It probably seems weird to start out a year this way, but I’ve been thinking about grief a lot lately. I lost a grandmother last year and its almost exactly five years since I said my final goodbye to my grandfather a few weeks before he passed away. However, since I’ve had time to mourn and process the loss of my grandfather and had already begun to mourn my grandmother before she passed (since I have been estranged from the family for almost five years and hadn’t seen her since my grandfather’s funeral), there’s all sorts of grief mixed up in there as well. For instance, I grieve the way things are with my biological family. I don’t regret the choice I made (nor do I doubt that I made the correct decision), but I grieve both that I had to make this decision at all and that things might have been different if my family had, even once, done the work they needed to do to show my they could change. On a less dire note, it has been just over ten years since I moved to my current city, a place I expected to be for five years at maximum before I finished paying off my student loans and left to go pursue a post-graduate degree in some form of writing or English literature. I am still paying off those loans and have given up on pursuing a higher education because there’s likely no financially viable path forward for me down that route. I also thought I’d be in a committed relationship of some kind by now, living in a house, and surrounded by my adopted family made of friends and the biological relatives I’ve chosen to carry forward into my future. There are a lot of things I thought would someday be and that now might never come to pass, and I grieve those too.

Life has not gone the way I expected it would. I was so caught up in the cycles of abuse and torment of my childhood that I genuinely never imagined escaping them. I thought I’d do better so that any of my children or niblings wouldn’t be trapped in them like I was, but I never thought that I would escape and that I’d take the drastic step of cutting off my entirely family in order to make it work. I thought life would be stable enough that I’d be able to eventually snowball my student loans such that I’d be sitting pretty and debt free (aside from a house) by 30, but taking a less terrible and lower-paying job at 25 meant that I was only back to that point in time for the pandemic to knock down my house of cards once again. I honestly don’t think that I got literally anything correct when I imagined what my life in 2020 would be, much less than when I was a decade out of college.

So there’s all kinds of grief that well up inside me when I think about the past, when I think broadly about the present, and I think about the future. My life is still defined by what I’ve lost, what I’ve cut away, and what I’ve sacrificed to get to the point where I’m at right now. I think I’ve made the right choice at every fork in the road, even if I didn’t wind up getting to the places I expected to go, but then that’s easy for me to say. I was the one making the decision and I know what information I was working with at the time. I expect my family would disagree, since I now know for a fact that my parents have refused to say anything about why I’ve stopped showing up to family events or where I’ve gone off to, but that’s fine. They’re entitled to their opinions and literally none of them have asked me why I stopped showing up. Which, you know, just goes to show that I was probably right to make the decision I did since they’d clearly rather gossip and wonder than have a direct and open conversation.

I don’t really view the difference between where I am in life and where I thought I’d be as “lost potential” or a more narrowed future. I mean, sure, my future is more narrow than it was a decade ago, but that’s just the march of time. Every decision I make is one fewer possible route my life (viewed as a whole) could go, so there’s no sense in grieving that, or even feeling any kind of bad about it. Its not like I’m trying to go for a perfect run or some kind of high score (I’ve read all of the One Piece manga too many times to ever consider myself as being some kind of high efficiency life-liver). So when I think about the places I thought I’d be at this point in my life and where I’m at now, it’s largely the abstract grief that feels similar to what I wrote above, about grieving that I was put in the position where I had to choose whether or not to allow my biological relatives to continue to be a part of my life. I don’t regret or grieve the decisions I’ve made that got me here (I still think choosing to focus on myself after my grandfather passed is what has allowed me to change and grow as much as I have, even if it meant shelving almost all attempts to develop new relationships, romantic or platonic, for a while there), I’m just sad that we all live in a world where people have to make those kinds of decisions. Where my life was such that I was put into these kinds of positions.

I don’t know what this next year will bring. There’s way too much stuff already on my radar for the year to really feel any kind of confidence about what things might look like a year from now. I just hope that I won’t feel bad about the things I choose over this next year. It is difficult, keeping a long view and making decisions I will hopefully not come to regret even if I’d prefer something else in the more immediate future, but I still think its the best way to live my life. Even if I do often wind up feeling a deep well of internal grief that I keep finding myself in these kinds of positions. One day, things will balance out since I’ll either be out of difficult choices or I’ll start having more joyous ones, but I’ve got no idea when that will be and the years have taught me not to try to figure it out ahead of time. Whatever things year brings, I’ll just keep doing my best to build the kind of future and life I want to have.