Twelve years
Hello old friend! It's been a minute since I last posted here. Reading through my old entries was utterly cringeworthy, as expected. But it was also pleasantly nostalgic to look back and see what was on my mind almost exactly 12 years ago.
It's interesting to contemplate my 19-year-old self in September 2009. I had just gone through (and was still feeling the reverberations of) breaking up with Kevin, and that fall at Dartmouth felt particularly lonely and isolating. It's such a cliché, but I wish there was some way I could send a message back to myself, sitting in that sad single in East Wheelock, and tell myself that 2010 would be, in retrospect, a pivotal year in my life.
From January to March of 2010, I did my Foreign Study Program in Costa Rica and the Cayman Islands. That term would prove to be one of the best experiences I have had in life to date. The classes I took in preparation and the work we did on the trip ignited a love of ecology and biology that was so profound that, in the mid-2010s, it led me to an internship, and later a full-time position, as a biologist for the Smithsonian Institution.
In June 2010, I reconnected with J, my first ever boyfriend from senior year of high school. We started to date, and we continued to date (at times, tempestuously) for the next 10 years. In October 2020, we got engaged under a beautiful old tree on a West Virginia plateau.
The world is so different now from the one we last left off with in 2009. We had another term of Obama, a bleak and awful term of Orange Man, and a current Biden administration. The internet is everywhere and everything, including a potent conduit of disinformation and political polarization. We are currently 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and to date, more than 675,000 people have died in the United States alone.
But life is good, too. In 2015, I moved out of my parents' house and into an idyllic, below-market-rate apartment in downtown Bethesda. In 2020, I moved in with J. In 2020, I became a godmother. In 2021, I became an "aunt" (or, to be pedantic, a first cousin once removed). In 2020, I started a master's program. (And as proof that some things never ever change, I'm up at 1am writing a LiveJournal post instead of working on my assignments and watching my lectures).
I'm sitting here, in September 2021, on the cusp of another significant year, much as my 19-year-old self was in 2009. In 2022, my position at the Smithsonian will come to a (planned) end, and I have zero idea what is in store for me next career-wise. And in 2022, J and I will be getting married, ushering us into the next phase of our lives with (hopefully) a dog, a house, a white picket fence, and 2.5 children.
I'll have to check in with you in the future, to tell you how everything turned out. Stay tuned until then :-)