Lessons learned in 2012, interspersed with pictures I found on the Internet in 2012:

That it is possible to do the thing you are best at all day and yet hate your life. Writing is basically my strongest skill in life, but writing SEO content all day made me feel awful inside, and I was really slow at it, so I don't think I intentionally slept more than five hours at a time for like six months.

That I can find myself saying, "How dare she [my then-boyfriend's friend] come into my house and speak Spanish to my dog!" I neither speak nor understand Spanish; this fact is known. I remember thinking, This is a ridiculous thing to say, and it is time to stop being in situations where I feel the need to construct sentences like this.

(9gag.com)

That I am less adaptable than I thought, and I have changed less than I thought, for better or worse. I'm basically still the same person I was when I was a kid, when I was in high school, when I was in college. It's been weird to realize that I cannot magically alter the things I care about and/or the things that make me mad. But, in retrospect, I don't know why it took me so long to figure this out.

(arresteddecision2012.tumblr.com)

That you can develop an angry smile, a smile of fury, and other people will not notice it is an angry smile. That, in general, it is possible to be furious completely under the radar of those around you.

9gag.com

That, when I get used to feeling like no one is listening, I forget how to talk. Regardless of whether that feeling is grounded in fact. When I moved back to Mesa and hung out with people who were like really, intently listening to me, I had trouble making eye contact, and I kept trailing off at the ends of sentences, waiting to be cut off. I do not know quite how these habits developed.

That returning is not always the same as going backwards.

PS: Extra-fun trivia! Where, O readers, did I steal the format of this entry from? (ie: "That...")

(Harrison Ford and Sean Young 
on the set of Bladerunner; buzzfeed.com)