2015: Retrospective
So here we are on Feb. 14, 2016, and I’m sitting down to write a 2015 Retrospective.
I debated long and hard over re-launching my personal blog, and ultimately decided to give it a go because I had topics queueing up in the back of my mind. I’ve committed to a lot of personal and professional growth in 2016, and the more I read, the more I inevitably want to write.
I wanted to start with my 2016 Resolutions, but it seemed premature to talk about goals without reflecting on what came before.
2015 was, in many ways, a full year. There’s certainly some inherent navel-gazing in looking back, an opportunity to structure (and restructure) the events of your life into something resembling a narrative.
But sometimes it’s also the best way to see how far you’ve come, to see that yes, there can be themes in the things that happen to you and the things that you do, and it can lead to personal growth when you’re able to identify and parse those trends (though certainly not Nicholas Felton-level trend parsing).
So here we go. Here was my 2015:
I moved to Bellingham, Wash.
Okay, so that was technically on Dec. 28, 2014, to be precise. I made a leap of faith, packed everything I owned in a moving cube and, three days after spending Christmas with my family, met my boyfriend of 11 months in the airport at SEA-TAC and drove two hours to our new apartment together in Bellingham.
Of course, that boyfriend is now my fiancé, and learning to live together has been easy and hard and full of compromise and joy all at once, but at the time my brimming confidence was mostly constructed of bricks of bravado and mortar of hope. It hasn’t been easy to leave what I know, a place like Boulder, Colo., or a family like mine.
I witnessed a truly bizarre Super Bowl.
Of course, I mean Super Bowl XLIX, in which the Patriots downed the Seahawks with a last-second interception on a pass play that almost certainly should have been a run play. More than a year later, that play still remains baffling.
I still remember the feeling of standing in our new living room, nothing quite where it belonged yet, people who were still pseudo-strangers gathered around our brand-new and gloriously huge TV, the drama playing out as the room collectively held its breath, and the moment when Brandon Browner jumped the route and intercepted Russell Wilson’s pass while the heretofore unstoppable Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch did not score a rushing touchdown.
Pandemonium, contained in a stunned silence from all the “12’s” in the room.
I confess to twinned feelings of elation that the Seahawks had lost (ask me about Super Bowl XLVIII and what happened to my beloved Denver Broncos at the hands of the Seahawks. Or rather, don’t ask me. Ask me instead about how my Broncos just won Super Bowl 50!), and utter disgust that the equally hated Patriots had just won football’s greatest prize.
I love football. I (abashedly) love football. Some of my earliest memories are of watching 49ers football with my father. This is for another post, but there’s nothing in this world that compares to football’s ability to inspire so much joy and euphoria and the feeling of being part of something at the same time as it inspires horror and embarrassment and incredulous expressions of but this is just a game.
My dog died.
A year later, I don’t know that I’ve really processed Dashiell’s death. He came into my life at a time when I didn’t know I needed him and changed me in ways I still can’t define. It’s the greatest cliché of all, but he rescued me, in the end.
I rescued him in November of 2011 from a rescue that had rescued him from the streets of Casper, Wyo., named him for a noir author of one of my favorite novels and endured chewed-up shoes and taught him to fetch and swim and never taught him to walk properly on a leash. I felt my heart squeeze with every little sound of joy he made every day as we approached the dog park, and I committed the great sin of anthropomorphizing his smiling little face into an expression of pure happiness and gratitude and love.
I wasn’t there when he breathed his last. My parents watched him while I took a plane to Seattle in the dead of winter. I always planned to come home for him in the spring, to drive him through the warm days to his new home. Less than a month after I left him, he collapsed and the veterinarians found advanced, incurable hemangiosarcoma, the killer of dogs.
There’s no research into how to cure dogs of this dog cancer. There’s barely enough research into how to cure humans of human cancers. I can’t be mad about that, but the helplessness doesn’t go away, that Dashiell saved me from myself in a time of upheaval and I couldn’t save him, was not even the last face he saw or the last hand he felt petting his ever-shedding fur. That regret doesn’t go away.
I got engaged.
The only rock involved was the one in the photo (ahahaha). But seriously, there isn’t and won’t be a ring. I’ll write on that some other time.
Get Claire Karjalainen’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Right after, in May, we took a road trip in my little 2001 Honda Civic through Arches, Yosemite, San Francisco, Muir Woods, Crater Lake and Portland. We still haven’t framed the posters we bought. Maybe for the one-year road trip anniversary…
I ate my first oyster. I loved it. I made a list on my phone to keep track of which varieties we like and what they taste like. It seems silly until the next time you’re wondering whether you liked that kind or not, right? Plan ahead and overdo things so you’re not left in the lurch when you actually need the information…that’s my not-awesomely-worded philosophy.
We adopted a pup.
A 6-month-old lab, whippet/Italian greyhound, Staffie mix of some kind. We named her Avery after our favorite brewery, where we spent long afternoons and evenings together over Maharaja and Hog Heaven during that long and beautiful first spring and summer of our relationship. She is the light of our lives and has truly absurd ears.
I left the agency world.
I’d put in four and a half years and a lot of blood, sweat and tears at Pivot. I arrived there an ambitious, unseasoned Jill of all trades, and I left as a marketing professional. I will not forget any of the many lessons I learned there.
I founded a solo proprietorship.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to start freelance writing and freelance marketing consulting. It’s a lot harder to do it well and make a living off of it. It has been an insane hustle, but the kind that I like. Planning and tracking and more planning and doing work and looking for business and building something. There’s plenty I would do differently if I was doing it again, but it’s been intensely rewarding and that’s for another post.
I did some wedding planning.
We picked a venue and set a date. I designed and made a website. I said “yeah, I like this one” to the dress while my fiancé looked on. Traditional, we are not.
I decided to stop waiting for professional opportunities to come my way.
I’ve been a little reactive in my career up until now. I’ve grown and taken on increasing responsibilities by being ambitious, but never with a real growth plan or career direction in mind.
After diving in and seeing all the ways apps and products can change the way we work and live, I want a job in SaaS marketing. I have no experience in SaaS marketing, even though I do have plenty of translatable experience. That means in 2016, it’s time to get to work.
Our movie bucket list grew to a truly absurd length.
I’ve seen basically no movies, apparently. Our movie list will take a lifetime to go through, which I suppose is the idea. We store it in Evernote so we can make live updates. Our grocery lists are in there too. Supposedly my fiancé thinks this quirk of uber-efficiency and organization is endearing.
I traveled to my fiancé’s hometown for the first time.
We spent Christmas in Fenton, Michigan, in the house where he grew up, with his incredible family (seriously, I’ve won the in-law lottery). It was the first Christmas I haven’t spent with my family. I only cried once. I ate the best sandwiches of my life at Short’s Brewing Company and The Laundry. I ate my weight in glorious Midwestern home cooking and baked goods. His family is the second-greatest.
I decided to start blogging again.
This is a means to practice writing that isn’t about health care revenue cycles or immigration law, and also to create some bylined clips for myself. This means slowly taking down the huge wall I put up between my personal and professional life, though it might be more accurate to say that I’m turning the wall into a picket fence, a friendly barrier that everyone can gaze across while being neighborly.
It’s a constant struggle. How much to reveal? What to write about? I want to write about things that are happening to me and things that I think I think, but sometimes it’s hard to know what parts belong to me.
Here’s to 2015. You were good to me, all things said. Bring on the Year of the Monkey.
