We've Almost Made It

We are officially in the last few days of this year. Scratch that. We are officially in the last few days of this decade. Ooooh.

It's crazy, really. It seems like just yesterday that everybody was worried that we were all going to die because of the new millenium. It doesn't feel like 10 years ago that everybody was freaking out about Y2K, but perhaps it's because everyone is now freaking out about us all dying in 2012.

Anyway, moving on. This decade has been most of my life. Probably much of what I remember happened in this decade. A lot of things can happen in ten years. I've changed a lot in ten years. But so much has stayed the same.

When I was little, I was involved in theater. The truth is, I'm not anymore, and I constantly wish I was. But good life lesson, I suppose.

When I was little, I loved to write. I got the idea in my head in second grade that I was going to write "The Adventures of Icey and Snowy," which was about two kittens in Washington DC. Today, I still love it. Being on newspaper staff and in AP English force me to write, and I love it. It's something that has stayed with me, and will probably always stay with me.

I met my best friends in first grade. Yes, we've had a lot of fights, and maybe we don't always get along, and we've made a lot of new friends, and even lost some, but I know that they will honestly be there for me forever.

We've lost a lot of people in the last 10 years, but we've gained a lot of new people too. We've combatted a lot of drama and hard times, and we've come out on the other side stronger. We've traveled a lot, to new places and old favorite places. We've laughed, we've cried, we've laughed till we cried. We've fought, we've loved, we've run away. We've kept secrets, we've told truths, we've told lies. We've won, we've lost, we've competed. We've done so much over the years, and we have so much left to go.

So even thought it sounds cliche, yes, this is an end. But January 1 starts a new beginning. It starts a new year, which is time enough for great (or not so great) things to happen, but it also starts a new decade. Ten years is a long time. Think about how old you'll be in ten years. Think about how much you'll have accomplished in ten years. Think about where you want to be in ten years, and start taking steps to make it happen.