Looking Forward

Time keeps slipping away. It's the last day of 2016 --in the past year, I went ice skating for the first time, bought a car with my partner Nico, spent time in the mountains, presented research at a Sociology conference in Atlanta, completed an internship with a local non-profit, saw Michelle Obama speak on campus, turned 21 and spent an evening on the Trolley Pub, voted for the first time, helped cook a real (vegan) Thanksgiving, worked as an undergraduate research assistant on a project I care about, and graduated early magna cum laude with my BA. 

I feel like I'm now between stages in my life and this year will be a whole lot of new things that I have to prepare myself for. I've spent the last 15.5 years as a student but now that I've graduated, I have to figure out who I am when I'm not in school. I'll be continuing on as a research assistant and working as a house manager at the theater while I continue to search for more permanent positions. With all of my unstructured time in the next few months, I can turn my focus to working on myself and really growing as a person this year. Here are some of my resolutions or goals for the year:

1. Create something at least once a week
2. Read before bed
3. Start doing yoga regularly
4. Send thank you cards and call my family more often
5. Learn to manage my anxiety, even if it means returning to medication
6. Focus on my health in general -mental health, taking better care of my diabetes, getting more active
7. Take efforts to make my life more eco-friendly such as reducing my carbon footprint and reducing waste

An Old Friend

I'm no stranger to blogging. As a teenager, I spent hours every day pouring through blogs. I think the idea of having a life so interesting that strangers on the internet wanted to know about it seemed glamorous to me. I started and dropped three different blogs of my own over the years: one about fashion, one about food, and one just for writing. Looking back at my dusty, archived blogs now, I feel like an entirely different person with a different life, different thought processes, and different aspirations. At least one thing hasn't changed though: I still feel the same urge to document and catalog my life on the internet to leave a written legacy of myself. That urge was what truly fueled my blogs as a teenager, and it's what drives me back to start blogging again now.

My hope for this blog is that it can be a place where I write about things that bring joy to my life: food, books, art, design, my studies, and the people I love. The name for the blog was inspired by one of my earliest joys: the gilded edges of the pages of old books that fascinated me, as a reminder to add that bit of magic to my writing like a little bit of gilding. It also serves as a play on my last name, Gold! My writing (and my mind, I fear) has gotten rusty but I know that writing is an old, comforting friend to me. May we get to know each other well again.