General Posts / Lifestyle

Here’s To A Better 2023, Maybe?

Reflecting back on 2022, from the comfort of 2023, 2022 was a hell of a year. In hindsight, I should have known that ending one-year chugging cheap gin and dancing into the new year before staggering home completely sloshed was only going to go as it started. With my head (and life) in the toilet, wishing I had made different life choices.

January didn’t get much better as Olivia caught covid precisely one year after I did. However, bringing home our gorgeous Teegle the Seagull, our senior beagle from Dogs Trust, brightened up the month.

But with all the dodgy life stuff going on, I seriously neglected all of my blogs. I have no idea how any of them are still going tbh. Towards the end of 2021, I started new blogs with big plans. Sadly life had other ideas, and every single one was sadly neglected.

My issue was I became so consumed with my freelance writing that I didn’t have time for much else. 2022 was expensive, and that was before the cost of living crisis. 

It was money after money after money. From heading to our long-awaited, rearranged trip to Disneyland Paris to the aforementioned senior beagle needing frequent and expensive vet trips to a family holiday to Tenerife for my eldest niece’s 18th birthday. And the more I needed, the more I worked, and everything else fell by the wayside.

Throwing in the family birthday season, summer and Christmas, and it was a complete disaster. I wrote a lot, and while the abrupt ceasing of copious work threw me for a loop in December, it allowed me to catch up on life.

Because my life wasn’t only neglected digitally, my house was a mess, my health was a mess, and we won’t even talk about my diet. There was just too much going on. Then October and November saw us experience the loss of two close and amazing people, both unexpectedly. Both were devastating, and this seemed to sum up exactly how bad of a year we had.

2023

But the slowing down of work and freeing up of more time has been therapeutic for me; while financially it has been a struggle, it has allowed me to get back to my blogs and finally get a handle on sorting out my house. Because, in all honesty, I have missed writing. Even though I do it all day, every day, I miss writing for me. Just putting my fingers to the keyboard and thrashing out some thoughts in my head without having a specific topic to write about or word count to hit. It’s therapeutic. And I know a lot of bloggers say that. And it is; I don’t care if no one reads the blog or even cares what I say. I just love having it. And despite the wonky year last year, the last thing I wanted to do was to close them down or stop writing them.

But so far this year, I have a long list of things to write for two of my blogs. I have some posts scheduled for another one of my blogs; sadly, my fiction blog is still without new posts. The inspiration to write for this one still hasn’t returned. I suppose when my life stops being so crammed, it could return, but it’s okay. I will wait for it to strike (100% will be one night as I’m falling asleep, and my brain will kick into gear!).

I have already written 2 new posts for my fibro blog, which was the total sum of posts in 2022 alone. I have written 2 posts; this will be my third for One Frazzled Mum, along with some competition posts that haven’t been sent to me by third parties.

Plans For The Blogs For This Year!

I’m not psychic, and I have no idea how this year will go, but I know that by doing a little bit of work often, I can claw back some of the progress I made in earlier years and restore this blog to something I am proud of.

I have a long list of posts, to which I will add a long list of behind-the-scenes work. I will be getting back to sending out regular-ish newsletters, and I have switched off my new post alerts. I also need to get back to sharing my blog posts on social media. But in all honesty, I do this for the love of writing, not to be a social media star, so chances are that last point will be wildly overlooked.

Will things go the way I want? Probably not. But for now, I am enjoying lazy Sundays in bed with a snoring, twitching-as-she-dreams beagle keeping me company while Olivia is at work (yes, she has a job now, and this revelation has given me inspo for a new blog post or two).

And here we are. I am feeling positive and confident about the blog. Less so about my life, my finances and the cost of living crisis. But for the first one, my fingers are enjoying dancing over the keys with all the grace of a hippo flailing in mud. For the sh*tshow of my life, there is chocolate and gin (and also twice weekly Zumba classes where I can focus on my lack of dancing ability and coordination).

I know it’s late, and we’re almost at the end of January already (which didn’t seem too long this year tbh), but this is me heading into a new year with a modicum of positivity and a bucket load of coffee. Wish me luck!