Goodbye!

This is my last post of the year. I thoroughly enjoyed writing these posts every week, even though for the last few weeks I had been struggling with some level of burnout. It is hard to keep a sustained level of interest and enthusiasm all of the time. Sometimes you just do the best you can and move on. It helps that these posts are fun to write. I took some time to look over my previous posts. My first few were cringe-worthy; I wasn't sure what I was doing, and I think I was trying to force a voice. In particular, I felt the need to include as many pictures as I could, but I was also pretty bad at finding relevant pictures and formatting the page properly. Then at some point I switched to plain-text posts, and I think that was when my posts improved. I'm pretty happy with most of my posts in the middle of my tenure here. I noticed that the quality of the last few have, in general, tapered off, but I think that the style I used before was still there. I feel like I just re-watched a TV series. The first season is uncertain, the middle seasons are great, the show begins to lose steam, the magic fades, and the final season is a swan song sung by a bronchitic goose. I would do it again if I had the chance. I enjoyed meeting my fellow Community Crew members. Also, mundanely, I had always wanted to be paid to write. I had always wanted to be a writer, but I never really followed through with it. Sometimes life is like that. You get caught up between what you want to do and what it seems you should do, between lofty ideals and practical considerations. The story of my constant major switching is the story of the battle between "Do I enjoy this?" and "Will this take me somewhere?" There were times when I felt like I had gotten nowhere, but being able to look back on everything that I had written had given me a sense of accomplishment that I lack from school. Getting marks back is sometimes an empty feeling. It's hard to know what the mark means. In some ways, school is a little bubble. If you think too much about the numbers, it's all going to pop. That's why I think it's important to reflect on what you've done, school or otherwise. It doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to stand shoulder to shoulder with great accomplishments. They just have to be tangible. I spend a lot of time in front of some screen or another, as most of us do, and I often end up feeling that I haven't done anything. But I guess I have done a lot. So thank you for reading my posts. I really feel like I did something, even if maybe not too many of you read it. They'll be up here for a long time, and I hope people get something out of it in the future.