The best writing happens when you’re laying in bed, it’s 1:49 and you just finished watching an hour of Youtube videos on your phone.

And you realize there’s a lot of things on your mind, and even if you lay in the darkness, you’ll toss and turn for the next few hours, so fuck it, you sit back up, pull your computer out and start writing.

2016 was a really weird year for me. I went to so so many concerts. I met so many new people. Had so many new experiences. January was also the first month, of the next 12, where I went from writing 8 articles or so per month, to just maybe 2 or 3 per month. I blamed all sorts of things for that slipping habit.

I have never felt more exhausted or more energized in my life this year. And I have thought a lot about life, about the world, about the society that we live in, about the small community that I am immersed in at college.

Every time I have to pack my suitcase to come back home I get a wave of anxiety, normally the two days or so before I have to board the plane. I feel like I’m packing my life away at college into a carry on and I have to pick up and start living at home again, which I haven’t done for months. And yet every time I come home something has changed, my sister has matured in ways I hadn’t realized. It’s hard to keep up with family, but people in general, when you’re not with them in person. You watch them go through life through phone calls and social media, yet with the people you see every day, you barely recognize the changes.

2016 was filled with a lot of soul searching, a lot of realizations about the ways the world works. Things I’d always pondered before, but never really manifested as conscious recognitions. About the drastically different types of people there are in the world, and how your opinions are shaped a lot through your own personal experience, because duh.

But it causes so much conflict, there’s so much miscommunication of feelings and experiences and a dearth of shared understandings. There’s a lot of selfish people in the world, and in many ways, I am one. Thinking that, I have finally understood why I heard so many times the phrase “ignorance is bliss” repeated throughout my childhood and adolescence.

Realizations that anything can happen. You can get the lowest grade in your favorite class of the quarter, the opportunity that you swore was the perfect fit for you could just remain stuck, and you’re waiting on an email that will probably never come.

And it’s crazy that first, so many people share these fears and feelings, and that second, so many others are facing challenges that are so much bigger than this.

And on a separate note, it’s amusing that so many groups and organizations are basically made up of a unresponsive listserv, a decent website and a fake polishing of the truth. And I’m not just talking about student groups at a university, I’m talking about charities, I’m talking about administrative groups. Support and growth takes time and diligence, and people who actually care about whatever the cause and purpose is. Right? Hard for me to grasp. Too often I get an email with something that looks official and uncover that it’s actually not very legitimate at all.

I’m in a very reflective state of mind, a mentality that I sorely missed.

There are so many habits and tendencies that I thought were etched into my routine. But only when you look back at what’s happened over a year, over a few years, do you realize how things do change. How YOU change. People who you thought were a constant in your life are really a variable. A questionable variable. Beliefs that you built foundations on, not as rock steady as you remember. Concerns – no longer concerns. I used to always have painted nails. I don’t care about that anymore. I used to freak out that my feet were too big – I grew into them. Some sources of apprehension, you grow into them and realize that they were never really something that should make you uneasy. I used to read the horoscopes in seventeen magazine all the time, now it just seems like a waste of headspace to think about those sorts of things.

There’s no central point to this. I have nothing I’m really trying to say.

Here are some good songs.