Looking back...

It has been a long, long year.  It started--and ended--with death, with a fuck-ton of discomfort along the way.

But.

It's over.

Thanks be unto God, it's over.

I've learned that it wasn't just my thyroid gland messing me up (though that was the root of a good part of the problem).  I've learned that there's no real treatment for me, that I'll never "get over" my physiological problems.  However, I know what they are, now, and I have a better idea of how to manage them then my doctor does, mostly because I have a lot more time to research the issue, the underlying causes, and how to deal with them to prevent them from getting worse.  If I can get the right combo of enough rest when I need it, the right diet, meds dosage, and herbals going together, I might be able to get to 80% of normal function, rather than the 40% I've been living with. 

I've found that I didn't have as good of an idea for changing my composition class as I thought I did.  I'm not entirely certain if it's just because it takes more energy, physical and mental, than I have access to, if it's student preparedness (more on that later), or if it just doesn't work, but it didn't.  Not in the spring semester (when I was off my thryoid meds through February), and not in the fall semester (when I was trying to finish recovering from surgery, and trying to get my blood thyroid levels set where they need to be to feel better when that wasn't the problem at all).  I'll be going back to what I had been doing: 3-4 short papers, and 1-2 slightly longer, researched papers.

I've found that I need to talk about writing conventions--capitalization, paragraph indentation, putting their damn names on the papers--that they should have already learned before they never learned punctuation, how to not do either sentence fragments or run-on sentences, picking the right homophone, or even the major parts of speech (no, they typically can't tell a noun from a verb, thanks).

I've found that Hillary Clinton is hated badly enough by enough people that she can't win an election rigged in her favor by both parties.  And that an orange lizard wearing a Tribble as a toupee is more electable than an honest-to-God decent man who comes across on TV like he might be on the very high function end of the Autism spectrum. 

I've learned that my vote doesn't matter, except in local issues...and then, only sometimes. 

2016 was actually worse than 2015.  I'm praying that 2017 doesn't prove more of the same.