what i learnt this year 2024

26 Dec, 2024

there's still a week or whatever until the official end of 2024 but many know that the especially these last couple of days of the year don't really count and i have a feeling i won't be encountering anything i would bother putting here during that time. december as a whole is a monday-sunday thing of months for me so i'm gonna be cheating a little too, and the (officially) final month of 2023 will be where i start.

last december i went on a family trip to the usa, canada, and japan to visit family (and travel) and travel and as a three-day stopover respectively. i was excited initially because i have never experienced a 'white christmas', it had been seven or so years since i last seen my mum's side of the family, and i planned to drop a lot of coin on random small toys along the way. this trip was also, in my mind, the last trip that i'd be my parents' child and enjoy almost everything on their money, so i had some expectations. it wasn't to be though in a lot of ways and after i got back from the trip in january i confided in some close friends that although i was very lucky to have been able to travel, it was kind of a bummer.

a year later i think it's still a bummer but i do also think something changed on that trip for me which has sort of slithered its way throughout the months of this year because i have noticed a lot of differences between the me of this year and the mes of the last couple of years. here are some.

despite my lazy and at times disinterested attitude, i do like my chosen field of study!

having the time to read everything set for my university courses this year has made me realise i do in fact like my majors, history and ancient history. i feel like this realisation should've happened when i switched from accounting to ancient history in my second year, which i think i did honestly because that was the time when i had real eureka! moment about studying and about my life for a lack of a less dramatic word,¹ but this year i really enjoyed them. some of my favourite readings i was assigned this year were "Revolutionary Echoes: Radios and Loudspeakers in the Mao Era" by Jie Li and John Berger's "Why Look At Animals?". i can't, and don't think i will ever, say that i enjoyed the assignments but i liked learning about what i had chosen to do for them. it helps as well that i also started to really get the passion and dedication people had for what they were studying thanks to needing to expose myself to the mysterious honours year that i hadn't really thought about but was somewhat in-built in my degree. more on that later (hopefully), but i suppose it has rubbed off on me, and i am a bit more excited, more than i expected, to begin my honours journey next year.

it could be because i read so much non-fiction nowadays, but i have been falsely identifying as a fiction reader all this time

also something that has been festering for a couple of years, but it really came into focus very recently, where i decided that this summer break is when i become less of a casual reader and more of a frequent one. from my to-read list, i found myself gravitating towards the non-fiction titles, and when i checked over how many of the books i read this year were fiction or non-fiction, an overwhelming amount (out of about 8 books mind you) were the latter. i might be able to go through the reason why, but i think i will leave that for another post... if you have recs (non-fiction or otherwise), please try your best to send them over via telepathic means lol

"i need some help" - some words i still have a hard time uttering, and being 'a bother'

i'm not sure if i really want to unpack everything about this, but i somewhat thought i was making some strides in this department with asking one more question than i would usually ask in the courses i took this year (zero), emailing and meeting potential supervisors and forcing myself to get clarification from my professors after class, sending out a close friends instagram story asking if anyone wanted to hang out (scary, and i have a hate-ish relationship with the app) and inching towards relying more on my lovely friends. it obviously isn't all forwards: a couple of days after my wisdom teeth surgery, when some things were fading but others were replacing it, i felt very out of it trying to make myself dinner while my mum slept (her sleeptime). she got a bit mad about it the next day, telling me that i should've woken her up if i was having difficulty and i cried, i think because i felt a little ashamed to cause another kind of trouble when i wanted to cause none at all in the first place, something that happens not often but enough for it to be recognisable of my person. work in progress indeed, but i feel more disposed to the 'progress' part nowadays which is nice. i will let myself be a person, who takes up space and gets help when they need it!

why am i drawn (...) to drawing?

i've always liked to draw, but have for quite some time preferred to keep that at the back of my being even though i think quite a lot about it. i've already established that i wanted to strictly keep it as a hobby and never put any pressure on myself to draw, but i haven't really thought about why i want to do it and i guess what do i get out of it. i found my answer sometime in the middle of this year, thinking back to that 'visualising an apple in your mind' diagram that made its way around at least like 5 years ago (i don't really remember nor do i want to bother to find out) and when i realised my mental visualisation skills were kind of shit. it hasn't stopped me from making up scenarios in my head and visiting very very vague silhouettes of places that only exist there but it's helped me understand that i draw because i want to have references and i want to remember things. i want to keep in touch!²

the others - i have less remarks about them but they still deserve to be here!

just as the heading says. i thought about making another post but i am too lazy.

• i am wondering why it's taken this long for me to take a liking towards transformers toys

i guess sometimes i get intimidated by longstanding series. when i actually realised that you could, ahem, transform many of them i was intriguied. fidget-toy adjacent, i thought, and i got one (studio series core class shockwave) as a reward/motivation while writing my last essay for the semester just gone. i've done some surface-level toe-dipping into the rest of the franchise but i think i'll be taking my time with the transformers media, particularly the comics which i'm most interested in. maybe watch this space.

• my bradley bain has a pretty distinct loser³ quality to him

whenever i draw him, i like to focus a lot on his green parka that's torn very interestingly at the ends and like to make it big and comfy because that's the ideal to me. so he gets kind of swallowed up and looks like a little kid in some ways. it doesn't really help that i think i have a sort of blunt quality to my lines and my shapes. this will make little to no sense to just about everyone and i hope it stays that way.

• love and romance and all that

there's been some steps in this department this year which i guess is cool. kind of similar to other stuff on here where it's been simmering up before this year but 2024 is when i really acknowledged it, where the acknowledgement is that i can point out definitively one speck of sand on the beach. i think i'm also and moreso rewarding myself for contemplating more on these things, although my surroundings did a lot of the work to get me here. the shell is breaking but when will the bird fly? at least i know roughly where i'd be heading whenever i do.

what's next?

next year, if it all goes to plan, i will be embarking on something quite new to me and hopefully learning lots! if it doesn't go to plan, i will also be doing something quite new and learning lots too so it's all a bit of an illusion of choice.

less vaguely, i'm excited to really get stuck into my hobonichi, read more (i got myself a kobo for christmas and hoping i will get around to more books with it), draw more, spend more time with friends and make some new ones, explore (myself and this pretty nice city i live in), get stuck into video games old and new, get more recipes under my belt, go and do things i want to do! a part 2 of this year where i keep trucking along towards something a little more tangible, a little more like a destination or pit stop. here's to 2025!🥂