This website turns a year old today.
When I officially bought the domain, I scrolled ahead a year in my calendar to July 4th and left myself a note saying “cancel WordPress or get charged for another year”. It was under the pretense of not knowing if the website would be something I continue doing after 365 days, or something that would lose it’s novelty after a few months. I can safely say, exactly one year later, that this website is still on my mind almost every minute of the day.
When I laid in bed the night of July 4th last year, I had all these huge ideas for things I was going to write and things I was going to produce. I’ve always loved editing videos and wanted to be able to make Youtube videos about fashion and things I’m doing in my life, especially my travels in Spain, and post video essays using the blog posts I wrote. My friend Talie and I did something similar during quarantine when we rollerskated to the gym or went rockclimbing in halloween costumes. When Talie and I moved to different states this stopped, and I had always wanted to pick it back up. I also just wanted to write about everything. It seems like every thought that came into my mind got jotted down in a notebook to analyze later.
I started off posting once a week, then three times a week, then every other day, and then it completely stopped. My return to my Home University for the second semester of my junior year proved to be a real challenge. I use the term “frolicking” often when speaking of my actions in Spain the semester before, but there was also a lot of “studying” and “breaking down” and “anxiety”. My Home University, which was already on my hit list, sent me to a college that was in the top 10 of universities for economics filled with students who didn’t want Americans being there and professors who emailed me, “if you don’t understand economics then I can’t help you”. I learned, with one month left in my classes, that one of the courses I was placed in was a class for Master’s students that I shouldn’t have been taking in the first place. Needless to say, I failed it, which was the only time I’ve received below an A in a college course. In all seriousness, I was two steps away from telling my parents I was going to come home early and just take extra courses the next year to make up for it. They regularly told me I should do just that.
So obviously when I got back to my Home University, no matter how much success I had there in the past, I was still stuck in fall semester. Where I failed a class and oftentimes heard students talking poorly of me in Spanish behind my back. It became incredibly hard for me to do anything spring semester except go to class, do my homework, and sleep for long periods of time. I continued thinking about this website every day, jotting down notes and planning to write things that never got written. I got on anxiety medicine that made me pass out during concerts and prompted my Spanish teacher pull me aside after class to ask if everything was okay. As the semester went on, the dreams of a successful blog where I could make money from writing or a Youtube channel I just had for fun became fuzzier and fuzzier.
I’m now off the medicine and I’m in New York but I don’t feel like I have anything important to say for some reason. I feel I could only fill up a postcard with legitimate things, “Doing fashion school in NYC! Meeting good friends, keep in touch!” The city of creatives and writers and photographers and I just sit and watch.
That is what I feel though. Typically there is a lot of disconnect between how I feel and what really is. In truth, the logic says there is more to it. For the first time in my life, I feel as though I’m priorizing friendships and connections over work. So maybe I don’t feel as though I have a lot to say through my writing because I’m saying it to my new friends. I no longer feel like I have an overflowing cup full of thoughts and emotions and theories that I have to get out somewhere, because each day when I wake up and walk into the living room, my roommates and friends are waiting with their own cups at the ready to catch my extra.
If I can think logically about my time in New York, that means I can try to think logically about my spring semester. In truth, there was a lot more to it than just me going to class and sleeping, but I tend to hold myself to a tremendously high standard. I was working three jobs, taking five classes, and got straight A’s– indicating that I completly demolished my econometrics and accounting classes. In the past year, I’ve posted 108 times which equates to about one article every three days. When I first started one year ago today, my goal was a post a week which would have me ending the year with 52 posts meaning I doubled my initial goal. During spring semester I also wrote 16 articles for my school newspaper (one of which the president of the university replied to), 17 articles for the music magazine I work for, and acquired two writing jobs for next year. Feeling can’t argue their way around logic, numbers don’t lie.
I’ve always struggled to look back on a year. That’s why I tend to get moody around holidays like my birthday or New Years, and now the anniversary of this website, which I comically refer to as a fiscal year. Yearly holidays or anniversaries force you to look back on the previous year and make you remember the expectations you had when you sat on the other side of 365. The problem I oftentimes have to deal with is my incredibly high expectations. I daydream about what the following year might look like to the point of it being so exciting one might pitch it to a director for a movie. And then I get to the end of the year and I’m disappointed. Because no matter how good my year was, nothing is as good as the year I dreamt up in my head. So even the happy memories and all the accomplishments and the numbers that don’t lie seem a bit juvenile, like I could have done more. It’s like when I got an interview for my dream internship and I immediately began planning out every aspect of my life even before doing preliminaries. Even now with all everything I’ve done on this website since first starting it, the things that come to mind are the things I could have done but didn’t.
“It’s like when we are in high school, and we’re back at school after spring break, counting down the days until summer comes. Making plans for fun activities, to travel, and have the summer of your dreams. Then summer rolls around, and you spend most of your days not really knowing what to do, and you get frustrated because the summer you planned out in AP Statistics third period didn’t look anything like this. Summer is great, but it’s never as great as we imagined, which, in August when we go back to school, taints our memory of it a bit.”
“I Got an Interview at my Dream Company”
Two days ago I realized that I would be ending the fiscal year without any Youtube videos, which was on the original goal sheet. I hurriedly put one of my ideas into action and created it within 48 hours, just so I wouldn’t have to end the year without putting that goal into action. Even now though, I realize I’m ending the year with only one video published, and I realize how I took my time in Europe for granted and now my time in New York City. Again I don’t think logically about all the time I had to spend on school and work during those time periods. I also have been acutely aware as I get closer and closer to starting my last semester at university that I have generated hardly any buzz around this website, not even a small micro community. There are the subscribers and the likes, but there is a lack of community in the demographic I am targeting, which is purely due to lack of social media use. Lack of marketing and advertising. This is a key necessity if I want to spend my spring semester traveling South America and making money from writing about it.
I suppose it’s good to feel disappointed though, just a little bit. Disappointment means I have plans for bigger things and certain aspirations for a particular outcome. If I got to the end of my fiscal year fully satisfied, then that would signify that I didn’t dream big enough at the beginning of the year. That I didn’t think of all the possibilities of my capabilities. This disappointment, for me, serves as a type of motivator for growth and improvement in the future. It pushes me to try harder in the following era and straive for bigger things. As I’ve been thinking back on the past year, this dispoaintment acts as a type of catalyst for change prompting me to evaluate my goals for this year and channel my energy towards those goals. I know what Mother Hen would say about this all, she wouldn’t understand why I’m disappointed in the first place. I have always been told that I hold myself to impossible standards. I’ve had to learn to manage this disappointment that I oftentimes feel as a driving force instead of letting is discourage me.
I go into this next fiscal year in a better mindset than I spent the latter half of last fiscal year though. I still plan on producing more videos, expanding my writing to more industries, and continuing to plan my early graduation to travel around South America while getting paid to write about the experience. I suppose we’ll see next year, until then,
Yours truly,
Calihan
Looking back on the year…
My first post: I’m In My Bellwether Era
(This blog was originally going to be just about fashion, but I had too much to say)
My favorite post: A Love Letter from Madrid
(This was obviously very hard to decide but I feel like so many of my posts are from Madrid it seemed very fitting. Contesters were: The Real Illicit Affair: Therapy and I’m My Own Muse and Reminiscing on High School Friendships)
Lennon’s Favorite: On Lennon: My Human Seatbelt
(She’s so selfish for that)
My favorite city: Paris – On Crying at the Airpot + My Trip to Paris and On Tour De Corn + Weird Trips
Little Girl, Big World 
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