It is January 1st, 2016. I have survived yet another year here. Looking back at 2015, so much has changed for me personally. Today I am not nearly the same person I was last year. Then I was young and in love, silly and naive, thought I was the happiest I could ever be, but I wasn't confident in who I was. Today I see how much happier I am because I learned to love myself so much and it is an absolutely wonderful feeling. A few months into 2015 I was alone for the first time in a very long time. I didn't have that one person I was attached to at the hip. It was actually a terrifying feeling at first, but because of that, I finally had the chance to get to know myself and take the time to do things I wanted to do for myself. I found a lot of that to be in reading and writing. 

In the past, I had always loved reading and writing. In elementary school, I tried to start writing a chapter book about a group of detective girls that would investigate in museums. My sophomore year of high school, my English teacher had the entire class participate in National Novel Writing Month and we each had to write a novel to a certain length and got bonus points if you added in different aspects to your story. I'm pretty sure I was the only student that got into that project without complaining a bit. I loved being creative with words, creating stories and spoken pictures. At this point in my life, I loved English and thought I would want to major in it in college, trying to keep it as some key part of my life. It was only a few years later I had a teacher that ruined this all for me. She over analyzed beautiful books to the point where I had no interest in reading them anymore. Papers turned into all fact (which I understand is inevitable and important but still no fun to write) with immense amounts of scholarly research to back every sentence. After doing this for a few years, I became accustomed to this being the only type of writing, letting myself to completely forget about the creativity in writing that I loved so much. 

Beginning to write for myself again during this past year rekindled that love a bit. Even if all I really was writing were these little blog posts or small diary entries, it reminded me how good it felt to get my words and thoughts down on paper. So what I am trying to say is that in 2016 I want to write more. In honor of publicly posting at least one new years resolution on here every year, I thought this one would be appropriate. Whether it's online or on paper, I want to take more time out to relax and jot down a little bit of the ideas bumping around in my little head. So 2016 will be the year of more blog posts, actually filling a journal, and starting the novel I've been thinking about writing just for the heck of it.

cheers to 2016,

Julia Carrington