At some point in late October,deep in the midst of post-viralness when the most active thing I could do was think, I realised the strangeness of months and years: how could a group of days be so easily categorised as September or This Week or 2009, and how could I spend so much time blaming that month or that year for everything going wrong, when the days, the years, really have no more in common than the sunrise and sunset? It was no more October’s fault that I had been constantly ill than it was the people next door’s, and I wasn’t crying at their front door each night, ruing the day they moved in. So I’m finding myself trying really hard not to blame 2009 for the catalogue of general lousiness that has been 2009, trying hard not to pin my hopes on waking up on January 1st 2010 we a sense of focus and clarity and boundless energy. But if I were to look at 2009 as a whole, to lump the days together into one neat bundle: wow, 2009. You sucked.

The biggest measurable challenge? Easily my dissertation, complete with overambitious, overcritical, underqualified, underhelpful supervisor. No, really, did I ever tell you that story about how she only sent me the first draft feedback at 7pm the night before the dissertation was due in? And how that feedback included a huge list of things she wanted in it that she’d never mentioned before? I cannot let go of the whole thing. Spending six months having to answer to the every whim of a slightly crazy person will do that to you.

The biggest challenge to my faith in the world? Either my purse being stolen (I know. It sounds so… petty.) or the random stranger Waitrose incident. Taken alone – even taken together – these seem like such relatively minor incidents, and you know, I am fine with replacing bank cards and watching bruises subside: I’m both alive and I’m grateful not to be in the headspace that makes attacking people in supermarkets seem like a good idea. But I’m increasingly realising that both incidents eroded something in me: I’m leaving 2009 with much less trust, and most less conviction of the goodness, of the world around me. I’m aware of how overdramatic that sounds, but that person who reaches around me to pick up a loaf of bread? I don’t think I can trust them anymore.

The biggest me-challenge? Trying to find out who to be when uni ended. I left university knowing two things: 1) I didn’t want to be a linguist 2) I didn’t want to jump onto the graduate career treadmill. It turns out that rules out very little and there is still so much hanging in space, undecided. I’m lucky enough to have a marketable enough skill to pay the rent while I work as a (sometimes very) part time freelance web designer, and for someone with no design background whatsoever there have been victories – I somehow managed to brand an awards ceremony, got two very conservative organisations to adopt social media policies, have yet to be arrested for the shoddy filling in of a tax return, and I’m currently disproportionately excited about being on some Creative Review Twitter lists as an actual designer. [That's just crazy. There are real designers on those lists!] But I don’t know if this is really the direction I want to take, don’t know if this is really what I Want To Do and whether I shouldn’t just go and do what my family suggest and get a “proper job”.

But the biggest challenge of 2009, the one I will look back on and go I can’t believe I did that? Just keeping one foot in front of the other and keeping going. It has been so ridiculously hard at times, but I’m starting to regroup and starting to look forward. You have been a lousy arbitrary collection of unconnected days, 2009, but I’m looking forward to the next lot.

[Note: I wrote this, which is less of an entry and more of a collection of random thoughts, as part of the Best of 2009 Challenge. I'm struggling to find any "bests" this year. I'm just going to go ahead and assume that the next decade can't get worse than the last one.]