Well friends, 2019 is coming to a close, and with it a decade is ending.
For the record I fall on the side that 2020 starts a new decade rather than being the last year of this decade. It’s true that the first year of the calendar was year 1, not year 0, so the first ten year period would end after year 10 and the next would start with year 11, but culturally we’ve been grouping decades from 0 to 9 for a while now, and the idea that 1920 is not considered part of the ‘20s, or that 1940 is not considered part of the ‘40s, is ridiculous to me. So I’m calling it the end of the decade tonight, and if you disagree you can do so quietly because I also feel like this is a silly thing to argue about.
So today I want to reflect on not only this year but also this decade. I set a lot of goals for myself this year, and while I didn’t achieve all of them, so many incredible things happened that I’m totally okay with that.
For Christmas in 2009, I asked my parents for a subscription to Writers Market. I believed that the book I’d been working on all through high school was ready to be published. I cringe a little now writing this, because in 2010 I still did not understand plot, but all publication journeys have to start somewhere, right? It took nine years, a lot of help, a lot of revisions, and a lot of rejections, but last January I signed with my awesome agent Laurel Symonds. While I’ve been working on the same book for the past ten years, more than that really if you go all the way back to the very first idea, it is an entirely different book than that terrible draft I started querying agents about back in 2010. Excuse me while I cringe some more. And this past year working on revisions with Laurel has transformed it yet again. I’ve learned so much about myself as a writer in the last ten years, and in this year in particular. I’m still revising, but I’m really happy with how things are shaping up, and I can’t wait for the day when I can finally share this project with all of you.
Also in 2010, I was entering my last semester of high school, breathlessly waiting on college application decisions, and planning to go to the Seeing Eye over the summer to train with my first guide dog. I had no idea how much I would love not only working with my Mopsy girl but also how much I would love having her with me all the time. Together we went to Kenyon for four years, lived in Italy for a year, and started law school at Harvard. Now Mopsy is living with my parents, and I get home as often as I can to see her. She’ll be twelve in June, so she enjoys more snoozles in front of the fire than she used to, but she’s still up for a trot through the snow. If she feels like it. And once Mopsy retired, I got matched with my little Neutron Star. He is very different from Mops, but just as delightful in his own way, and seven years working with Mopsy has made me a better handler when it comes to Neutron. We’ve adventured all over Boston, and now we’re working on D.C.
A lot has happened to me since 2010, and I feel like a lot of it has culminated in my accomplishments in 2019. This decade, I graduated high school; went to college; got a Fulbright and lived in Italy for a year; volunteered at the New Hampshire Disability Rights Center; went to Harvard Law; decided I didn’t want to do disability rights law and wanted to be a space lawyer instead; and interned at the U.S. Department of Education, MIT, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Analytical Space, and participated in the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program. And this year, I graduated from Harvard Law, got a job at the FCC as a space lawyer, and moved to D.C. In 2010, I started querying my book. I got rejected, got some helpful advice from the agent of a friend of a friend, revised, queried again, got rejected again, revised, revised, and revised some more. In the meantime, I attended the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, wrote a bunch of short stories, and started submitting them to magazines. I was twice a finalist in the Dell Award, and I’ve had six stories published so far, including one story published in 2019. I also have a poem coming out in an anthology this spring, which I’m really excited about. I also wrote 2.9 other books this decade: my memory-wiping musical academy novel, which I’m halfway through a third draft of; my WWII Italy novella which I wrote for my senior honors thesis back in 2014 and haven’t touched since; and my middle grade space adventure novel, which I’m so, so close to the end of a first draft of but have paused on because of other projects. I kept up this writing through college, Italy, and law school, and while I admit it’s hard to do the amount of writing that I want to be doing with a full-time job, I’m still plowing on ahead with revisions for my middle grade fantasy novel.
This decade hasn’t been all sunshine and butterflies. There was a lot of rejection letters to get where I am now, including rejections from all the MFA programs I applied to, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt. In 2013, I had to have my right eye removed because it basically exploded. My year in Italy was really hard emotionally, as was my time at Harvard. We lost my special education advocate and close family friend for many years to cancer. My grandmother also passed away, as did all but one of my great-aunts and uncles, and my sixth grade math and social studies teacher whom I was very close to. My childhood dog, Kokopelli, also died, and if you have a dog you understand how heartbreaking that is and why I’m including him here.
But here I am, at the end of the decade, looking back at who I was ten years ago and who I am now and all I have been through and accomplished, and I am really proud of myself. I have a full-time job I’m enjoying, more of a social life than I’ve had in years, an awesome writing group, some truly wonderful friends, and more adventures ahead of me.
This is not only the end of the decade, but it’s also the end of 2019. I set some pretty ambitious goals for myself, and before I sign off for the year, I want to give you a quick rundown of how I actually did. I did graduate, pass the bar, get a job, and move with as little stress as I could manage. After my series of illnesses and injuries through the summer, I joined a barre studio in D.C. and I’ve been going three or four times a week. I’d like to do better with my eating habits—I kind of fell off the wagon around the holidays—and I want to get to the gym in my apartment building and do some more aerobic exercise, but I feel stronger and fitter than I have in a while, so I’m counting this as mostly a win. I set out to read 100 books this year, and today I finished my 109th book. I’m not going to finish another book before midnight, so I’m calling it at 109. And while I didn’t get to new drafts of three distinct projects, I did do an awful lot of writing this year, and everything else was so crazy this year that I forgive myself. Oh, and I blogged more, realized I was blogging too much, and became a lot less regular about it again. I’m still working on finding that happy medium, but I’m moving in the right direction. I did pretty well with all these goals. I haven’t decided what exactly I want to shoot for next year, so I’ll get back to you on that.
So how are you feeling at the end of this year and this decade? Did you meet your 2019 goals? What are your plans for the new year?