Welcome to the end of the year. Time to reflect on the last 12 months and panic-set some unachievable goals for the next 12, am I right?
Since a new decade only comes around every ten years, I wanted to use the end of 2019 to write a reflection on the entirety of the 2010’s. Condensed, of course, and not focusing friends and family and traveling to new places, all of which I am so grateful for but I was lucky to have throughout the decade.
Instead, I wanted to highlight what I felt were turning points, little inflections that shaped my course to becoming the person I am right now, stepping into a new year and a new decade and, 2 days after that, a new age (26!).
So here are ten awesome things that happened in the last ten years, and here’s to many more in the next ten.
1. Studying French and Chinese
2012 -2016
Technically I began studying French in 2006, but I’d argue the real work didn’t start until I started high school. In college, I woke up absurdly early throughout my freshman year to learn Chinese, a skill I have yet to put to good use but hope to in this new decade. I don’t regret it for a second.
I also minored in French in college, and these days I try to keep up with both languages through apps and podcasts (and the hundreds of Chinese flashcards I have trucked around with me for 7 years. Definitely not a psychopath move.)
For awhile, I would slip into French in my Chinese classes and vice-versa; they’re not exactly similar languages, but I feel like they activated a part of my brain that I didn’t otherwise use often. Studying other languages allowed me to learn about and communicate with other people and cultures, and that’s one of the best things I’m taking away from this decade.
2. Getting into hiking…then backpacking
circa 2012
I never thought of myself as “outdoorsy,” and rejected that label even more a few hours into my freshman year of college. I had chosen to go to school in the midst of woods and mountains, and now found myself on a two-night backpacking trip with a bunch of strangers I’d just met.
My dad’s ten-year-old external framepack strapped to my back, I did my best to seem cool and fun and smart enough to be there while also getting my first introduction to iodine-treated water and cooking on a Trangia stove.
After that trip, I slowly but surely immersed myself in my school’s outdoor club. I continued to wear the wrong clothes (cotton, unnecessarily ugly pants) and know basically nothing about navigation. But the more I learned from other people and the more often I went hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the more I fell in love with it.
I loved that the Appalachian Trail ran through town and thru-hikers often asked students for directions to Trail Angels. I loved my first winter hike and learning how to layer better. I tried backpacking again, trekking through ten-mile days in the otherworldly landscape of southern Utah.
It grew to to the point that I knew wherever I ended up living long-term, it would have to be close to some good hiking trails. The last decade has shaped my priorities in different ways, and “going outside a lot” is high on the list.
3. Cutting my hair short
2013
In the spring of 2013, I chopped my hair to my shoulders and donated ten inches to Locks of Love. (Technically a professional chopped it. I would have done a terrible job.)
Immediately, I was worried I’d made a mistake. It had been a part of me for so long that my long hair was somewhat entwined with my identity, and the short-haired girl looking back at me in the mirror kind of looked like the Geico gecko.
Eventually, the new look grew on me (hehe), and I look back on that period of short hair fondly. It was different and new and out of my comfort zone, all things I needed more of at that time.
4. Living abroad
2014
“Spending a significant amount of time outside the United States in your formative years makes you a better person.” – Ali Wong, Dear Girls
Ali Wong said it, so it has to be true, right? Look, I don’t want to be that girl you went to college with who won’t shut up about that time she studied abroad. I only bring it up because living in Paris for 3 months was a notable part of my decade. It helped me become a more confident person who spoke better French. It also made me super paranoid and realize that I’m not really a city person.
Another quote from Ali: “Studying in a developing/third-world country is way more intense and formative than studying in a first-world fancy country.” This is probably also true. Most people would likely classify France as a “first-world fancy country,” where I was admittedly living a good life, eating enormous amounts of cheese and crepes and gorging myself on wine.
That isn’t to say I didn’t experience stress, because there was plenty of that. I was almost pickpocketed, got lost, was often sick, felt unsafe, stressed out about how expensive Paris was. But I was lucky to go through these tough spots in relative comfort, where I could expand my comfort zone and test myself and mess up and still have it pretty easy compared to countless people around the world.
Thank you, Paris, for teaching me more about the world, art, and the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had.
5. Running my first half marathon
2015
Many of the changes I underwent over the last decade were related to my identity. In high school, I identified as an athlete; I played soccer, ran track, and spent a huge chunk of time dedicated to the girl’s varsity basketball team.
Once I got to college, sports slowly fell by the wayside. Instead, I went for runs. It was a fun way to explore campus and beyond and work off the ten desserts I ate at the dining hall every day (I wish this was more than a slight exaggeration).
I always have been and always will be competitive by nature. So although I was no longer on a sports team, by my junior year I missed the camaraderie of working towards a shared goal and the high of accomplishing an athletic feat.
So I signed up for a race.
If you had asked me in 2010 if I would ever run 13 miles in a row on purpose, I would have thought you’d lost your mind. But running my first half, which I can’t remember most of except for being passed by my professor and struggling through the last hill around mile 10, felt like flying by the end. And I wanted to do it again.
I ran another half marathon in 2016 despite a busted knee I’d injured hiking, and after that I had to stop running for awhile to treat said knee. It still bothers me a bit to this day — getting old is so fun, right? — but I’m planning on running my third half in 2020. And after that…maybe a full marathon? (We’ll see.)
6. Getting back into skiing
circa 2016
You might be noticing a trend here. I grew up skiing with my family in Vermont, where I learned that while I loved navigating snowy pockets between trees on my short rental skis, overall skiing was icy and freezing and hard to muster up the energy for when the alternative was a steaming cup of hot chocolate and raiding the candy store in the mountain village.
I became a decent skier as a kid, but when the time came to give up winter break trips up to Vermont in favor of starting varsity basketball practices in high school, I wasn’t too heartbroken.
In college, with my hardcore basketball years behind me, the story stayed pretty much the same; my freshman year saw me skiing at a tiny local ski resort, skidding across the ice and wondering why I was bothering to freeze my butt off again after taking 4 years off from the sport.
At the end of 2016, I joined my boyfriend and his family on their annual ski trip to Colorado, my first time skiing out west. Somehow my boyfriend, who slid down his first slope in Snowmass as a wee lad and skied soft Colorado snow for years, convinced me to take the highest lift in North America up to ski the bowls at Breckenridge. I shlumped my way down, the moguls definitely too steep for me to do anything but slowly traverse across and down at an approximately ten degree angle.
I’m grateful for my boyfriend’s stoke on skiing over the last few years, because without it I don’t think I would have gotten as excited about it again as I have. Skiing is cold and expensive, two of my least favorite adjectives. But I can ski those moguls way more competently now, and the rushing wind on my face feels invigorating instead of tears-inducing, and at the end of a long day on the slopes, hot chocolate tastes that much better.
7. Changing career interests
2016
When I tell people I was a Government major in college, they assume I am interested in politics.
I am not interested in politics.
While I try to keep up with the news and be an informed voter, I specifically studied International Relations, meaning I read a lot of depressing academic texts about war.
That also meant that I thought, for several years, that I wanted to work for the State Department. Or the CIA. Or a foreign news desk. Or something. I didn’t really know, but all those options seemed important to society and my classes were interesting, and so I stayed on track.
Then, the summer after my sophomore year, I took a class in the film department. The following summer, I accepted an internship at a startup in New York City. I was slowly realizing that maybe I wanted an entirely different work environment than the ones I’d been considering, but the train seemed like it was full steam ahead, and it was too late to jump ship. (Am I mixing metaphors? Too bad. I never said I was an English major.)
By the time graduation day rolled around, I was woefully off track. In fact, the track was in another state, and I was adrift in a far-off ocean, wondering what I was supposed to do with myself now that I no longer had this path to align myself with.
I organized phone calls with a bunch a different alumni, who were super nice and also helped me figure out what I didn’t want to do.
I still wasn’t sure what I did want to do, but I wanted it to be creative. So I settled on marketing, found an internship at a marketing agency in D.C., and kept moving forward.
This, naturally, was another key lesson I learned this decade: when you don’t know where to go, pick any direction.
8. Changing careers again
2018
I’d like to roll from the lesson at the end of #7 right into to this one: when one direction isn’t working for you, pick a new one.
In the three years after graduating from college, I moved to D.C., then Boston, and now Colorado.
I finished my marketing internship and took a full-time marketing job. Neither one was a great fit for me, but I learned HTML and CSS and how to work on a team and how to communicate with clients and countless other things, all of which have helped me since.
Finally, I decided marketing agencies were not going to provide me with a path I wanted to follow and keep following. So I did what every millennial experiencing a quarter-life crisis does: I took a seasonal job. This one was leading teenagers on outdoor trips for a summer, and it was exactly what I needed.
For a few months before and after that summer, when I was living in Boston before I got my current Colorado gig, I freelanced as a video producer. That was hard and stressful, but it put me on the path to working in film and photography, and I learned a lot.
The key is to Always Be Learning, friends.
I’m so glad I studied something I’m not working in and took jobs in a field I didn’t see myself in long-term. Those experiences taught me a lot, gave me plenty of applicable skills, and shoved me closer to a path I do want to be on. I don’t know exactly where it goes, but I’m happy to be here.
9. Climbing the Grand Teton & gaining confidence outside
2018
Back to that summer job for a minute. I’d been wanting to work as an outdoor trip leader for teens for several years, but the timing hadn’t worked out. When I left my job in D.C., I was excited to finally have a full summer I could dedicate to this job.
Shockingly, leading teenagers through the wilderness can be stressful. My co-leader and I dealt with sprained ankles, interpersonal conflict, an eating disorder, and many, many other problems not unique to young people, but definitely applicable to these particular young people.
And it was infinitely rewarding. As a group, we backpacked in the Spanish Peaks of Montana and the Wind River Range of Wyoming. We swatted (and occasionally ate) approximately 8 billion mosquitoes. We ate baller pizza every time we exited the backcountry (all pizza is amazing when you’ve been backpacking for the last week).
We whitewater kayaked on the Snake and Hoback Rivers and flatwater kayaked in Yellowstone National Park. We saw a grizzly bear and her cub and a golden eagle and marmots and bison.
And at the end of our month together, we climbed the Grand Teton.
I don’t climb or whitewater kayak on a regular basis, and I had only backpacked a handful of times before this summer. By the end, I knew bear safety inside and out, could set up a Whisperlite stove in no time, and generally knew much more about being a competent outdoorsperson than I had previously.
I’m grateful to this decade for turning me “outdoorsy.”
10. Moving to Colorado
2019
This post isn’t focused on 2019, but I have great memories of this year. My boyfriend and I moved out to Colorado the last week of March, staying with our families along the way and shelling out for absurd amounts of gas for our U-Haul.
Our move-in was pushed back by March snowstorms delaying construction on our future home (apartment building), so naturally, the first weekend we lived in Colorado we went skiing.
For the rest of the year, we explored our new home, hiking and biking and taking walks up the mountain outside our apartment window.
I don’t think 2010 me would have predicted me living in the West by 2019, purposely sleeping outside and entering situations where I will definitely be cold and attempting to run at elevation.
But then again, I don’t think she would have been too suprised.
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For more year-end reflections, check out these posts from years past:
Happy New Year!