New Year, New Me: "i thank You God for most this amazing day"

 Hello one and all!
I really enjoyed last year's post celebrating the new year. I used to not really understand the hype, but I so do now. While the turn from one year to the next is not a magical reset button that makes everything perfectly fine again, while we can't expect the year to be inherently good on its own, I do see the magic in celebrating a new year. As I said in last year's post, there is something absolutely glorious about a new thing, a new opportunity. That's beautiful, and that's worth celebrating.
As most of you know, I choose a song to be my theme of the year. The songs in the short time I've done this tradition have included "(Just a) Simple Sponge," "Sad Girls Club," "Bring on the Monsters," and "I Am Enough." Usually, these songs were all easy and natural choices. I would hear them or think of them and know that they were the songs I needed to be the theme of my year. This year, however, was different.
2021 was difficult, and I'm honestly exhausted from saying that, but that doesn't change the truth of the statement. It was way harder than 2020 was for me; it wasn't even a contest, really. It was probably the hardest year I've had since 2016, the only year in my life that can kind of compete with it. So at the end of 2021, I think it was hard for me to choose a theme for 2022 because there were so many things that I felt like I needed that I didn't even really know where to begin. I just felt empty.
In 2021, my favorite girl band, Cimorelli, rereleased and did a whole new campaign for one of their songs from the early days of the band, "You're Worth It." This was almost the theme of the year. My strong self-worth that I take way too for granted had seemingly diminished. I faced a lot of health issues that drained me. There were a lot of traumas that I had uncovered that year that left me simply feeling empty. This song is pretty cliché and basic in its message and writing, but I felt like I needed cliché and basic. I felt like I needed to go back to square one and just remind myself that I was worth living a happy life. I frequently reduce myself to my appearance or view myself as a production to be put on for other people. But none of that's true about me, and I think I needed the reminder. I in particular was drawn to the lyric: "There's so much that you've been through that nobody knows, so many things you never show." I felt misunderstood and lost in my darkness. It was worse than people even could understand. I'm remembering one time during the summer that I was at work and my mom called me. She was discussing my well-being with me, and asked a couple times if I was okay. Once even saying, "You're okay, right?" I said yes, but I couldn't even do so without crying. I didn't know how to tell people how poorly I was doing. I needed my worth to be reestablished. Those things were addressed further in last year's therapy, which lead me to reconsider my song of the year.
I began to wonder if instead "Hope for It" by Cimorelli needed to be my song of the year. I am literally just today starting to find words that adequately describe the whole of what I just went through in therapy. It was fascinating. I went in talking about the shameful feelings that I had associated with my missionary service. On my mission, I had been so open, loving, and trusting with people, especially with people that I normally never would be. It was a gift from God. But I put expectations on myself, as did others, that I wasn't supposed to think about God's greatest gift to me. I tried detaching myself from the past, saying no to everything I'd ever gone through and trying to pretend it didn't happen. That surely contributed greatly to the complex feelings of loneliness, shame, and misunderstanding that I was facing. I wasn't making myself open to the truth. A lot was based in my issues of self-worth. Just as much, if not more, was based on my damaged trust. I was so angry at all of my old missionary friends. They had so much of me. I was able to be open with them in ways I had never been with anyone before and hadn't been since. This anger turned into absolute resentment. Why couldn't I get that back? And worst of all, why them? I'm okay with the fact that people go in and out of my life. But the people that know intimate details about me, I want them to be the ones that stay, the ones that are there all the time. While I still talked to missionary friends on occasion, I didn't as frequently as I would like to with people that know me terrifyingly well. Or rather, people that don't know me terrifyingly well anymore, but kind of used to. I felt like I had changed so much, and they had so much of me, and I was outraged that every time I would talk to them, they would say something about the version of me they had known. Something that was no longer true at all. It broke my heart, and they would have to sit and wonder why I suddenly looked sad in the middle of our conversation. I was intimately known and at the same time not known at all by people that once were the best friends in my life. All of that led to a severe lack of trust. I didn't want to share any of myself with anyone else ever again.
The lessons learned from discussing these feelings in therapy (which previously I couldn't even say out loud--thank God for that saving grace of being free to say the truth) were beautiful. First of all, my missionary service was a gift from God, and I knew that. Anyone that wanted me to suppress that and never think about it ever again didn't have my best interests in mind. It's a gift from God, after all! There were great experiences and lessons learned. Remembering them could be a new spiritual experience in themselves. And while this brought up problematic emotions for me, it was still a great way to bond with people. It is not good to say no to gifts from God. They are the most beautiful and precious things everywhere! Denying remembering my past would be denying a gift from God.
We of course talked a lot about my trust issues, which are many and deep. It's something I still have to practice a lot and something that many days I still don't want to practice at all. But we talked about letting myself learn to trust people, because I have to do it slowly, and that's all. I can evaluate how much I trust a person based on my relationship with them. As I evaluated my relationships, I saw a lot of boundaries. I realized that is something I'm really good at. I am good at saying no to things and people to protect myself. As a person with anxiety, this has always been in my nature, but it's gotten even worse over the past year or so. It was almost as if I only thought about things that I say no to. However, my boundaries are only kind of in my control. I can control how I keep them, but people break boundaries sometimes. That's how abuse happens. It's heartbreaking, but it's true. I wonder if there's a cycle of boundaries being made and then broken, which leads to more boundaries and walls, which can also be broken.
Boundaries are important, but I have those down. What I realized is that I have trouble with what I say yes to. I have absolute control to my yeses. What I intentionally do is where I hold my power, and that can bring me more happiness than anything else! I hadn't even noticed that I was really bad at saying yes.
I've made saying yes the focus of my life. No relies too heavily on other people. I've said yes to so many more things. I prioritize my writing, education, religion, and job because I say yes. I am finally living my dream of doing a study abroad/writing retreat this summer. I am working hard to make my dreams a reality. This is because I am saying yes in ways I wasn't able to before.
This led me to think of "Hope for It." It's about how when life gets hard, we trust God no matter what comes and push forward. We hope for good things even if on the surface it seems like there's nothing good to hope for. But saying yes is all about hoping for good things. Only through hope can those yeses exist.
That was my song for 2022 on New Year's Eve. But during the first week of January, I couldn't get a different song out of my mind.