The closer we got to the end of 2018, the more I felt that nagging desire to write some kind of “end of year blog post”. And yet every time I sat down to do it, I just… couldn’t. This past year was big. It was hugely transition in many ways, from gliding into my thirties, hitting many large positive and negative life milestones, and altogether having a sense that I’ve been doing the same things far too long and needing to take on new things.

While on the surface I’ve very much adjusted to living a life without YouTube in it, there’s still a huge part of me that is recovering from that lifestyle, and still grasping to find ways to fully fill the holes it left. It’s easy to keep doing things because you’ve done them for a long time. It’s brave to stop doing things when you realize they aren’t adding value to your life anymore. It’s scary and hard to figure out what to replace them with.

But every day is a new opportunity to reinvent yourself, and there’s no deadline. 2018 threw me some serious curveballs, but I like the direction my life has taken, and I want to keep exploring what else there is out there for me. So I’m going to spend some time looking back on this past year, and then think a little bit about my plans for 2019. As always, I thank you for joining me for any of it,

2018. We didn’t always get along, but boy were you an important year: 

• Got married to my best friend on May 4th. 
• Completed a lifelong goal of visiting Japan, on our honeymoon. 
• Learned to snorkel in Hawaii!
• Came home from my honeymoon to find out things were not going well at work. 
• Became the casualty of a company-wide reorg and lost the job I loved. 
• Got laid off for the first time ever. 
• Spent many months job searching and interviewing for so many jobs that I genuinely lost count (probably at least twenty).
• Went on many amazing trips like Disneyland, NYC, and San Francisco with friends, and a solo Chicago trip for work. 
• Took my spontaneous road trip to North Dakota while being unemployed and got to spend some quality time with relatives. 
• Finally started my book inspired by North Dakota, which became my 13th NaNoWriMo win.
• Also spent most of the year working on another book project that’s pretty close to what I’d call a “first draft”. This will be my first non-NaNoWriMo draft of a book.
• Taught myself all sorts of random new skills while being unemployed since I can’t sit still, like: sewing a quilt, embroidery, building miniature things and some minimal baking. 
• Finally got a new job at Microsoft, and started my exciting new role with the Mixer team as a Partner Account Manager in November. 
• Read 30 books, which is actually quite low for me, but a number I felt good about for wedding year. 
• Realized that with my new job and new marriage and fun hobbies and great friends I am genuinely just so happy, and cannot wait to see what this next year will bring. 

The start of the year was a whirlwind. I loved our wedding, but I hated what planning it did to me. I’m already prone to anxiety and stress, but the months leading up to the wedding were on another level. Frankly, I’m not sure I would do it all over again if I had to. But the wedding day itself… was truly magical. Seeing the joy on the faces of our friends and family really did help to make up for it, and people are still telling me it was the coolest wedding they’ve ever been to… so I suppose all the work was worth it. I’ve already blogged extensively about this, but it’s obviously the biggest pinnacle of 2018 and I am loving married life so, so much. 

I’m not so interested in new year’s resolutions, because I’m already big on habit tracking and basically set myself resolutions all the time… but here are the high level things I want to focus on next year. My values, if you will. 

1. Self-care, and setting myself up for success. By this mean I learning more about myself in terms of what food my body likes, how much water it wants, and getting in better shape, as well as being more mindful and intentional about how I spend my time. 

2. Investing time into the projects that mean a lot to me. Writing. Crafting. Cooking. Mostly writing. I’ve got a project I’m currently working on that I’d like to have in your hands by the end of the year, but we’ll see. I guess my intention for this year is to work harder on writing than ever before, and start to share it, in some form.

3. Travel! This one is a little tough because losing my job and starting over made me zero out on vacation days, but as I slowly start to accrue them again, Joe and I want to do so much traveling. We’re starting to think about larger life steps, so before we dive head-first into that stuff, we want to make sure we’re doing all the things that are so much easier with kids, a house payment, etc.

That’s it! I am in a really good head space going into 2019, I’m happy, I have a wonderful support group in terms of friends and family, my job is new and exciting and challenging, and I am deeply passionate about so many projects I’m working on. The biggest challenge, honestly, is focusing in on a couple things so I can actually do them justice. That’s always been the toughest thing for me because I always want to do EVERYTHING.

So 2019 will hopefully be the year that I do SOME things, and do them well.

Thanks for all your kind words, tweets, emails, instagram comments, etc. You have no idea how much it means to me to hear from you, especially when I’m not “creating content” regularly. I promise I am making things… it’s just on projects that take much longer, and stay much closer to the chest in the mean time.

Happy New Year! This will be a year of positive, intentional change, and I’m already loving it.