2015: Year in Review (What kind of a year it's been)

Normally I wouldn't write this until the dying hours of the year, but I'm gonna be in Thailand then, possibly nowhere near a modem and almost certainly not feeling like pouring my heart out on the internet. Also, in case you hadn't noticed, I've not been great about writing blog posts these last few months and I don't want to neglect this one as well. I have so much to say about this year.

Which is strange because 2015 has felt very short to me: I kind of feel that this year didn't start until late April, when I finally left France. Hell, a small part of me feels that this year didn't really start until I moved to Japan at the beginning of August, meaning that it was 2015 for a mere five months.

But of course that's not the case- this year was as long as any other (excepting leap years) and I can't excise parts of it just because nothing really happened.

Not to say I didn't have any fun at all for the first few months, but it was almost invariably on a weekend, in a major European capital (Paris, Brussels, London) and involving one or more of the following people: Dani, Grace, Jonathan, David, Poppy, DKB, Patrick, Jari, John, Naomi and Nicole. I want to thank all of you for adding some much needed fun to an otherwise bleak time.

For you see, Laon was miserable. I'm very glad that I was only there for seven months, as it means that it's already been over for longer than it was happening and that very soon it will have paled into insignificance. I spent  weekdays mostly in my room watching old episodes of 30 Rock and worrying about how I was soon going to be out of a job. I wasn't depressed or anything, but I didn't have a lot going on.

 In April, everything changed when I found out I would be going to Japan. I had actually forgotten all about the JET programme by the time my acceptance letter came through, so this was really a big shock- I'd been planning to move back to Edinburgh, try and find some kind of middling job which paid the bills but gave me enough time to do theatre on the side and, as much as possible, resume my life from uni.

I'm very, very glad I didn't do this.

Edinburgh friends, you remain amazing as does our fair city. But I cannot recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the best parts of my time at university (I also, thankfully, cannot recapture the first half of second year or that time my mother poisoned me before an exam). My life in Japan is brilliant, in many of the same ways that my life in Edinburgh was, except that I have money here and there are monkeys and hotsprings. I really wish that there was some way I could do theatre here (Japan is really not into that, it seems) but apart from that, I have no real complaints.

2015 has not been as...cohesive as the other years I have reviewed on my blogs (2014 began and ended in the exact same place; this year I'll be thousands of miles away from where I was 12 months ago). I like to look for patterns, lessons that keep coming up, recurring themes to try and tie the whole thing together because I am, at heart, a storyteller and I love a satisfying thematic denouement but it's not really possible for this year because it's just been so wildly varied.

The first part was spent trying to pass the time in rural Europe, the middle frantically preparing in England and the last part just mostly doing whatever I want in Japan. I don't know if this is relevant, but this is also the year when I spent the least time in Edinburgh, which maybe meant that I had to evolve more as a person, as I wasn't always trying to be the same as I was at uni. But maybe I'm grasping at straws.

Does it matter that this year didn't have an overarching message? Of course not. And while I find it distressing that almost a third of this year was a write-off (again, I only mean the weekdays, not the weekends, Euro-friends), it doesn't eclipse the fact that life is really great for me right now. I hope this continues so that in a year's time, when I'm reviewing 2016, the theme can just be 'Everything is Awesome all the time'. Who knows? We'll just have to wait and see.