New Years is a complicated day for me. It’s a holiday and a day to spend remembering spending time with friends the night before. It marks the close of the last year (a difficult one, for me, so I’m glad to see it go). It’s my sister’s birthday.

It also marks a day when people look forward to a new year with hope for things to come. Resolutions set, positive changes planned, somehow this arbitrary day marks a point in time when people can start over in ways large and small. And here’s where the other kind of anniversary comes in for me.

Three years ago today, I woke up feeling pretty under the weather and spent the day in bed nursing flu-ish aches and a headache and general malaise. A week later I remember telling a friend I was still so tired I was having to really talk myself into lifting my hands as far as the keyboard. Soon after that I went to the doctor for something other than a broken bone or a check-up for only the second time in my life.

Since then I’ve taken medical leave once, worked reduced hours for one summer, had my mom travel several hundred miles every couple of months to clean my house and stock my freezer,  pulled back from interesting projects at work, accepted generous help with everything from meals to laundry from good friends, and generally completely lost touch with the person I used to be.

So New Year’s Day is a hard one for me, full of anger and sadness that this thing, whatever it is, has swallowed yet another year — full of fear for the upcoming years.

Periodically, there’s reason to hope that this won’t last forever. When I pull myself out of the gloom induced by yet another anniversary, I’ll get back to the business of remembering that future hopeful periods may actually blossom into real health, and that a few past hopeful periods have resulted in improvement even when they didn’t cure me. I can read again, as long as it’s light reading, and I can do many interesting things at work again. I also know now, for sure and certain, that I have friends and family who care about me.

And tomorrow will be January 2nd, 2011, which will be a far less complicated day.