Well, well, well… 2009, and in turn, the 200- decade is coming to an end. Of course I have some sentimentality about this, but as I am only 23, this is the first decade shift where I am able to reflect intuitively about the changes that I have been through. And there have been many.
This decade has seen me through high school and college. And I grew significantly in each. I doubt people with whom I lost touch from HS would recognize me now. I do not look much different, but my attitude is completely different. I have grown as a person, and I now, I love myself. I’m not sure that I did in HS.
Anyway, college continued lessons that I began in high school. I learned that you can’t trust everyone, but that you can trust a very few people with pretty much everything. I became a woman of the greatest sorority of all time, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., by the grace of the Mu Beta Chapter. That alone taught me so much about myself. What I was willing to do for something that I wanted, and exactly how much of myself I could give to others, to the greater good. And how much I could get back.
I realized that although Sisterhood, Scholarship, and Service meant more to me than before, school isn’t everything. Your learned experiences sometimes teach more than a professor lecturing from any textbook.
I realized that my heart was truly breakable, but that I had to love myself more than I loved anyone who did not explicitly want the best for me. I learned what it was like to want something or someone so badly that you would fight nearly to the death for it/them, and I also learned that sometimes you walk away, your head bloody, but unbowed, picking up your own pieces and moving on.
In this decade, I worked in the “real world,” and discovered that it’s really not that bad. You struggle with it if you aren’t willing to take your lumps to get to where you actually want to be; when you decide that you are too good to climb a ladder and decide to leap tall buildings in a single bound. J
I also embarked on a remarkable “idealistic journey” of service and development when I joined the City Year family. CY is hard, mainly because you don’t have a clue what you are getting into when you join it. But while the people you help would make it worthwhile anyway, the people you meet keep you going everyday.
2000-2009 brought joy and pain, suffering and loss and happiness and gain. All of my downs taught me how to appreciate being up, and all of my ups prepared me for being down. ALL of it was made possible by my Lord and Savior. He has truly kept me up, and been the footprints in the sand of my life.
I don’t think that any other decade will see me going through so many different stages of life. From high school to college to work to service. From innocence to love to heartbreak to a much deeper knowledge of what I want from myself and from others. It was all easy, and it was all hard, and regardless, if I had to do it all again, I’d face it chin up and with my hair blowing in the proverbial wind.
2010-2019 is going to be a damn good ride.
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