To my girlfriends,
It’s 2014 now. Most of us had a hard year. We’ve had a tough couple years, to be honest. It’s not easy growing up, moving away, losing loved ones. Some of you got married. Some of you got your hearts broken, or broke someone else’s. More than one of us cried her eyes out all night long.
We tell ourselves the New Year will be better. We even capitalize it to drive home its importance. We say that 2014 will be the year we stop eating an entire bag of Cheetos when we’re drunk, the year we take a tropical vacation, save money, tone up our arms. We say that in the New Year, we’ll advance in our careers. We’ll meet the man of our dreams. We’ll wake up one day and know exactly what we want. The New Year will be better, we say. We repeat it to ourselves like a mantra. It’s a fresh start. It’s a chance to leave our old self, all tired out from the events of a year, behind in the snow.
The New Year will be better. It will be better in lots of ways. There are new people to meet, new places to go, new words to read. We’re going to experience all sorts of new things: new jobs, new bodies, new hair colors, new friends. These are good things. We are going to grow. We will learn more and more about ourselves, where we came from, who we’re meant to be. And we will have each other to lean on, to bounce ideas off of, to argue with and to call when the nights get really long and cold.
We confer with one another, saying 2013 was the worst year yet. Maybe it was. But it wasn’t all bad.
No matter how bad a year can get (and they can get terrible), there are still more than a few perfect moments that you’ll remember even when 2013 is long past. Even if it was bad, I still had a group of girls laughing and drinking champagne on my living room floor, painting their nails and watching the bride shows on TLC. I had girls on a dance floor, in the passenger seat of my car, around the table at our favorite bars. We were together, and that’s what mattered. We’ll eventually forget about the pitfalls of 2013 and only think about the good.
I thank my lucky stars for my girlfriends this past year. My best friend and roommate moved to Chicago and we stood out in the snow crying into each other’s hair, but we still talk and Snapchat every day. I made sisters out of coworkers, reconnected with the girls who’ve been by my side since first grade. I listened to their problems and they listened to mine, no matter how small. I had girls to sing karaoke with, to drink birthday drinks with, to lay in the sun with, to spend countless hours texting back and forth with.
I’d always considered myself a guy’s girl, but that’s not true. I couldn’t have made it through the past two years without my girlfriends.
This New Year will be better, I promise. It won’t be everything we wish, but we’re not stupid. It will knock us down and make us cry, but it will keep us smiling too. We’ll fuck up and make dumb decisions but we’ll learn from them. We’ll take a big leap of faith and make changes in our lives. We will be happy!
We will!
The New Year will be better. We’ll be in each other’s weddings, we will occasionally stay out late dancing even though we’re getting older and a 2 AM bar close feels impossible. We’ll laugh til we cry, we’ll trade secrets, have sleepovers or at least have breakfast. We’ll get our hearts stomped on again- there’s no way around that. We’ll grow another year older, another year smarter. We’ll meet more girls to add to the circle.
The New Year will not be perfect, but we’ll have each other. 
