Day 22 - How have you changed in the past two years?

I've changed quite a lot, actually. 2009 is what I call the Year From Hell. It started with the end of a four year relationship that I thought was going to become a marriage. At the same time, I was realizing that Georgetown was a horrible place and that I did not want to keep going to school there, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. So 2009 began as a giant existential crisis. Thankfully I had a great therapist. In 2009, I think I was still trying really hard to be an adult, but wasn't sure exactly what that entailed or what I looked like as a truly functional adult. I had spent all of college in one relationship (that I now realize was dysfunctional for at least half of that time) and I had never breached much beyond that. By suddenly being thrust into singledom and forced to make the difficult choice of leaving the Georgetown graduate program, I finally had to get accustomed to making hard decisions and standing by them, even if they were the wrong decisions (for the record, this time they weren't).
After moving back to Detroit, I got a full time job, which is how I spent the rest of 2009, all of 2010, and up until this moment. I got to pay off all of my student loans, which was awesome, but more importantly I spent some time out of school. Just working gave me time to breathe and think about what I really wanted to do. In the fall of 2010 I came to the conclusion that I did want an advanced degree, that I did want to stay in science, and that the right program for me was Iowa State's Interdepartmental Microbiology(IM) PhD program. So I applied. Of course, this spring I was accepted and this summer I'm moving back to Ames to start life as a graduate student again. However, this time I'm going to be a slightly different graduate student. I'm older, I've spent more time in a lab, I'm more certain that this is in fact what I want to do, and in general I'm more prepared to navigate the insanity that is academia. I'm also still single, and planning to stay that way for the meantime, because if nothing else it means that there's one less focal point for drama that will distract me from the much more important goal of passing all my classes. My anxiety disorder and depression are under control now, instead of being active and untreated, and I'm more prepared to recognize when I need help if those things start to trouble me again. Overall, I'm on much sounder footing than I was two years ago.
So to sum up, now I really am a functional adult, instead of someone masquerading as one.