Hi everyone!

Happy New Year's! I'm currently writing this blog post on New Year's Eve, but I'm going to schedule this post for tomorrow. I want this blog post to start off the New Year.

In this blog post, I want to reflect on 2015 and also plan for 2016. I didn't do this last year, so I wanted to do it this year.

2015 has been a pretty good year for me. I do think this year was a better year for me than 2014, which was not such a good year.

From the beginning of this year to the end, I feel like such a different person! Thinking back to the beginning of this year, it seems like so much time has gone by. At the beginning of the year, I wasn't feeling or performing my best. For a couple of months at the beginning of 2015, I was in this weird slump. My relationships with the people around me were not great, and my dad was in the hospital for a couple of weeks getting his gallbladder removed. I was constantly feeling unhappy and every day was just.. blah. I feel like the main reason for my slump was that I felt really lonely at the time. My closest (and really only) friend and I were growing distant, and I really depended on others for my happiness. I mentioned this in one of my previous blog posts from February of 2015. However, things started to change for me, and I didn't even notice these changes until a couple months ago. I think because of this I was forced to depend on myself and become my own best friend. I was so reliant on others for my happiness, but gradually, without even noticing, I started to develop a friendship with myself. We should all be our own best friends because, at the end of the day, we only have ourselves to depend on. I can't tell you exactly what I did to finally be able to depend on myself for happiness, but one thing I can say is to spend a lot of time by yourself reflecting. Treat yourself like you would your best friend. Hang out with yourself. Also, distancing myself from my cell phone has helped a lot. Sometimes I still feel extremely alone. In fact, I'm feeling a bit lonely right now, but, like all things, it will pass.

Another couple of things I wanted to talk about in this blog post are my travels this year. This year my sister graduated from graduate school so my family and I flew out to Philadelphia for her graduation, as some of you may have seen from my blog post about Philadelphia. I feel so proud of my sister, and I'm so thankful to have her as my sister. This year she spent a lot of time at home, and I really appreciate being able to spend time with her because I see her so rarely. I really trust my sister and believe she is someone that I can always confide to.

(I took a (long) break in between writing this blog post and now its the New Year! I was meaning to finish this yesterday but didn't get to it)

I also traveled to Europe this year with my family, which was the best trip I had ever been on. The countries in Europe that we visited were so breathtakingly beautiful, and more than anything, I love spending time with my family. On this trip I felt like we really bonded, as we were forced in a car for many hours, traveling from place to place. I'm so thankful I was able to go on this trip, but truly, I would be happy traveling to anywhere with my family. I definitely want to go back to Germany, Austria, and Czech Republic someday and relive the memories I had there.

Finally, a lot of my year has been dedicated to studying for the SAT. It may seem like a silly thing to include in my reflection of the past year, but the SAT was and still is a major "project"(and a huge source of stress!) I'm still working on. There are a lot of different and new people from different areas that I've met through my prep class. There are actually two students (both of whom went to my elementary school I believe) who are from Paris, which is really interesting to me. I definitely have wished to attend school in Paris before!

As for 2016...

One of my main resolutions is to live simply. I'm going to declutter my room and my life. I often get caught up with material items, and while I don't think owning material items is a bad thing, being obsessed with things is unhealthy. I'm still going to buy things, but I am going to declutter and rid my room of anything that I don't use or has no sentimental meaning to me. I also want to start eating more simply and cleanly.

Two of my resolutions are academic. I want to maintain good grades both this second semester of this school year and first semester of the next school year.I also want to reach my goal for the SAT. My "dream score" would be 2300+, but I won't be too disappointed if I fall a bit short.

Another one of my goals is to learn how to drive! I live in a city where, in order to get places, one needs to drive. I won't be able to reach this goal until the end of 2016, but I'm really excited.

Finally, this year I want to be completely dependent on myself only. I mentioned before in this blog post how I struggled with finding happiness from myself and relied on others for happiness. I feel once I'm able to completely rely on myself, I will be so much happier and won't take things personally. I believe in life, we shouldn't take anything personally, whether that be criticism or flattery. I am striving to achieve that and hopefully by the end of this year, I will be much more stable and happy. I've already improved so much from before, but I still have room for more improvement.

I highly recommend doing an introspection like I just did. Thank you all so much for reading, and I hope all of you have an amazing 2016.