Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?
This is a perfect question for today. We’re all in the reflective, looking back mode as we get closer to the new year. For me, while my life has greatly changed over this past year, I honestly don’t know if this is how I pictured my life. Actually, I don’t even think I pictured the future at all last year. There was so much I didn’t know. And by that I mean, I was only a few months into a job that I never expected to have because at the beginning of that year, I didn’t expect to leave my old one. But I did.
Absolutely everything felt like a new experience. The routines that went along with a traditional school year were over. I had started therapy just the month prior. I was just beginning to process all that brought me to where I was. I hadn’t even started healing, I was just working through the emotions so that I could heal.
At this point last year, I didn’t know what the healed version of myself was going to look like. I don’t think I even tried to imagine her. Who I am now came together little by little, piece by piece.
This voice I have now? The one that has put words onto a blog post every single day of 2025? I’m pretty sure this voice was only a whisper last year and my blog may still have been anonymous then. Actually, it was. Looking back at my posts, I see that on January 31st of this year, I wrote a post titled This Is Me where I introduced the face and name behind Middle-aged Maverick. Now, at the end of the year, I cannot be silenced. I cannot go back to hiding my identity. I certainly didn’t imagine that would be the case a year ago.
I know I certainly didn’t imagine I would spend the year filling up my arms with tattoos. My post in February, The Blue Tattoo, reveals that it was around the end of this month that I got the idea for my blue flowers tattoo. I have since started calling it my blue freedom tattoo. I knew for a long time prior that I eventually wanted to get something to fill in the space on my arm where I had a heart and a band of flowers. I had no idea that the blue flowers would be only the beginning and that the feeling of having my arms covered in tattoos was a feeling of power that I never expected.
This was me on tattoo day, the last time my arms looked so bare:
I go back on January 10th to have my latest tattoo finished. I previously thought, and even told my husband, that this was going to be the last one. At least for a long while. But since I said that a couple weeks ago, I am already slightly bothered by the empty bit of space between my blue flowers and the piece I have on my forearm. There’s room for more and I’m tempted…
There’s a lot more I could say about how I’m different now than I was a year ago. My boundaries are rock solid and unmoving. I don’t communicate with my parents anymore. My thoughts are focused heavily on writing a book and building an online presence. Going to try making videos again soon.
And like I said, I honestly never imagined this life for myself. A year ago I was taking my life one day at a time. I was learning how to regulate my nervous system and manage triggers caused by CPTSD. I knew I wanted to be healed, but I didn’t know what that would look like.
Now that I think about it though, this person I am now, I’ve seen her before. I wrote about her in my post, The Doppleganger of My Dreams. I wrote that post in 2019. Long before grad school, long before becoming a principal, long before my entire life changed. I saw her and I knew that was who I wanted to be. And now, six years after writing that post, I am her.
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