Steve has both inspired me and quieted me. I loved his year in review article and thought maybe I should write my own. But his life is my life, and he had done his review so comprehensively and charmingly that I figured I could just point you on over there.
And so I am.
I thought I'd go for looking back at the decade, since Steve covered 2009 and I've enjoyed hearing other people's stories of where they were ten years ago. I would normally be writing my year-end summary and New Year's resolutions in my journal, but I had a brief glimpse of it the other day in some random box, and then it got swallowed by the general chaos of our lives again, so here I journal instead, in front of God and everybody.
So where was I in 1999?
My personal writing was more haphazard and just whatever I felt like writing at the time.
We had hoped to ring in the new year taking communion, but the service was at 5 or 6, to allow people to attend parties or put kids to bed. So we went and bought our own wine and bread and had our own service at midnight. First steps toward a home church?
.
It was supposed to be a glamorous 1920s bob. But when you let Great Cuts loose on your hair, you get what you pay for. I should also point out that glamorous 1920s bangs work better when you don't have seventeen cowlicks.
I was 23 and a half years old.
I didn't really know what to do with it.
I still had hope that someday soon I would outgrow my ugly duckling phase and become a beautiful twenty-something swan. I think we probably peaked around 28 in terms of any coolness we hoped to achieve, and I expect it's downhill from here on out. And, yet, I hope I at least am more confident and put-together now than I was a decade ago, if not youthfully beautiful and stunningly sophisticated, goals I never did manage.
I was among the first bloggers, even though I didn't yet know the term. I would link to my earliest blogs, but most are defunct. SteveandAmanda.com in its current incarnation remains, though it has changed much since then.
We had written a Christmas letter telling everyone how much nothing had changed in the past year.
I was still considering seminary.
Things that are different now: new place, new child, new cat, new career, new church, new writing, new self.
Sometimes I feel like I haven't accomplished much, and the like the years post-college have just flown by, but when I look at it spread out like this, I can see how ten years have passed and how much has filled them.
I am so much more grown up. That has to count for something, right? Look how mushy and unformed I was a decade ago. Cute and naive and adorable and hopeless. I know who I am now. I know what I want for the most part, even if I'm not sure how to get there, or always want to put the work in.
Contradictorily, having a child and constraints on my time has made me a more prolific writer, and more determined to use the time I have.
Case in point, Corin is coming down the stairs, singing off-key, and I am signing off. Happy looking back to you and to me, and happy looking forward.
What will the next decade bring?
I meant to post this back during all our house-buying hoopla and searched for it on various humor sites but couldn't find it. Well, hooray for cleaning out my hard drive, because I found it saved as a PDF in an obscure folder.
We went to the Christmas Eve service at church tonight, and unlike the last couple times, we kept our unruly child in the service instead of the cry room-slash-penalty box — because it was being used by tots younger and rowdier even than he.
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