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2024 in Review

Posted in Alive, Books, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, Quiet, Reading Challenges, Resolutions, Writing, tagged , , on December 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[Prime reviewing/contemplating/reflecting space – a blanket and a cup of tea in front of twinkly lights]

How many times can I say this year has been a doozy without it becoming redundant? Welp, here’s one more time.

This year was a doozy.

I’ve tried reflecting and looking back for the past week, as is my custom. Most years – but particularly this year – I resonate with Kate Bowler’s feelings on reflection. I get stuck on certain things and forget so many others, even with the aid of my journal and planner (which in many ways is even more telling than my journal). The older I get, the more I realize that maybe the end of a year is too soon to reflect on it. I am usually still too close to it to ponder it with any real clarity.

But what I can do is look at the goals I set and see how I fared in measurable ways. So let’s dive in.

2024 Theme – Quiet

In many ways this year was very loud. But that especially drove home my need for carving out quiet time, and I had a small amount of success with that.

The intentional pursuit of quiet helped me to find space to heal both mentally and physically.

It also revealed how much work I still have to do in those areas. I didn’t always succeed at finding space, and my medical challenges this year made sure that it was really obvious when I didn’t. Getting quiet time is a lot of work, but it’s necessary and worth it.

Even when I’m “quiet,” I’m still anxious. It takes a lot of time I don’t always have to calm my brain enough to get the needed benefit from quiet moments.

Another challenge is that I don’t really have physical places to find quiet. My upstairs neighbors are loud and active, so even when I’m quiet, my environment still isn’t. And to go anywhere else is to inevitably have to socialize or be perceived or get distracted. Going forward, I need to find a way to really be at rest. I would prefer it to be an actual physical space, but earplugs have been a little helpful in the meantime.

I’m not quite done with quiet, nor do I think I’ll ever be. I have goals for the upcoming year that will help me continue to explore it.

Read 180 Books

I’m so close. I have read 175 so far. It’s possible to reach 180 by midnight tomorrow, but I don’t see myself forcing it just to meet my goal. I am enjoying looking at my Storygraph charts, and I may share one or two tomorrow when I talk about reading goals for 2025.

Even if I don’t finish any more books this year, aiming for this lofty goal still helped me read 20 more books than last year. I consider that a success!

Creative Education

All things creative pretty much tanked for me this year. I did have a few performances with beloved friends, and I have been able to be more active in choir this fall. But with the exception of a few brief inspired frenzies, my writing has been at a standstill.

I am not any further on The Artist’s Way than I was last year at this time, and I haven’t really cared about creative education at all. Looking back, I can admit this goal was a little unreasonable.

What has changed is that I would have felt really dejected about this pause in the past. But I don’t feel that way today. I am satisfied with how I’ve spent my time this year, even if that meant I didn’t heavily pursue a lot of the things I love. My attention was simply needed elsewhere, and I honored that. I am proud of myself for doing so.

Health Goals

I’m alive! I did it!

I survived cancer and cancer treatments, both of which tried to take me out.

As part of that survival, I also built some stronger, healthier skills that I hope to take into the new year. Also, I’ve learned to call them skills instead of habits, because apparently habit isn’t a thing my brain does. This was one of the helpful revelations that came out of therapy this year. For me, there’s no doing things without thinking about it. Even if I do something every day for a year, the moment I don’t remind myself (that is, actually set reminders or leave lists in a place I know I’ll see them), I drop it like I’ve never even heard about it. Everything has to be a conscious choice every time.

Which sounds exhausting (and it can be). But it’s also liberating. It frees me from trying to make progress the way other people do. Instead, I can focus on my goals in a way that actually works for me.

And it’s working beautifully so far.

So that’s the year. That’s 2024. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with it.

I hope you are satisfied with your year, too. Feel free to brag on yourself a little in the comments.

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Friday Five – Biggest Lesson

Posted in Alive, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health on December 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Today is officially the end of the semester. All the students are moving out (well, all who are not staying for winter housing, which is a whole thing). I’m working tomorrow just to supplement the office/make sure my people are sane and fed. 

The prompt for Susannah Conway’s December Reflections challenge today is “Biggest lesson in 2024.” Always the overachiever, I’m listing five things I’ve learned this year. Some even have links. Enjoy!

  • Taking care of myself is not selfish. Or, even when it is, it’s the good kind of selfish – the kind that helps me be a whole person who isn’t constantly stressed out and mad at everything I’m doing for everyone else instead of taking care of my own needs and/or sanity. This lesson can be for you, too. Take care of yourself. Decadently, even. If you don’t know where to start, here are some ideas on romanticizing your life, some of which may seem extravagant (gentle pushback on that – is it actually extravagant, or are you a people pleaser?) but some of which are also just “remember to drink water.”
  • An important subset of taking care of myself – keep up with your health screenings. It literally saved my life this year. Here are some basics but you may need others depending on your personal health risks. That’s a good question to ask during your annual physical.
  • I can’t care enough for everyone. Still working on this lesson, particularly at work. My toxic trait is that if I feel like someone is not invested or caring enough about something, I try to care on their behalf. Turns out, caring does not work like that. It just makes me tired and stressed, and I do not need that in my life. “Find out whose business you’re in,” and get out of it.
  • Ask for help when I need it, and expect that it will come. My people showed up this year in multiple big ways, and I’m so grateful. I was afraid to ask for help, particularly financial assistance. I could have saved myself so much worry just by having more realistic expectations of my friends and family. This has turned out to be my greatest joy of the year.
  • It’s OK to feel multiple things at a time. I can be grateful and angry and resentful and hopeful and grieving and curious and awestruck at the exact same moment. This has pretty much been my mood since October, and I don’t see it going anywhere any time soon. Side note: people do not know how to handle this. Side-of-the-side-note: people can learn how to handle this, or they can go away.

What has been your biggest lesson(s) this year?

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Friday Five – It’s Friday

Posted in Alive, Denton, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Lament, Mental Health, Revolution, tagged , , on November 8, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It’s Friday, everyone. We made it. 

I am anxious about my health, my job, my friends (especially those of us whom the prevailing culture seems to want to annihilate), my country, and the world in general. I am not ok.

This week has been a lot, and it’s Friday.

It’s Friday, and I love you, and here are some things I want you to remember to do.

I hope your weekend is restful, and I hope you get to spend it with people who have your best interests at heart.

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Day 30 – Readathons Gone Awry

Posted in 31 Days, Books, Getting It Together, Health, Home, Joy, Quiet, Seasons, tagged , , , , on October 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”

“I was delighted to sit in the corner with my food and a book and speak to no one.”

Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

This past weekend, I participated (loosely) in Dewey’s 24-hour Readathon. The official time was 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday (EST). But I (and various others in the Discord and in the Facebook group) rarely actually stick to the time of the event. My goal, for example, was to simply read a collective 24 hours. I think the Dewey’s team is on to us – instead of hourly challenges, they just listed a handful of challenges to complete “at any time during the readathon.”

I completed no challenges.

I didn’t read a full 24 hours.

I barely remembered to post the picture of the stack I was choosing from (see above) on the group’s social media pages.

I carried on with plans to attend my favorite yearly Halloween party and Spiderdead, brazenly cutting into the hours I would usually set aside on readathon weekends to read.

I finished three books, but only one of them is actually in this stack (Fang Fiction – pretty cute!).

What I got out of the readathon was still pretty magical.

I got to tuck into stories about found families and books and several other favorite themes. I ate good, simple food, so I rested better (weird how that happens) and thus felt more refreshed when the weekend was over (despite it being a “busy” one). I embraced my full homebody self without the usual twinge of guilt about what a person who lives alone should want to do on the weekend.

These twinges are getting smaller and less frequent as I age. One reason for this is that I’m accepting who I am more and becoming less apologetic about it with each passing month. Another reason is that I get so much joy and restoration out of my alone time that there is little to no room left for feeling bad about it.

At any rate, I had a great weekend, and I look forward to many more like it as the season changes.

Reading more makes me want to write more. I’m reflecting on my reading this year.

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Day 11 – Friday (Not) Five – My Inner Hobbit

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Books, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, Quiet, Work, tagged , , on October 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I subscribe to quite a few blogs/newsletters, and that’s where a lot of my daytime reading goes. Here are my musings on three that stuck out to me this week. There were a couple others from Substack, but just as it was getting interesting, the prompt to become a paid subscriber popped up, so I’ll spare you those. I may have more to say about that later (not all bad…just…more).

  • Loving Your Inner Hobbit – Ask Polly (aka Heather Havrilesky). “The truth is, I think that most of us — even those of us who outwardly appear lazy or disorganized or prone to underachieving — hold ourselves to uncomfortably high standards. We’re plagued by guilt without consciously realizing it. We’re ashamed of our regular human urges. We feel like we’re letting ourselves down constantly, just by being human.” I have been feeling this a lot recently. I mean, I have overachiever tendencies all the time, but I’ve trained them to stay mostly dormant. Not right now, though. I have a lot of anxiety – mostly about work, but also about other things in my life that I feel like I’m missing the mark on. And as much as I would love to blame other people, the bulk of this stress really is just coming from inside the house. All the grace other people are extending to me seems to bounce right off this hard shell of expectations that I have for myself. I want to embrace my inner hobbit (that’s pretty much my whole personality, btw. Ultra homebody. I don’t know anyone who loves being at home as much as I do.); I just seem to have temporarily forgotten how.
  • Coffee Table Books – Ginger Horton (MMD Book Club). “Gift books and coffee table books—you know the ones, usually hardcover with loads of glossy photos or illustrations, probably picked up in that impulse section of your local bookstore, or even in a boutique or on vacation—provide some of my favorite reading experiences. And yet when a friend asks, ‘What are you reading?’ I’m prone to forget to mention that gorgeous volume on the nightstand that’s been flipped through many times or the little book of essays that sits in the breakfast nook.” This rings so true for me. Some of my favorite reading experiences are not the things I talk about the most. They’re not the books I read cover to cover and then mark as read on my reading tracker apps. They’re the design books in my living room that I thumb through when I need to see something pretty or the short humor essays I read (or re-read) when I need a quick laugh. As I get more shelves and reorganize my collection, that’s becoming more of what’s on my TV shelf – books that are best enjoyed in increments.
  • Bracing Yourself: How To Process Breast Cancer After Treatment Ends – Bezzy BC. “You won’t be told how to manage survivors’ guilt or how to respond to the continuous stream of messages that will no doubt flood every inbox you own. You won’t be prepared for the fake quick fixes your loved ones will tell you about because they heard it from a complete stranger in a grocery checkout line. You won’t be told how to feel when people you have contact with every single day drop off the face of the earth because your cancer diagnosis is too much for them.” Another thing I wasn’t told is that there’s this weird space between treatment and after treatment. I’ve rung the bell, signifying that the big three – chemo, surgery, radiation – are done. But I still have the port because I’m still getting immunotherapy treatments every three weeks, and I still have routine checkups and tests in the upcoming months to confirm that what we did actually worked. Is it really “after” if there are still appointments on the books? If I still feel the lingering symptoms from radiation and chemo (or maybe even surgery)? Part of processing involves knowing exactly where I stand, and I’m not really sure how to do that. The ground under me feels pretty shaky right now.

I am staring down the last few hours of work and then I am looking forward to a restful weekend.

Hope your weekend is everything you want it to be!

And I hope you’re enjoying my reading reflections this month.

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Day 10 – Wisely Ambitious

Posted in 31 Days, Books, Getting It Together, Work, tagged , , , , on October 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.”
Dan Harris, 10% Happier

I’ve never considered myself an ambitious person. I mean, I have goals, and I do everything I can to meet them. But I have learned that there are many things that have to fall into place for most of the outcomes I seek to actually happen, and a lot of these things aren’t necessarily within my control.

I can apply for the job, nail the interview, have all the qualifications…and still not get hired.

I can write a good rough draft and then edit it into really beautiful prose, but I can’t make anyone want to read it (or any publisher want to publish it).

I can be thoughtful, giving, kind – really, just a top-notch, sensational delight of a human being – and that person who catches my eye can still not be interested in dating me.

I can do everything right and still not get what I want.

I can do everything to the best of my ability (which often is above average) and still fail.

It took me a long time to learn that failing does not equal being a failure.

Failing is an inevitable part of the process. In fact, just about anyone who has ever worked toward anything worth having will tell you, failing happens a lot more often than succeeding.

But once I learned that I don’t need to waste time wallowing when I fail – wondering what’s wrong with me or overanalyzing what I could have done to change the outcome (answer – probably nothing, as many outcomes are 0% within my personal control) – I found that I could move on and try again a lot more easily. Turns out, trying again (even a lot of times) is not as big of a deal when I’m not bogged down by thoughts of inadequacy (e.g., I didn’t get what I want, therefore I suck) or personal offense (e.g., I didn’t get what I want, therefore they suck).

My personal goals are all based on what I can accomplish completely on my own. At work, we are implementing a “new” system that I hope will actually restructure the way we frame and evaluate our goals there, too.

I’m sharing reflections on my reading this year.

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Day 9 – Practice

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Beauty, Books, Core, Getting It Together, Home on October 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“I mean, I just worry… I don’t think about what I want, I just worry about what might happen to me and then figure out how to keep those things from happening.”

“…becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.”
Alison Espach, The Wedding People

This whole book was a roller coaster for me, and this was a good year for me to read it. I’m glad it came out when it did.

I live most of my life bouncing between these two goals:

  • Throwing all my energy into doing what I can to avoid bad things like losing my job (and thus my insurance and all the things I rely on my paycheck to cover) or death
  • Creating a life that actually feels worth living

I suspect it’s the same for a lot of people.

For the most part, I can trace my best days to the ones when my focus is on more creative aspirations than when I’m just trying to elbow my way through it. The energy required is about the same – I don’t tend to half-ass things, even when they’re not technically my passion – but the reward is far greater when I can see a tangible path toward the life I imagine to be ideal.

Imagine, because I haven’t actually lived it yet. I’m not quite who I want to be when I grow up. I’ve gotten fleeting tastes of the good life and my ideal self but have yet to make either my standard.

It’s a life surrounded by books and bookish people/events. It definitely starts later in the day than my current schedule usually does. It involves occasional travel, but it’s more about creating a life I don’t need a vacation from.

My future self is a person whose default is grace and generosity of spirit (and also resources, as long as we’re wishing for things). She is curious and has the time and space to drop everything for a good story. She is a solid but soft place to land for those who need it. However, when she invites people in, she lets them sort out their own feelings about whoever else shows up rather than doing their emotional labor/conflict management for them (I think this is one of the lessons I’m learning this year).

I love planning for this future self and the life I want for her. I hope they’re both possible, and I hope they’re everything I have imagined them to be.

I’m reflecting on what my reading is teaching me this year.

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Friday Five – Self-Care Tools

Posted in Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, What I'm Into on April 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

This week has been pretty OK. Today, on his birthday, I’m thankful for my brother-in-law. He is always eager to help out with random tasks, and I think he cares more about my car maintenance than I do. He has a sweet heart and gets nerdy about good deals, which is super endearing. Glad he’s part of our family!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the chaos of the world this week. We humans are just so, so bad at…humanity. The therapy has been really good lately, though, so instead of spiraling, these thoughts have prompted a craving for creating restorative, quiet space and practicing consistent self-care (which are important for maintaining sustainable education, awareness, conversations, activism, etc.). Of course, this has led me down rabbit holes, chasing tools that might help. So that’s what today’s list brings. These aren’t necessarily things I am going to incorporate, but I found them particularly beautiful and thought they might be things others would enjoy as well.

  • I have toyed with the idea of the Archer & Olive subscription box for a few months. I looove and hoard office and craft supplies. Any time I’m at a yard sale or a craft store or Targe with a little fun money to burn, that’s what I’m drawn to. While the subscription is a bit pricey, you get quite a few nice things with each box. And they’re soooo pretty. I may subscribe just to have gorgeous things on hand when someone’s birthday (or any day, really) comes up and I want to give them a little something special.
  • I ordered the latest copy of Bella Grace, and it is a visual treat. The articles and lists inside are not particularly groundbreaking, but they’re easy reads. They’re great for a quick reminder that there is more to life than the to-do list. Sometimes, I just thumb through to look at the beautiful pictures (also would be good for collaging/mood boards, if you’re into that sort of thing). 
  • I am obsessed with the Finch app. I have often struggled with tracking simple daily self-care, and this makes it fun. My birb is named Bandit, and she’s adorable.
  • I find myself using the Insight Timer app more days than not. It’s where I found the sleep music I’ve been using for a while (also, I think I want to make a sleep music album myself. I think that’s my jam.), but lately, I’ve also been using some of the good-morning/good-evening meditations. 
  • Finally, while I think this would be too much stimulation for me personally, I can see how a Northern Lights lamp like this one would be a cozy addition to someone’s home. 

Do you have favorite self-care tools? What are they?

I hope you have a good weekend, friends!

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Friday Five – The Hyperfocus Is In

Posted in Denton, Food, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Home, Mental Health, Quiet, Reading Challenges, Work on February 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It’s been a nutty couple of weeks. I feel more settled at work than I did in early-to-mid-January, probably because the semester is getting underway and everyone is falling back to their routines. Either that, or I have successfully adopted a more relaxed, whatever-gets-done-is-enough attitude (less likely, but still remotely possible). Also, I’m getting more done, so it may just be that that feels good. Regardless of the reason, I’ll take it. 

Meanwhile, I am super focused on a few key things. At home, I am nesting like I’m expecting a new baby. I am constructing an elaborate meal plan that I may actually use occasionally when I feel up to it in the next few months. And the information-sponge part (erm, majority?) of my personality is in overdrive. About everything. Mostly health stuff, but it’s hard to turn it off when it’s time to talk about something else. Yesterday at an appointment the nurse said, “This may be too much information.” No such thing, friend. No. Such. Thing.

However, I am enjoying super easy weekends and shall continue to do so while I’m going through treatment so as not to tax my system any more than necessary or cause any delays. In the perfect world, I would take this opportunity to learn how absolutely essential easy weekends are to my life and general well-being and keep them indefinitely. One can hope.

Here are some things I’m enjoying lately:

  • One of the wonderful things about reading challenges is that I get prompts that remind me of things I love. Nowhere Bookshop’s challenge encourages us to read our “Roman Empire” book – a book about any topic that lives a solid rent-free existence in our heads. One of my proverbial Roman Empires is architecture, specifically house plans. I think about how building homes could not only be useful as a career but also make opportunities to provide shelter and safety for others as well as build communities. I think about it a lot. I have several rough sketches for houses – everything from small bungalows to large spaces with full libraries and indoor pools. Also, I LOVE BLUEPRINTS. This prompt has me deep-diving into this topic that gives me so much joy. Look at these tiny house plans! How cute are they? And I adore the whimsy of this one. I mean, I would need a whole second tiny house just for my books, but I love the creative, economical use of space. Anyway, I put a lot of books on hold at the library about this, so I think I will have this prompt more than covered.
  • Also…I like this article. Not making any plans (for now or in the near future). I just like it.
  • I love cottagecore. Not so much the clothing or decorating style (although I do love roses and carnations and tend to decorate with both, even after they’re dead), but the lifestyle elements. Container gardens, reusing scraps, knitting my own blankets, slow food. Focusing on less waste and more creativity. Great quote – “We can choose to create a world for ourselves filled with gentle moments, while also considering how we can make our homes a place of cultivation instead of a place to store ‘things.’” This also slides right in line with my current nesting habits.
  • I’ve been looking for recipes recently that are high in protein and fiber. I’ve been in a bit of a food rut, but most of these and these look good to me. Perhaps I’ll try one or two of them this weekend (lookin’ at you, sweet potato).
  • I know they’ve reached their goal already, but these are some of the most talented baristas in Denton, and I want them to have all they need and more while they look for their next gig. So if you have a little love (and by love, I do mean cash) to throw their way, please do. Also, there’s going to be a fundraiser at Rubber Gloves, so swing by if you’re in Denton on February 10.

Take care this weekend (and all the time, really), friends. I hope it’s relaxing and fun and everything you want it to be!

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2023 in Review

Posted in Books, Getting It Together, Home, Hope, Mental Health, Reading Challenges, Resolutions, Work, Writing on December 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »

This year was a wild one. I’m pretty surprised I accomplished as much as I did. I met the spirit of each of my resolutions, if not the actual goals themselves.

Theme: Home

I’ve thought and read a lot this year about what home (having one, being at, making one, etc.) means. I’ve jotted down notes throughout the year and shared some of them here (click “home” link in the word salad over there —>). As I was finishing up The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik, I ran across a quote that sums up a lot of my thoughts on the theme – “Nothing about deathlessness or permanence, nothing forced; it was only a request, a cry of longing: stay here, please stay, be our shelter, be our home, be loved…”

Home is not something I construct once and have forever. It is a living, breathing thing. I find it in spaces, but I can also carry it with me, a sense of belonging that simply comes from being at home with who I am. A loving, peaceful home – or world – cannot be created from exploitation or greed. It must be cultivated with care. And care is complicated, especially when there are few systems in place to foster it.

I see this working in many of the choices I’ve made this year to put down some things that seem great but are either shiny trash or just not for me. I’ve also put my strategic/analytical strengths to good use in choosing new things to pick up. 

I don’t think this a lesson that ends, but I’m glad to have explored it more thoroughly this year.

Arts/Words/Creativity 

The thrill of having a week off work without having to use any PTO often goes to my head. Especially when setting goals for the upcoming year. I wouldn’t have it any other way, though. I like thinking in terms of extravagant possibilities, particularly when it comes to creative pursuits.

While I didn’t quite make the goal of reading 180 books, I don’t think it’s beyond my reach (in general – definitely beyond my reach in the next day and a half). In fact, I was ahead of schedule for most of the year, until work and health issues exploded. I don’t know how much those things will actually settle down, but I’ll keep the same goal for next year and see how it goes.  

When it comes to setting reasonable creative goals, I first had to fail spectacularly to learn. Most of the year, I faithfully set weekly plans on Sunday…and then did not meet them. Minor tangent – I am delighted to report that failing isn’t half the gut punch it used to be. Perhaps I’m actually healing from my overachiever, perfectionist ways? Here’s hoping. Anyway, in the last few months, I have become better at setting realistic short-term goals, a skill I plan to take into the new year with gusto.

Health/Wellness/Energy

I still really dislike strength training. And I dropped my Pilates membership because I wasn’t going anyway so it didn’t make sense to spend money on it. But I am begrudgingly sticking to a pretty regular schedule, completing at least two upper body and two lower body sessions a week. I am happy to report that it still works even when you whine about it, and a little whining is cathartic. 

My favorite wellness habit this year has been my commitment to making sure I have the downtime I need to function properly. The more I learn about how my brain works and what it needs to be at its best, the easier it is to say no to things that keep that from happening. Same thing with cutting out foods that make me feel sluggish. Actually feeling good and having sufficient energy to do things is so much better than slogging through or pushing myself until I collapse. I’m up to three regular time-outs a week. I think that’s the sweet spot where I still feel connected to people and life in general without getting overwhelmed and out of sorts. 

As it turns out, these are skills I will need in the months ahead.

I have some hard things coming up, health-wise. I don’t know all the specifics yet or the extent to which I will need to reorganize the rest of my life to adapt to these changes in the upcoming months, and I don’t know how much of it I will share here. I do know, however, that I will need the space to figure it out as I go along. And the work I have done this year toward being healthier – both physically and mentally – is going to help me do that. I’m grateful for what this year has taught me in this regard.

Finances

I do not have $1000 in my cushion account. Like I said, some shit has come up. But at least I have a cushion account, and I’m leaving it alone (except for the emergencies and extra surprises for which it is intended) and replenishing it as I am able. This is still an improvement over last year.

As far as my goal of identifying one new way to save or make money every month, I have gone above and beyond. I dropped subscriptions and services that I wasn’t using enough to justify the expense. I curbed impulse spending by giving myself a 3-day waiting period before buying anything I didn’t need to make sure I actually wanted to make the purchase (this was more successful at certain times than at others). Do you know how much more satisfying it makes the purchase when you actually do decide you want it? I had no idea. 

But most of all, I applied for and got a new job that increased my monthly take-home pay by about 18%. I have needed every penny of it, and I am so glad to have it. 

This year has shaken me in several ways, but it has also revealed that my foundation and my support system are stronger than I thought they were. Most days, I’m more grateful than anxious, and I’m pleased about that. 

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