It’s no secret that in many respects, 2017 has been kind of a dumpster fire of a year. However, for me personally, I found a lot of silver linings. In this blog entry, I decided to focus on all the good things that this year brought.
I moved to Paris, where I lived from January 9th to May 13th. It was the most challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience. It’s really daunting to be able to pick up your life and move to a foreign country and not know anybody, but I did it!
My anxiety kind of reached a breaking point during my initial move, and I was able to find the proper support to deal with that, specifically by seeing an English-speaking therapist and finding proper medication. One of the nice things about living in France is that socialized health care, y’all! I paid a grand total of 2 EUROS for a prescription. 2 EUROS! I paid for a prescription with a COIN!!!!!! America, get on this!!!!
I ate SO MUCH DELICIOUS FOOD. My diet was essentially baguettes, hummus from Marks and Spencer, Nutella crepes, and maybe a lentil salad once in a while. And lots of wine. Oh, how I miss that cheap wine.
I went to museums galore! I love art museums a lot, which you know if you saw the interests I listed in my blogger bio.
Speaking of museums, my random choice to visit the Palais de Tokio on one of my days off led to me inadvertently crashing a fashion week event, where I saw both Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington. Unfortunately, this was also the day I decided to go out with my unwashed hair in a messy bun and put zero effort into my appearance, so this did not lead to any modeling contracts.
I met great people that I still keep in touch with! Two of the friends I made in Paris, Gabby and Regina, even came to visit me in Oberlin a few weeks ago!
I got to travel a lot! I went to Nice, Bordeaux, London, Prague, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Berlin! I had been to London and Nice before, but the rest of the cities were new to me. I think Berlin might have been my favorite. It had a grimy and youthful vibe, not unlike O(berlin).
I felt like a more confident and capable person when I left Paris. I honestly did not think I was going to be able to live there for 4 months. But I did it, and at the end, I could have honestly lived there for 4 more months. Being able to explore Paris on my own and not have that much schoolwork was a dream! Also, now I'm living in New York for Winter Term, and living in Paris definitely made that less of an adjustment.
I got to express my political outrage via my summer internship with NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. It was cool to be able to go to protests and help plan events, after feeling helpless watching all of this political nonsense unfold from afar.
Because of this, I traveled to Austin to protest Governor Abbott calling a special session. I was very close to Wendy Davis during her speech, and I also got to meet her for a second time! I told her she was the first person I ever voted for, and she gave me a hug and told me not to give up. You can't beat one of your heroes telling you that.
I finally got to move up from dorm living. Now I'm living on Union Street with friends, and it feels nice to be able to have a big bathroom, a double bed, a kitchen, and a TV. It has definitely improved my mental health not to be trapped in a tiny room for hours. It's nice that I don't have to rely on CDS all the time, and I can easily cook myself some pasta or scrambled eggs, instead of having to leave the house.
Liz Phair and I are now friends, by which I mean she once replied to one of my tweets and liked another one.
I really really enjoyed all my classes and professors this year. It feels really good to be intellectually stimulated and to really care about what you're learning. As a reminder, the classes I took were Introductory Astronomy, LGBT Identities, Constitutional Interpretation, and Racial Politics in a Post Obama Era.
I especially did well in Introductory Astronomy! I really enjoyed the class, and I was so nervous because I am terrible at math and my other QFR was awful. BUT I understood what was going on and liked what I was learning. On one of the tests, I got EVERY SINGLE MATH QUESTION RIGHT which has not happened to me since elementary school probably. Like, I am so bad at math, I got a 58 on my precalculus final my senior year of high school. That's a failing grade! (But it was my last high school final ever, and I knew I could fail it and still get a B- in the class, plus Oberlin was only a summer away, so really, who would care?)
I just got my grades, which were mostly As with one B+! A friendly reminder that your grades are NOT an indicator of your self-worth. However, I really worked my butt off this semester, especially this finals week, so it feels really validating that I did so well.
I got to see a lot of friends over winter break, and I spent a lot of time hanging with my mom.
Our kumquat tree was blooming, so I got to eat some kumquats!
All in all, a bad year for humanity, but a good year for me personally. I'm not trying to pretend that it was great 365 days of the year or that I didn't have bad things happen to me, but I think it can be healthy to focus on the positives. It's scary that 2018 is my last year at Oberlin and after that I will have to figure out what to do with my life, but I don't feel like thinking about that for a while.
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