“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.”

Alright. I was going to recount the past year and yada yada, but if you want that just go through my archives. Everything is there. Well, most of it.

There have been a lot of ups and downs. Lately it feels like more downs than ups. I miss Marika every single day, and I don't know how to make things better. I cry a lot, and there's no way to make the sadness go away. I won't suddenly wake up one day and be okay with the fact that she's gone. I just have to find some way to function with the sadness, or else I'm in real danger of letting it consume me. I'm working on it, I promise.

The end of this year is filled with preparations for Birmingham Fashion Week. I'm making an entirely new collection. I stopped in ATL on my way home and got some amazing fabric from Gail K and I've been sewing every day for the past few weeks. Hopefully it all turns out how I want it to.

I'm really excited for Birmingham Fashion Week. I've made a conscious effort to stop planning my future so much, so I'm not expecting anything from this, I'm not trying to figure out what is going to look best in my portfolio, I'm doing it for the sheer joy of designing. I have spent a lot of blog posts talking about how I'm not sure I belong in fashion and how I'm not like everybody else, but at the end of the day, I'm doing what I love. I need to embrace that and quit worrying about what's next.

I think I've mostly processed the aftermath of the tornado. I still choke up when I read news articles about it and it still sucks to drive through the damage path, but it's getting better. It's beautiful to see how my community has risen above all of the death and destruction to hold onto one another and make it through. I take pride in living in Tuscaloosa; it really has become my home.

This past semester has been intense. I was far busier than I ever could have imagined, but I somehow managed to squeak by with the grades I wanted. I had some amazing professors who were willing to work with me when I missed that entire week before dead week.

Overall, I just want 2012 to be better. I got completely off track with my weight loss/healthy living goals, and I'm really disappointed in myself for that. I can make excuses about it all day, but it's a change I need to commit to and never look back. I think the best thing in the world for me was blogging every single day about what I was doing, what I was eating, and everything else. So I'm going to try really hard to make that a daily habit again.

I need to start living my life again. I need to do what I want to do, not what other people expect me to do. I'm not making New Year's resolutions, I'm not saying, 'this time it'll be different.' I'm making this time different. That's it. End of story. I will definitely fail. A lot. But I have to start trying again. If I don't, I am on a dangerous road towards depression and that's just not something I can live with.

So let's all get ready for 2012. 2011 was a huge jerk, and we need to just bury it and pay our respects. Maybe in a few days my memory will improve and I can do a sappy retrospective on the year, but for right now let's just look at new beginnings.