I’m writing this within the first few hours of 2019 and as I look back on the year behind, I am pleased to see that I am in a better place than I was at this point last year. With this in mind, I have to consider this year, overall, a good one.
I came into 2018 with no money and with only a part time job in a call center as a source of income. This would be fine, of course, if I had a solid personal life to back it up, but at the time I didn’t really have many friends around to see on a regular basis. A couple of my closest friends had even moved away to far off countries.
To be honest, I was getting a bit disillusioned. I was finding it very hard to find copywriting or digital marketing-based work and I was weary of making new friends, because I didn’t want to invest emotionally in people who I knew I’d end up separated from sooner or later. I thought it best to just keep to myself, make enough money to live from the call centre and not expect any more from life.
Thankfully, thoughout the year, I ended up making quite a large number of new friends – more than I normally meet within a year. I felt that I had become quite a bit more cynical and, for me, it was obvious that I was not engaging with people in as much of a positive way as I had been before. So what was comforting for me, was that I still found that new people I met would compliment me for being positive and upbeat – what really motivated me to make more effort to be friendly and positive again, was when a new friend confided in me that they were having a hard time and needed more positivity in their life. It served as a call to action and made me feel that my positivity had a purpose. Meanwhile, I’ve also regained contact with some friends I was worried I was drifting away from, which is something I’m very glad about.
Career-wise, I now work for WDC (Whale and Dolphin Conservation) as the Digital Fundraising Officer. Though my role is only secure until April, it is a job I like very much and I hope that I will be able to remain there beyond the fixed term contract I am currently on. I’ve also been tweaking and editing the first draft of a novel I wrote – who knows if anything good will come of that.
There are a lot of things I hoped to have achieved by now, but have not and a lot of areas for improvement in my life – but for this post, I wanted to write about the positives because 2018 was ultimately a good year for me.
(I wrote something like this about 2015 and 2017 too. I should make this a tradition…)