Foreword: This review was written on and of these past 3ish months. It’s been hard to think back to 2022, and I’ve been procrastinating writing and posting this yearly reflection. I’m now 2 months into 2023, and thought it was about time to post it lmfao. I hope you enjoy!

2022: the year in review

Dear lian sequeira,                                                                                                                                                                31st of december, 2022

Every time I’ve tried to write this introduction, I’ve kept getting distracted by the one and only: Captain Jack Sparrow. (And yes, I am currently watching Pirates of the Caribbean). I thought it would be nice to start and end the year with the man himself, Johnny Depp. It seems like just yesterday that everyone was talking about and obsessing over the court trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, and to think that was the start of 2022?!

This year was like any other. It was filled with ups and downs, challenges and hardships, new friendships and new lovers. It was filled with adventure and the constant knowing that the unknown was ahead.

I remember at the start of this year someone said to me, “2022 is pronounced 2020 2.” It was like the year was set up to be the sequel to the hardest year of our lives. The mockery that we knew was coming, and somehow ended up just that – not as “good” as the original, but still providing some sense of satisfactory content to the midst of the overall plot.

This year was full of experiences. It went by so quickly, but at the same time, so much happened. It honestly felt like the year wasn’t one year, but instead, 2 full years of memories and experiences, split up from January to July, to August to December. There were many challenges along the way, but there were also a lot of lessons learned and experiences that I will never forget too.

UPDATE: It’s now January 5th, 2023, and for the past couple of days, I’ve been stuck on what to write for the rest of this review. Every time I think about what happened in 2022, my heart hurts more and more because I realised that this year was just straight up shitty. There’s no sugar coating it, nothing. It was shitty. I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve. I lost people. I lost sources of my happiness. I lost sight of what was truly important. This year wasn’t a win. And admitting that hurts more than I can even begin to explain.

I was talking to Kevin this afternoon, and as I hopped into the shower, I thought of the things that I learnt this year. Lessons that came out of bad circumstances, out of heartbreaks and mistakes. And while these situations have caused me so much pain and internal conflict, the things I’ve learnt because of them have altered my perspective on life itself. That’s not to say that I’m over everything bad that has happened. In fact, I’m just beginning to process the lengths in which I’ve hurt not just myself, but also the people around me. But despite that, I had to learn things the hard way. I had to experience situations that seemed seemingly impossible to overcome, situations that I still think are impossible to overcome. These situations have not only occurred in my personal life, but in my schooling and in my relationships with other people.

22 Lessons I Learnt In 2022

Choices Have Consequences

I’ve heard this phrase so many times now, specifically from my Dad. In 2018, he wrote this phrase in my first birthday letter, referring to the choice I made on which highschool to go to. He said that I could be the judge of whether or not my choice was “the right one”, but either way, there was no way I could go back to change and choose a different choice. In 2019, he helped me construct a speech about how choices had consequences. In the next 4 birthday letters, he referred to the same motto.

It wasn’t until I made a bad choice at the start of December, that I realised how powerful and true this sentence was. I didn’t fully realise the impact of the choice that I made, but now I have to deal with the tragic consequences it has brought upon me. That choice and action has made me lose people that I care about, people who trusted me, and instead, I broke their trust and hurt them unknowingly. The consequences of that choice are affecting me a great deal, and I’m now in a pothole full of guilt, regret and disappointment in myself.

I haven’t gotten to the part of where I deal with the consequences in a healthy way. Hell, I’m beating myself up everyday for what I did, and everything is a sharp stab in the heart that I fucked up. I don’t know how to deal with the consequences of my actions, but I know that either way, I will eventually move on from this.

Growth is Not Linear

I actually said this specific line when I was being interviewed for Max Potential, a leadership program that I got into for 2023. They asked me why I applied for this program, and I said that one of my goals for this year was to become the “best version of my self,” but one thing I realised this year was that growth isn’t linear. Growth isn’t something that just “occurs,” and I can’t force it to happen either.

There are many stages of growth. Usually it would be grief, but the same concepts can be applied to growth. The Seven Stages of Grief follow as such: Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and acceptance. Growth is the cycle of these emotions/stages. It’s the constant reevaluation of who you are in this moment in time, and the change from one stage to another can move at very different paces for different people.

True growth is never planned. First, it hits you with an impossible situation, and then watches you struggle and observes how you try and deal with the situation. Growth occurs in people reactions to a situation and can change depending on the person themselves and how tricky the situation is. It’s never straightforward, and there is no right or wrong way to go about it. Instead, it’s a constant circle of emotions and feelings, with no black or white answer, but instead, a multitude of grey.

There is No Such Thing As Becoming The Best Version of Yourself

Looking back onto my New Years Resolutions for 2022, this is the one goal that seems so unrealistic now. I wanted this year to be my year. The year where I peak at everything I do, whether it be at school or music or simply just expanding my social circle.

I’ve now realised that there is no such thing as becoming the best version of yourself. Sure, you can get better and improve as a person. But no matter how much you improve, there is always a way to improve even further. There will always be a person that will be better than you, but in hindsight, it’s not about comparing yourself to others. It’s about comparing yourself to the person you were yesterday, the person you were last month, the person you were a year ago.

Your evaluation of the word “best” always continues to grow as you do. As you achieve your goals. As you meet new people. As you raise your expectations and standards for yourself – Your best continues to become bigger and bigger. And eventually, when you take a moment to breathe, look back and reflect, you will realise that you have superseded the “best version of yourself” that you wanted to become a year ago. Yet, you still feel like there is more for you to achieve, and hence, there is no such thing as becoming the best version of yourself.

Goals Mean Nothing if You Don’t Put The Effort in Everyday to Achieve Them

Everyone starts their new year with a list of resolutions, a list of things they would like to achieve by the end of the year. But in reality, how many of those goals are actually achieved? How many of those goals are actually realistic?

The answer to that question is unfortunately close to none.

We start each year looking forward to the year ahead, looking forward to a clean slate without the mistakes and fuckups from the year before. But as soon as one thing goes wrong, or one day passes where we don’t stay on top of the promise we made, we crumble and our new habit or goal dies. “Maybe next year,” we promise ourselves, leading us on to procrastinate the goal/habit we want to build.

At the start of the year, we make these promises to ourselves, thinking we have all the time in the world. Or technically, in the year. But before we know it, we realise that December is here and Christmas is just a week away.

This was a realisation I had at the end of 2022. All the goals, promises and habits I wanted to build at the start of the year weren’t fully accomplished, and I came back to the start of the cycle of “Damn, another year wasted. Maybe next year.”

Goals mean nothing if you don’t put in the effort in everyday to take that one step forward to achieve them. Without persistent and conscious efforts to keep going and, let’s be real, force ourselves to do things that we don’t really want to do on some days, we won’t achieve the goals we want to achieve.

My Number One Priority Should Be Me

This is a hard one to acknowledge, because now looking back onto the year, my number one priority was not me. It wasn’t my family or school either. No, my first priority, whether subconsciously or not, was my social life.

I spent the majority of the year making new friends and connecting with new people. And while yes, this is important, my focus was taken away from my own personal goals and it led me to be distracted from the real things that mattered.

This “distraction” per say, affected me greatly, and I can see that through my results and marks from school this year. Despite putting my shit together for some of my classes by the end of the year, I still prioritised the wrong things and this caused me to not do as well as I liked overall.

My number one priority should be me. Yes, I can and will prioritise other things like my education, family and friends, but at the end of the day, I am the only person who is going to be there for myself no matter what happens. My happiness, my growth and my health, among other things, should be my number one priority. Because in reality, if I don’t take care of myself, who will?

There Is No Such Things As Failing; Only Not Learning From Your Mistakes

The amount of times I cried over assessments and exams this year were too many to count. The first time I bawled my eyes out was unfortunately on my 16th birthday, after a really hard maths exam which I knew I failed even before getting my results. By the end of the year, I passed 1 out of 4 of my math exams, and that was barely by 2 or 3 marks.

I was so disappointed in myself that day, that I ended up crying my eyes out and avoided going home at all costs. Yet, when I finally did come home, my dad gave me a hug and said that it was okay, and that he didn’t care if I failed my maths test or not.

This year, I decided to start maths tutoring to help me, because of how much I was struggling with maths. So far, it has really helped, and I’ve started to understand how to do problems better. Despite these stuff challenges, I eventually stepped up and made a brave decision to do this, even though asking for helping has always been a struggle for me.

There is no such thing as being truly happy

No one is ever going to be truly happy with everything in their life. Everyone has their insecurities, their challenges, the things that they want to change. This year, I’ve had moments where I’ve felt like I was truly happy, but now I realise that in those moments, I just focused on the things that made me happy and not the hardships in my life.

That being said, be happy with what and who you are. Focus on the present moment, and what matters. Be grateful for the people and the things that you have, because you never know what might happen in the future. Rather than focusing on the what if, focus on what you do know and what you have in the present moment.

Look for the simple things that bring you joy

Find happiness in the small things. Find happiness in the smell of rain, the sound of thunder, the feeling of warmth and comfort in a hug. Look for the simple things that bring you joy. The people that make you smile and laugh, not only when you feel good, but when you feel bad too. No matter what, I’ve found comfort and joy in music and walking on the beach at sunset. I don’t look for extravagant things for happiness, like material possessions, but rather the natural beauty the world has to offer.

Other Lessons:

• Take small steps forward to face your fears
• Every experience, no matter if it’s good or bad, will teach you an important lesson
• You cannot change the past, but you can change how you act in the present/future
• You cannot change how someone acts, but you can change how you react to the situation
• People’s words should match up to their actions
• Without the dark, you don’t know what light is
• Falling does not mean failing; failing is when you don’t try new things, and don’t pick yourself up when you fall, when you give up
• Something that may work for someone else may not necessarily work for you
• Resilience
• Take accountability for you actions; stop over apologising
• Unless you believe it yourself, it won’t mean shit
• It’s not how well you scored, but what you learnt from the experience
• Life is like a movie – you are not the main character or the side character. You are the director and have the power to change the movie