For most of us, 2016 has been... a year. This year has been one of the craziest, saddest, happiest, and loneliest, years of my life but it has also been a game changer. I've seen so many posts on social media saying "Thank God 2016 is almost over" and "If you want to make my year any worse you have (however many days) to do it." This year was rough on all of us, but when the clock hits midnight on January 1st, you will still be you and I'll still be me.

The thing with a new year is that it gives you the chance to improve and become closer to the person you want to be. You can't start over, but you can use what you've learned in the past year to try and change whatever it is in your life that you don't like. You take your successes and build on them. You take your failures and learn from them. And with that being said, here are a few things I learned in 2016:

1. You Have to Let Go

I've mentioned this previously, but I let go of many people this year. Not entirely because they were "bad" people, but simply because we didn't fit in each others' lives anymore. Letting go is hard when you've spent almost ten years with someone. It's even harder when you have to let them go but still see them everyday. But the most important part of this letting go lesson was that holding on to the past only holds you back from what could be. You can't change another person because people only change if they want to. So while you may have been good for each other earlier, sometimes you have to realize that you've become two different people who no longer belong together and just follow your separate paths.

2. Dependency and Weakness are not Synonymous

For the past couple of years, I've started to realize that I have a problem with the concept of dependency. I hate the idea of someone stopping whatever they're doing or taking time out of their day to help me with something because it makes me feel incompetent. I know it shouldn't, but it does. 2016 was a year where I really depended on a few key people in my life to get me through each day and even though I felt weak asking them what to do during hard situations, I know that if it weren't for those few people who were by my side I wouldn't be where I am now. (If you were one of those people and you're reading this, know I love you very much and am so thankful for you.) No one gets through this life alone. We all need help from other people in some kind of way.

In addition to learning that accepting help from others isn't bad, 2016 has also taught me that I need to be way more dependent on God. While He isn't the one who creates problems in our lives, He is the Creator of every good and beautiful thing in this life. John 14:27 says "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let your hearts not be troubled, neither let them be afraid." That doesn't mean I won't stop stressing and overanalyzing every single detail; I'm human and can't help it. But it is a great reminder that while I can't solve all of my problems, my Creator says he has my back and I can depend on Him to get me through any circumstance.

3. You ARE Enough

I've struggled a lot with this one. I'm an over analytical perfectionist. If I fail at something, I'm going to beat myself up over it. I'm going to think of everything I could have done better. I'm going to wonder why I can't be like the person who can talk to anyone with ease, the person who makes A's on every assignment, the person who is self assured and confident. I could go on forever. A lot of the time I don't feel like I'm "good enough", but I've come to the conclusion that there is no concrete idea of what "good enough" is. We were all made with our different quirks, our different traits, our different opinions, and our different abilities. You are you. You can't compare every aspect of your life to someone else's life because there will never be two identical lives. It's literally comparing apples and oranges.

4. Happiness is Everything

I've written about depression and how much it sucks before. Although you can't really control a chemical imbalance in your brain, you can still try to choose happiness everyday. It's incredibly hard to do when it seems like all the odds are against you, but you can try to see even the smallest of something good in everything as a reminder. You can surround yourself with people that make you laugh, you can stop watching the news, you can volunteer. Whatever you do, make sure you're happy doing it. I value happiness so much more than I did a year ago. My only goal for 2017 is to try and choose happiness.

Again, when the clock hits midnight on January 1st 2017, you will still be you and I will still be me. Changing the six to a seven on the calendar doesn't magically make everything better. A new year doesn't determine what happens next, but you do. The only entity that brings change is you.