Well, as 2019 draws to a close, my mind is naturally drawn towards a year end review (which, never fear, I will still write - but I have a few more weeks to finish off last year's resolutions before I score myself). However, in addition to the year-end, it's become an internet thing to reflect on the decade, either based on your accomplishments:
https://mashable.com/article/theres-only-one-month-left-in-the-decade-and-weve-accomplished-yet-another-meme/
Or on your levels of attractiveness:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/01/2009-vs-2019-how-hard-did-age-hit-you.html
I posted my 2009 vs. 2019 photos on my Instagram, and since then I've been thinking over my past decade. If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you'll know that I usually dwell on the decades in May (around my birthday) due to my annual "Dear Future Me" tradition of writing to myself one, five, and ten years in the future on my birthday. But since we're at the end of the 2010s, I'm doing a look back - not at my accomplishments, but at how my life has changed. The 2010s were a decade of big change for me because I'm a millennial (born nearer the end of the millennial block, but firmly in the standard years of 1981-1996), and I came into my adulthood in the past decade.
At the start of the decade (2010) I was set to graduate high school, and was waiting to see what colleges I'd get into to move into the next phase of my life. I remember vividly the night of December 31st, 2009, when I was rapidly finishing the college applications I had held off until the end (there were tears) but in the spring of 2010 the acceptance letters were rolling in and I was re-visiting colleges to make my decisions. Ultimately I decided to go to UMBC, and in the summer of 2010 I was on campus as a student for the first time for honors orientation, then the CWIT retreat, and then my first week on campus as a real college student that August. There are so many more photos from that first week/that first semester, than the rest of my college years because it was all brand new and I was making new friends. Flowing into 2011, I finished my first year of college and got my first job, a summer internship, at the end of which I had decided I wanted to keep working. In one of our monthly dinner (when I went to college, my dad started coming up to campus for dinner roughly monthly) Dad talked me out of it, and I went back to school to finish my degree. I was fighting my first ever case of imposter syndrome. I was worried that if I gave up this first job, I'd not get another one, which was silly. I went back to school, and the start of February 2012 was the semester I started talking ballroom dance classes - and therefore the semester I met Ryan. I remember the day vividly, and I remember the first day he asked me if I'd go to the Friday night dancing with me, and I remember the Easter Sunday in April that Ryan came to meet my family and ask Dad if he could take me out, and the very awkward first date we had (even though we'd been dancing partners for three months by then, this was a date and that made things different) and the moment that summer that he asked me to be his girlfriend officially. 2012 was quite the year.
For the most part, 2013 passed normally - until that October when we got my Dad's first cancer diagnosis. He'd fallen on a hike with my brother, and had assumed for a while that the pain he felt in his hip/posterior was just a result of that fall - but it was cancer. He had surgery, and it was supposed to be over, and we moved into 2014. The spring of 2014, I was applying for full-time jobs and deciding on how to best fit in as many graduate classes as I could while I was still on scholarship. That May, I graduated with my friends with a bachelors of science in computer science, and they started full-time jobs, but I took a summer internship at APL, and was back in the fall for a final semester before graduating with a masters that December. I also ran my first race that November, driven by Ryan's passion for it to try to get myself into shape. Dad's cancer had spread, and the summer of 2014 he started chemotherapy - but we were still thinking that there would be a way to beat it at the end of that year (or at least, I was - I don't know what my parents thought).
In 2015, I started my full time job at APL, and I started bugging Ryan about what the plans were for the future of our relationship. March of 2015, we got engaged, and as we were planning our wedding, we got the news that cancer had moved into Dad's lungs, and this had moved from a "we can beat this" to a "how long do we have" kind of cancer. As that news spread around my extended family, our July 2015 wedding became a more significant event. After my wedding, Dad never went back to work full time again, and my wedding was the last time all of my Dad's side of our extended family were all in the same place at once. And then I moved into Ryan's house and changed my name and started my new life. 2016 rolled through, and Ryan added me as a co-owner of his house (making 2016 the year I became a homeowner), and we kept running together (we ran the 10K across the bay that year). Somehow Dad kept beating the odds, and kept living, and at the end of that year, my sister got engaged. So 2017 because the year of gaining a brother-in-law, adjusting to that change in our family, and we rolled into 2018 as a family of 13 - 2 parents, 2 brother in laws, and 9 tight siblings.
At the start of 2018, things were tough (and you can go back and read the blog about those days) as it became clearer that Dad was at the end of his battle with cancer. I'm not going to re-hash the bad days - instead, I'll focus on the precious memories from the start of that year. In February, UMBC opened a new event center, and Dad (wheezing and on a cane) came to a game with me. UMBC pulled off an impossible win in March Madness, and I enjoyed watching with Dad on TV. My parent's 2018 wedding anniversary (their last) was spent in a hospital, and at the start of May, my dad moved into his eternity with Jesus. And that was 2018. And now we are coming to the end of 2019. I'll recap this year in a later post, but I ran my first triathlon this year (I ran three) and Ryan started a business, and another one of my sisters got engaged.
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