vomit, I am ready to ride another! After all, I took a ride on that monster and even with all the screaming, I sure rode the heck out of it. Take that 2011!