My new motto, I guess, is “keep going.”

There are still 11 days left, but I’m not sure I’ll have a chance to reflect again. It’s been a wild year and decade. For a little context, at the beginning of 2010, I was starting my second semester of freshman year at a high school in Fayetteville, Georgia. And now, I’m a semi-adult, working as a journalist in New York.

I wouldn’t change all of the things I went through these last 10 years for anything. It’s been a painful, but ever so rewarding decade. I know some people think what’s the point in thinking so much about where we’ve been when we live this life every day and there’s so much life left to live (hopefully). But my thought is how can we really know how incredible our present is or our future will be if we can’t see how far we’ve come?

True. Three-hundred sixty-five is just a number. Twenty-four is just a number. But that doesn’t mean we have to measure our time in numbers. We can measure it in feelings instead, in love.

If I had to sum up this decade in one word, it would be gratitude. There’s a theory that when you’re feeling grateful, your brain is incapable of feeling anything else. I can’t imagine where I would be or who I would be without going through all I did in these past 10 years. That’s why I’m grateful. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without all of it. It’s also why I don’t have any regrets. The things I can do better or more are my motivation to improve myself and the world around me. But if the events of the last 10 years didn’t happen, I couldn’t be here writing this note of reflection.

I guess that’s all I had to say. This life’s pretty great, even when it’s not. Thank you.

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