There's one more day left in 2016. "We've got to remember to take the joy sign down," said my mother, a couple of days ago. She was talking about one of her Christmas decorations, the words "J-O-Y" spelled out in lighted red letters, hanging in our foyer window. As if it's only appropriate to sanction off joy to this time of year. Of course, that's not what she meant, but I'm certain that if you've been anywhere near the social media vortex lately, you've seen the headlines.

"2016 is the worst yet," "2016, just die already," "I'm done with you and your cruel games." The titles read like a cringeworthy middle school breakup note posted on Facebook. Each one fuels the fire more. Memes get created, crappy Buzzfeed caption videos get shared by multiple people. Dark forces get lambasted. ("why did you take Carrie away from us?")

Truly, if we look back on it, it was a bad year for a lot of people. Here in the United States, you could barely tune out the white noise surrounding the presidential election, which seemed to drag on for years rather than months, and is still dragging on. The list of celebrities lost has been long and varied, from Prince to Muhammad Ali and his close friend, photographer Howard Bingham. We could reminisce on these things, and it seems like that's what we've chosen to do.

Around me, friends have felt the struggle in their personal lives as well. My friends from college, now in the 22 to 25 year range, had the same problems I did finding work. It probably didn't help that most of us went for liberal arts degrees, but honestly it seems as though everyone who's young right now is struggling. For about 11 months of this year, I was deathly unhappy in a job I took because I felt it was the right thing to do, and because I looked past what my internal rhythm was telling me.

But, saying all of this, I wouldn't write the year off as all bad. I've seen this sort of thing happen before, after all.

I can start by saying that I was an avid Tumblr user throughout college. The site was a great time-filler, the kind of thing I could hop on and spend mindless hours scrolling through. To me, it felt more personalized than Facebook, because I could express through I was largely through visual materials. Fine art architectural photography, vintage Italian cars, old photographs from the National Geographic archives, and captioned screencaps from America's Next Top Model all resonated somehow. And people would open up on their own, for better or worse.

But the point lies in the statement here. "(insert year) is the worst ever" was a post I saw dozens of time on Tumblr. For 2013, 2014, 2015, until I stopped using the site regularly. It reminded me of when I would wallow in failed relationships blaming myself, even though I knew deep down that the other person had way more problems than I did. Of course it's the worst, because I can scrape up about 20 examples of bad things that've happened, ignoring the fact that bad things happen on a daily, hourly, minute-to-minute basis. It's just human nature.

So rather than continue to harp on how terrible 2016 has been, I'd encourage the masses to think instead about some of their own personal triumphs. Certainly it's been a tough year, but think of what you've learned, seen, accomplished. It's almost impossible not to have grown through these experiences. Those intense emotions we've all felt are good, they remind us that we're alive and that no matter what's going on or what we're going through, that it's possible to come back. At the very least, we have to retain that hope and approach each day, not just the year, better than we did the last.