I never did get around to writing a Year In Review last year.
I still collected all the data, still had things to say… just never managed to sit down and do it. For various reasons.
As I sat down to recap 2023, I felt (as I’d known I would) that I couldn’t summarize 2023 without at least acknowledging 2022. So, in lieu of a review, here are some screenshots from my 2022 roundup on Exist.io, where I aggregate all the things.
If 2020 was the Year of the Pandemic, then 2021 seemed like the year of Pandemic Fatigue. We spent 2021 trying to establish a New Normal — and sometimes succeeding, until the next COVID variant would strike.
We’ve all spent the past year living through a global pandemic that’s destined to be at least a footnote in the history books. It’s upended everyone’s sense of normalcy, changed social interactions, wreaked havoc on some sectors of the economy, and cost many their jobs or their lives.
My family has been lucky: our jobs are stable, we’re all healthy, and COVID-19 mainly just means an upheaval to our routines. I’ve been working from home, Connor finished out second grade from home and started third grade with a hybrid of remote and in-person learning, and Aaron spent most of the year working longer hours and adjusting to having us at home during the week.
Even though 2020 was a Very Different Year Indeed, I still kept track of most of the things I usually do, and I certainly couldn’t leave this bizarre year undocumented.
Continue readingI’m not sure what it was about 2019 that got me away from writing and photography, but I’m finding that I failed to document a lot of the highlights of the year as they happened. On one hand, I suppose that means I was living life instead of recording it. On the other hand, it means that a lot of notable details got shuffled around under other stuff in my brain.
So, the year in summary (aka the tl;dr version): I did a lot of sewing. A LOT. My evenings were mostly taken up by sewing and by taking Connor to karate class twice a week. My evenings got even more full once I joined the adult class at the karate school (the teens and adults learn Krav Maga rather than American Freestyle Karate).
The other major memorable thing about 2019 was my ADHD diagnosis. Getting diagnosed and starting medication was A Big Deal for me, and will likely be something I look back on as a major turning point in my mental health.
One of these years, I’ll get my annual Year In Review polished up and ready to publish before the last week of January. This is not that year.
This year, I had initially planned a slight departure from my normal, categorical method of cataloging the past year and wanted to try a My Life In Weeks style retrospective. Alas, after I typed in everything I’d cataloged weekly in my bullet journal, I discovered that it was long and unengaging — even for me.
So, I’ll include the weekly breakdown at the end of this post, replete with hyperlinks, but I’ll summarize as per usual.
Speaking of summaries… this year was the year I got medicated for my depression and started sewing (and no, I don’t think one was necessarily due to the other). Also, this was the year we went on our first family vacation (which, at the time of this writing, is only partially finally documented online via photos, but not reviews).
