It all started when Troy and Gabriella stood on stage together as the first notes of “The Start of Something New” and the crazy people at the kid’s party yelled and mingled in the background. The room, filled with streamers and sliver glitter, seemed to beam with endorphins as everyone counted down to the next year. People kissed, but of course the two beautiful specimen with voices like butter, did not. Instead, they just gaze at each other and you know this moment “something has changed, never felt this way, I know it’s for real, blaaaah blaaaahh”.

Watching this as a young impressionable baby, I thought to myself: this will be me every New Year’s because New Year’s is flippin’ amazing. The hype of New Year's Eve fed into my skewed reality through middle school, high school, abroad, and now, college. This mind set has followed me up until this past New Year’s Eve night when I looked around at the dark, alcohol-wafting night club I was in, and let go of my dream to find my #14 on the basketball court but #1 in my heart.

Young adults seem to have the expectation that by ending the year with a bang, the next year will be just as rad as the last. You pick out sparkly dresses that if worn on any other occasion would blind you in the sun, gather a group of the besties, do something that you probably do any other weekend but this time it’s going to be EPIC, spend way too much money on a taxi drive, go to bed at a ridiculous hour because the pretty, concrete floor of your friend's apartment freezes you to the core. The next morning you wake up grumpy and think about how much of a disappointment last night’s outing was.

I remember as a kid going to one of my parents’ friends’ house, drinking sparkling grape juice that tasted 10,000 times better than the real champagne, kissing my mom and dad at midnight, making a bullet list of great things that happened that year and going to bed. At the time this seemed lame and I could not wait for the night of my dreams filled with new boys who just wanted to gaze into my eyes and hugs from my gal pals as we drove around a lit-up city in the early hours.

Maybe not all of my New Year’s Eves in my young adult life have left my hair smelling of second-hand smoke from the jam-packed club, but most have left me feeling sad as I write the new number on the date line; sad because I let myself hype up a night that should be a time of reflecting and appreciating whereas I spent the trying to force epic things to happen. My New Year’s resolution is to spend the last day of 2017 with the people I love as I appreciate the great year that I will leave behind as I enter new adventures.