a love letter to 2024 (and wellbutrin)

i always take new year’s very seriously… i know it’s an arbitrary day and all, but i love to use it as a time to kind of recalibrate my life path and give myself a fresh start.

honestly, 2024 is the best year i have had in a LONG time, and confidently the best year i’ve had post-pandemic.

2023 was a year of massive change and uncertainty for me. i loved my last semester of high school and how familiar and comforting everything was, and suddenly i was absolutely lost and lonely as a freshman in college. in hindsight, i’m really glad things went the way they did - i chose a college that i know now is where i belonged, and i just needed to be absolutely swept out of my comfort zone like i did in new york. but 2023 absolutely gutted me if i’m being honest. i ended last year in one of the lowest places i’ve ever been. i really would rather not get into it because it’s quite embarrassing in retrospect, but i’ll just say i experienced a pretty severe heartbreak at an already vulnerable time and it caused me to fucking spiral. like to the point where my best friends had to set up an intervention. i was watching tarot readings.. it was so bad. i was surrounding myself with people at school who made me feel really bad about myself, and my self confidence was in the gutter. of course, i told myself i would leave this in 2023 and when the clock strikes midnight i would magically become some better version of myself.

spoiler alert, that is not remotely close to what happened. boy i wish! for the first few months of 2024, i was in a deep pit of depression that i sunk deeper and deeper into every day. and i beat myself up for it even more, because i had this stupid fixation on the ‘new year new me’ thing. my depression was a combination of a lot of things.. i felt so lost and lonely at school, i didn’t like how i looked, and i consistently faced a lot of rejections, whether academically, socially, or romantically. i started therapy again, which helped a bit, but i just could not get myself out of bed anymore for the rest of the semester. i finally started taking antidepressants after many months of convincing myself it wasn’t bad enough to warrant medication. i can confidently say that with a combination of the chemicals and some effort on my part, my life changed.

i distinctly remember this one day i was walking around campus maybe 3 weeks into my medication. it was a beautiful spring morning, and i couldn’t stop staring at how colorful everything looked around me. the sky was brighter, the flowers popped, the bushes were greener. and i would literally laugh and roll my eyes at this story too if i didn’t experience it myself, trust me. but i really felt like for the first time in a while, i wanted to actually live in the world around me, and i was noticing all these little things that were gray before. little by little, i was kind of kicking myself out of bed. i did my best to redirect my harmful thoughts into new hobbies that i would never have picked up before. it happened so gradually that i didn’t even notice something was different until i was genuinely, wholeheartedly content with everything about my life.

when i was going through depression, the smallest, stupidest things felt so do or die all the time. like my sorority recruitment didn’t go the way i wanted to and i genuinely thought i needed to transfer schools because i would never have friends again. or i would wake up one morning unhappy with how my body looked and think i would be unloveable forever. i look back at all these delusions i had and truly think, ‘who gives a fuck’! i didn’t expect how freeing it felt to stop directing so much energy on shit that is not at all a real problem and direct it on actively loving myself instead.

with that in mind, i was getting so much more out of life. this summer, i got my first professional position in tech working at a startup where i absolutely loved my team. i also started working on my first real ‘side project’ that i was making for myself and myself only - this blog lol. it brought me so much joy not only working on the site design and code but also creating a safe outlet to express myself freely. i picked up a couple other cool hobbies too! i’m baking and coloring more, and i’ve been trying my hand at video editing recently.

i can’t describe how much i love new york and college when i’m not deeply depressed anymore.. i have friends here who i love and who i never feel like i have to put up a front around. we do cute college things together like cook and go to the park and go to each others’ dorms and hang out. and when i’m not on my campus, i’ve been exploring the city on my own a lot and falling more in love with it!! obviously this semester was not easy.. my classes drain the life of me sometimes, but even when i’m miserable and cramming studying for my finals, i’m still constantly thinking in the back of my head, “i am so grateful to be here and to have this be my life”, a thought i absolutely could not fathom having last year.

this might’ve been a bunch of self-aggrandizing rambling, but i don’t feel very proud of myself often and i really do feel proud of being able to pull myself out of a dark place and work on making myself a better person. and i’m writing this all to remind myself that things are not always so simple as a new year reset. i was stressing myself out for a bit the past couple days thinking, damn, i don’t have a list of 100 resolutions and an exact plan of how to revamp my life like i usually do every new year. but honestly, that short-term burst of motivation never really lasts for me. i’ve only been able to change through a very slow, long-term process of small steps in the direction i want to go. those little decisions build up over time, and small successes give me more confidence to go after bigger goals. so i guess in 2025, i’m kinda gonna try to keep this going and build up even more momentum.

i feel really lucky in the place i am right now, and sometimes when a couple things go south, i get worried that all my progress will be lost and i’ll spiral into my old habits. but i know that that all or nothing mentality is what gets me into the spiral in the first place.. so i’m trying to continue being gentle to myself when i slip up. i of course have some big goals i’m excited to achieve this year, but i don’t know, shit happens. i think my biggest goal at the end of the day is to keep making decisions towards actively loving myself. either way this year goes, it’s gonna be on the blog, i promise that.

anyway 2024.. she started out a bit rocky. but i’m going to miss her. she was also a great year for pop culture but that’s besides the point isn’t it? i don’t know, i’m rambling. i’m writing this at 2:14 am on christmas eve. i love you 2024, thank you for treating me so kindly. and 2025 is gonna be even better.