Have you ever had one of those moments where, after telling yourself or someone else that something is fine, finally take a real look at it and realize it isn’t even sort of fine? There’s a wide range of situations that can involve this sort of feeling or experience. It could be something like thinking to myself that my headphones are fine, but then going to put them away and realizing that they’re almost unusable because one of the pieces of tape holding them together came loose and it suddenly struck me that the reason I fold them so oddly these days is because I’m trying to avoid putting any tension on any one of the many pieces of tape. Or it could be a situation like me telling someone that something I’m dealing with is fine and not a problem to the extent of it becoming a small argument only for me to go home, sit down for a bit, and realize that I’m actually completely exhausted and burned out by that thing I said wasn’t a big deal (it has been a few years since this happened, but I’ll never forget the sequence of events). There are a lot of times these little revelations can strike you out of nowhere, especially if you’re as invested in trying to get through your day as I am during times of prolonged high stress like pretty much all of 2023 has been so far.

This sort of thing happens to me the most when I’m moving. As I’m packing, I’m exposed to a lot of things that I’ve been holding onto and the thoughts of “how do I pack this?” aren’t really that far off from “should I even pack this?” It is very easy to find something you’ve been staring at for weeks or even months when you’re packing and finally have the thought trickle through your mind that maybe you should replace it or just toss it out. Maybe you don’t need six pairs of ripped shorts since you’re probably never going to rip a pair of shorts in a way that can be reasonably patched (I patched one of my usual wear-out tears before and it was intensely uncomfortable for me in a way that has made me regretfully decide against ever trying to extend the life of a pair of shorts that has passed on in such a way). Maybe you don’t need to hold on to all those DVDs someone gave you for Christmas an unknown number of years ago because you’re never going to watch them and no longer need to worry about the person who gave them to your finding out that they completely misunderstood your interests. Maybe you can toss out those mostly-dried jars of dip-pen ink because you rarely write anything by hand these days and never need fancy ink and pens to write what little you do.

I wound up throwing a bunch of stuff away. Maybe not a lot, at least compared to my overall amount of stuff, but enough that my landlord had to call an early pickup for the dumpster in the basement of my apartment. Most of the time, it felt nice. Anything that gave me too much emotional difficulty got tucked into an “I don’t want to think about it” box and covered with a layer of clothes for my own safety. The rest of it got thrown away as I reflected on the path my life took to get to that point. This wound up being the focal point for most of my reflection while I was busy packing, a weird mix of sad nostalgia and gleeful unburdening. It felt good to throw things away that I didn’t need anymore, but it was often sad to think about why I’d kept it in the first place and now no longer felt the need. There were a few things that got tossed without a second glance (the collection of harry potter books I’d forgotten I had, the aforementioned ripped shorts, and a pile of old shirts that made me feel awful when I tried them on), but most of it left me thinking about how cluttered my life had become.

Eventually, I wound up taking the whole “examining something closely after saying it was fine and discovering that it was, in fact, not fine” thing a few steps further. It’s not like I’ve got any one issue in my life that I thought was fine and turned out to not be fine. I’m actually pretty good these days, on catching those sorts of things before I’ve spent enough time lying to myself about it that I’ve begun to believe it. It was more… I guess, things as a whole. Because of the up and down nature of the year for me, I have hesitated to cast judgment on my year so far, despite being almost halfway through it and feeling like enough time has passed since new year’s eve that I should be halfway into 2024. A lot of nice things have happened this year. A lot of terrible things have happened this year. This could, by being very selective one way or the other, be either the best or worst year of my life. Well, maybe not the worst. Definitely ONE OF the worst years of my life, though.

It’s not like I didn’t know this was true. It’s not like I’m not INCREDIBLY aware of the taxing and, at times, overwhelmingly positive nature of the past five and a half months. I think about it constantly. I’ve been struggling to manage it in a way I haven’t struggled since before I left my parents’ home. But it had not really occurred to me how wrong this experience is. Not that my perceptions are invalid or that I’ve somehow handled tht year incorrectly. Just that life should not be this way and I should not be doing my best to keep things going. I should not be trying to find enough good to balance out all the bad like I’m attempting to achieve total karmic neutrality by the end of the year. That’s not a thing I can do, in any sense of the phrase. I can’t balance out the way my rent is going up, or how much extra I had to spend on my trip to Spain or how moving into a smaller apartment has forced me to make compromises about my comfort [compromises I’ve mostly mitigated by the time this is going up]. I shouldn’t be holding up the peace and quiet of my new apartment as the balance to its higher cost. I shouldn’t be trying to make plans with friends that cost nothing to balance out how much I’ve had to spend this year. I should DEFINITELY not be trying to find ways to spend money to balance out the loss of people who used to be a part of my every day life. None of these things are connected in any meaningful way beyond that they’re all a part of my life. Sometimes, stuff just sucks. Sometimes, things are just nice. There is no way to achieve any sense of neutrality without finding ways to quantify every aspect of your life and even then it requires a level of control over your own life that I doubt I will ever acheive.

This year has been great and terrible. Wonderful and miserable. Sometimes all four at the same time. I am not filled with much hope that the rest of the year will be calm or peaceful or that I will be able to cultivate contentment. All I can really hope for at this point is that it never becomes more than I can handle. Which, you know, was not something I thought I’d ever be hoping again. Even the last few years, all of them incredibly difficult and taxing, can’t hold a candle to this one and I would still probably say that, taken in total, this year is still probably the best year of the 2020s so far. It’s just been so much without a chance to catch my breath and it continues to be that. It feels almost inescapable, at this point.