Another New Year!

Winter Break is always a whirlwind time of year for me. I have an entire month off from school - which means time for actual life activities, such as spending time with friends and family. Or, in the case of this year, doing a lot of wedding planning - which, while stressful, is a task I can hardly complain about. It's one of the happiest tasks I can think of because, despite the hard work and dispense, it means that 5 months from now, I get to walk down the aisle to marry the man of my dreams.

This year brings a lot of excitement for me, and it's hard to picture just how that will feel when I sit and blog about it this same time next year. This is the year Kris and I get married, it's the year I go to clinic, and in a year from now I'll be only one semester away from graduation. 

All in all, 2015 has been an incredible year - and I say that because it turned out to be nothing like I expected it would be. Last year, I entered 2015 sad and confused. A little despairing, even. Lonely. If you had asked me where I saw myself in a year, I'm not sure I would have been able to answer that question, outside of still in school. Enter a semester at school in which I struggled more than I expected to, and it was a bad combination. If someone had told me I'd be engaged that year? I wouldn't believe that, either. I still felt as though my heart was trying to heal from the year before, and it wasn't going well. I was putting my heart in all the wrong places, trying to understand why it couldn't fit into place, why when I tried to heal and love, it felt like I was always asking the same question: "Is this all it's supposed to be? Is that it?" It didn't feel right. I wondered if it would ever feel right, or if this was simply how I was supposed to feel.

I feel like this is all really vague, but my point is that 17 year old me would have pictured my life now very differently. Everyone wants to think they'll marry the first person they ever dated, and I was no exception. I shaped my entire early life around that premise - around planning a life for me and someone who simply wasn't right for me. After almost 5 years of trying to make it work, I realized I had to do one of the hardest, scariest things I'd ever had to do - I had to end things. The next year and a half sent me into a spiral of self questioning and trying to let myself heal through other people who never really helped me figure out why I was still hurting in the first place. That made me doubt if I'd made the right decision, and left me unable to truly connect with anyone I tried to. Was this a vicious circle I had doomed myself to forever? 

When I met Kris, it didn't take either of us long to realize that we'd met the right person. It turns out it was the easiest thing I ever had to do. All those doubts, that inability to connect, the hurt - I realized that with the right person, they'll help you realize why you felt all those things before... and they help you through them. They make you realize immediately that love shouldn't have to be a game of questions and hardships - it should be with someone that makes you realize that all the hardships and doubts up to that point have shaped you into a person made better and made prepared to love the person you're supposed to be with. 

Two years ago, I drove in my car on the way to work one day and started crying with the burden of what I was preparing to do - to end a relationship I'd built my entire life around. What if it was the biggest mistake of my life? What would happen when someone else came along and they moved on? My life was a big question mark, and I could hardly bear it. Will it be ok, God? I wondered. I asked. I prayed. Would it? I got out of the car that day no less burdened, but I felt as though I had received my answer. It was going to be ok. God can't assure me of what exactly will happen, and he can't promise me that I won't get hurt. He couldn't show me exactly how the next year would pan out - the fighting, the crying, the confusion, the emotional turmoil. But he gave me a simple promise, and that is that with trusting him, comes the fact that I am his daughter and that he watches over me. I knew what to do. 

This time of year, I think back to that pivotal moment, and I realize the vision that God had for me: I barely had the strength to change my life two years ago, but if it hadn't been for me finding that strength: if it hadn't been for me going through all the hurt, the questioning, the doubting; I never would have met Kris, and never would have realized that God had in fact made someone perfect for me and that he was out there. I ended up in this big city, a place bigger than I could have ever imagined with more people (and traffic) than I could picture. God brought me to swing dancing, and I came to love dancing. It was my outlet from the questions about my life that I couldn't answer. I felt so sad and alone most of the time, but when I danced, all of that went away - I felt like I was supposed to be there, like I was drawn there, almost magnetically. I laugh when I look back and read my posts from last year about how much I love dancing - how joyful I felt when I danced and how I felt the need to be there - because I didn't know when I was writing that that only a few months later, I would meet the love of my life there. 

When Kris entered my life, I had no idea at first that God had planned an amazing future for us. I had no idea that in little over a year, I would be marrying him. All I knew was that he was a man who liked to walk through graveyards as much as I did when I agreed to go on a date with him. And what a whirlwind adventure that turned out to be.
The second half of 2015 has been the best half-year of my life: the adventures Kris and I have shared, delving into his coffee world and sharing my world of princessing, Diabetes and PT with him - getting proposed to - and finishing out the year with my best semester of PT school yet. I am excited to see what the New Year brings, because I know it will be exciting and new.

It's funny, I was in the process of writing this post yesterday when Kris and I received news and completely just changed everything and set the stage for a new year of changes. It was scary-upsetting-daunting - I'll be honest, it's the exact opposite of how we wanted the new year to turn out, and it comes at one of the worst times possible what with an upcoming wedding, bills, having moved into a new (more expensive) place and the knowledge that the boxes of insulin I have left in the fridge won't last forever. After a lot of time spent just worrying about where to go from there (after this new news), we are starting to figure out a new game plan - which comes just in time to usher in the new year (New year, new you, right?). It's scary, but we're going to figure it out. If anything, yesterday has only more so reinforced that Kris and I are a team and that together, through good and through bad, we will overcome anything and help each other to get to where we need to be.

So, 2016 is a big year of changes, to follow 2015 which was also a big year of struggles and changes. My best friend and I get to take it on side by side, though - and that makes all the difference.