wildeabandon: picture of me (Default)
2020; 2019;2018; 2017; 2016; 2015; 2014; 2000-2009

Was 2021 a good year for you?
It's been challenging, and somewhat exhausting. More so, for me, than 2020. The last few months especially have really taken their toll, and although the acute burnout has passed, I'm still not quite firing on all cylinders.

There have been some very good things as well, of course. I had a truly glorious retreat at St Beuno's, and a wonderful week with friends in Norfolk. And I met my first ever nibling, Alex, who is absolutely adorable.

What did you do in 2021 that you'd never done before?
Learned a piece of music by ear. Rode a bike in London. Gave a eulogy. Participated in a vaccine trial. Heard seal song.

Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I wanted to sort out my sleep pattern. I made some progress in the first half of the year, but it all went to bollocks in the last few months. I'm hoping that having a bit more space in my life next year will give me another decent shot at it.

Did someone close to you give birth?
Yes! My youngest sister Sarah and Mthr Alice.

Did anyone close to you die?
Yes. My friend Ramona died in January. Nila, to whom I had at one point been close, although we'd drifted apart recently, died in June.

What countries did you visit?
Wales.

What would you like to have in 2022 that you lacked in 2021?
Well, I'd like more of the return to normality that I was expecting in 2021 but never quite materialised, but I'm not really expecting it this time.

What I do think I'll get is a bit more balance in my life. I'll be working a lot less in 2022, and in April Mthr Alice will be back from maternity leave, both of which should help enormously.

What events from 2021 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Finding Ramona's body. Seeing seals on the Norfolk coast. The moment of realisation that God is calling me to the priesthood.

What was your biggest achievement(s) of the year?
Just about keeping all the plates spinning at St John's

What was your biggest failure(s)?
Not being very good at keeping in touch with people the last few months, especially [personal profile] hjdoom

Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing physical, except a bout of food poisoning in November. My mental health has taken a few knocks, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it a depressive episode.

I did not have the third stage of my phalloplasty because the NHS hasn't been doing any lower surgery since late 2020. They'll be resuming in March 2022, but the waiting list could be up to two years. I'm approximately as happy about this as you might expect.

What was the best thing you bought?
I think the best things I spent money on were holidays and my spiritual direction course, with an honourable mention going to getting the piano fixed. If it has to be an object then I'm leaning towards my bike. Obviously I've not had it for very long, but I'm enjoying it immensely.

Where did most of your money go?
Charity, mortgage, groceries & bills.
I spent more this year than last on Nice Things like holidays, restaurants, books, games and hobby materials, but still considerably less than in 2019 and earlier.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I guess one of the difficult things about burnout is that it makes it hard to access feelings of excitement. I remember that I was really excited about St Beuno's and the group holiday in Norfolk, but I can't quite remember the feeling itself at the moment.

Compared to this time last year, are you...
i. Happier or sadder?
Sadder, but much happier than I was this time last month, and expecting the improvement to continue.
ii. Richer or poorer? Richer
iii. Healthier or iller? Less healthy. I've really not been doing well at maintaining any sort of regular exercise this year.

What do you wish you'd done more of?
Especially in the last few months, prayer and related study. Also exercise.

What do you wish you'd done less of?
Working myself to the point of burnout over September-November. Playing pointless games on my phone and doomscrolling because I was too burned out to have the executive function for anything else.

How did you spend Christmas?
From Christmas Eve through to the 27th I was in Yorkshire, with my parents and my sister Anne. It was very laid back and I enjoyed it immensely. I hadn't seen my parents in person since summer 2020, and it was really good to get properly caught up. Yesterday we continued our tradition of House Christmas joined by Anne, [personal profile] themidnightgirl and [personal profile] the_alchemist, which apart from last year, we've been doing since we moved into this house Jesus' time. It is a good tradition and I like it very much.

How was your religious year?
Complicated. There were some very good bits. Being able to properly celebrate the Triduum again after a year off was deeply fulfilling, and the rest of my first year of Encounter was wonderful and enriching and challenging and growth-enabling. My retreat at St Beuno's in May was truly a foretaste of heaven. My two Bible study groups - one with just me and [personal profile] hjdoom, and one with a group of friends - have been really good as a means of pushing me to engage more deeply with scripture on multiple levels. I've been preaching more frequently this year, which I've enjoyed and feels like something that I should be doing and can probably become quite good at.

And then at about the same time Mthr Alice went on maternity leave and my work life went a bit crazy, and I ended up in a place where I was so busy with the Church that I didn't have any time for God. My engagement with the first term of Encounter Year 2 has been far less than I would like it to be, and my life of private prayer ceased almost entirely. And that was pretty miserable. I got half way through my last session of my own spiritual direction before asking to cut it short because it felt like we were going round in circles, and not in a way that got us closer to the centre, just in a way that felt like bashing my head against a brick wall.

I'm not in that place any more - prayer is happening again, albeit in dribs and drabs, and I'm able to see glimpses of the divine in my day to day life in a way that I really wasn't a few weeks ago. And then last week everything got turned upside down, so I have no doubt that next year is going to be very interesting indeed.

Did you fall in love in 2020?
No.

How many one-night stands?
One. I went to bed with a good friend, which was a lot of fun, but our kink-orientations aren't really compatible, so at least whilst the pandemic adds in so many extra logistical challenges we're not trying to pursue something ongoing.

How has your romantic life been generally
[personal profile] obandsoller and I continue to be very much in love and to grow together in mutual support and comfort. I would like it if we had more time together when neither of us were exhausted, but we do a very good job of carrying the load for one another. I occasionally think that it would be nice to have a secondary relationship, but then I think about how much effort dating takes and recoil in horror.

What has your professional life been like this year?
I'm adding this in as a new question this year, because it feels like quite an odd ommission. I started the year with the last couple of months of a contract as Head of Student Number Planning and Reporting at BCU, which had been an enjoyable but pretty demanding job, even though I was only working four days/week. After that I did a short contract for Canterbury Christ Church, which was a role I found via one of the other students on my Spiritual Direction course - which was not, I must admit, somewhere I expected to be doing professional networking!

As that was drawing to a close, a former colleague pointed out to me that Portsmouth were looking for someone with part of my skillset for a fixed-term contract over the summer, and so I reached out to them to see if they would be interested in taking me on a consultancy basis instead. I wasn't particularly optimistic, because consultants tend to be a lot more expensive than fixed-term contracts, but for the same reason, the latter can be a lot harder to find, and also it turned out that whilst I was substantially over-qualified for the role they'd originally envisaged, they would also be able to use a lot of my other skills pretty productively, so after a certain amount of faff and negotiation, I started with them in the summer.

This was all good, and then they wanted to extend my contract at about the same time as Canterbury came back to me asking if I could do some more work for them. Initially both of them suggested 4 days/week, which you'll notice adds up to more days than there are in the week even with no weekends, so after a bit of back and forth I agreed to work two days/week with Portsmouth, as well as introducing them to a former colleague with similar skills, who picked up some of the work, and the other three days with Canterbury. This felt like a pretty good arrangement, as the projects were quite different, so it gave me the variety which I enjoy, and having multiple clients at once makes it a lot less likely that I'll get tripped up by IR35 legislation.

I knew that trying to work full time at the same time as Encounter was restarting for the year and my responsibilities at St John's were about to ramp up was going to be pushing it a bit, but it was only for a couple of months initially, and I thought that I'd be able to manage it. And then there were some external deadlines which wound up needing rather more of my time than had been originally agreed to, and whilst I could have said no, it was a bit of a point of professional pride to get us through. So the two months of full time work turned into four, with some crunch periods in the middle where I was working at about 150% of full time for 2-3 weeks at a stretch. And whilst that crunch was going on I felt like I was doing okay - busy and stressed, but holding it together. But then when I stopped it hit me like a freight train, and I could barely hold it together to do the "normal full time" level of work I was supposed to be doing then.

But I made it through. I've got another couple of days to do with Portsmouth at some point when they feel it would be useful to get some external expertise, and another contract that's likely to lead to a few days of work here and there throughout the next year, but for the most part I'll just be working for Canterbury, and that's agreed as three days/week until the end of 2022.


What is the best thing you created in 2021?
It hasn't been a terribly creative year. I did a fair bit of crochet and knitting. You can see quite a lot of my finished projects here, but I think possibly only if you have a ravelry account.

What were the best books you read?
Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich - I read this multiple times both in translation and in the original Middle English, along with a couple of commentaries on it by Veronica Mary Rolf. It's very good. Comforting and uplifting without being naïve, and containing the most satisfying response to theodicy that I've ever encountered.

Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer - The Church and the Famine of Grace by Jarel Robinson-Brown, as mentioned in my previous post.

New Seeds of Contemplation, by Thomas Merton. Merton probably isn't for everyone, but I really click with his writing. He make me laugh, sometimes in appreciation of his snarky acerbic wit, and sometimes with the sheer joy of being alive in God's creation.

A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik. I knew there was a reason for my "Don't start reading a trilogy until the entire thing has been published" policy. Waiting for the third one may yet just kill me.

What were your favourite musical discoveries this year?
The Young'uns, whom I saw at Shrewsbury Folk Festival

What did you want and get?
To continue to grow in relationship with God, and to live out the life in God to which I am called.
To hug my friends again.

What did you want and not get?
A sense that the end of *gestures* all this is in sight, or at least that we know how we might get there.

What was/were your favourite film/s and plays this year?
I only saw one play in the theatre, Leopoldstadt, which was very good indeed. I also watched the Donmar Cabaret from 1993 with Alan Cumming as the MC on Youtube, and am now quite tempted to buy tickets for the new Eddie Redmayne version. I may also want to consider seeing something without Nazis this year...

What did you do on your birthday and how old were you?
I was 40, so I guess that means I'm officially middle aged. I didn't go out because I was self-isolating after being pinged, but a few days later [personal profile] obandsoller took me out for dinner at Gautier Soho, whose vegan tasting menu was absolutely stonking.

Who and what kept you sane?
To the extent that I stayed sane, my spiritual director, prayer, and [personal profile] obandsoller.

Who did you miss?
Again - Everyone, obviously. But particularly [personal profile] bunnypip and family, as we've had the worst luck in having to postpone or cancel visits for Covid related reasons.

Who was the best new person you met?
Our new next door neighbours, Jesse & Alex. New real life friends were a pretty unusual thing for me even in the before times, so we have been extraordinarily lucky to have two such excellent people move next door to us.

Have you changed your hairstyle?
Not really. Maybe a bit of tweaking, but I think I'll be sticking with the 'messy androgynous pixie cut' look for the foreseeable now.

What are you looking forward to most in 2021?
Not being overworked.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020?
I think I may have learned this one before, but I got a reminder this year. You can go quite a long way to not noticing burnout creeping up on you by being too busy burning yourself out. But once you stop the merry-go-round and it catches up with you, it takes more than a week or two to recover. It may be necessary in the future to push yourself to (or past) the limit because of circumstances outside your control, but if you're going to do that, you need some proper substantial recovery time and space planned in.

Date: 2021-12-30 06:48 pm (UTC)From: [personal profile] doseybat
doseybat: (Default)
I just can't believe the NHS saga with these surgeries and the operating theatre space and the pandemic resource thing, argh. Obviously my gyn surgery was very different for multiple reasons but I remember the feeling 1.5 years ago that my life was kind of stuck until the surgery could go ahead. Hope it's not much longer for you

Date: 2021-12-31 07:32 pm (UTC)From: [personal profile] bunnypip
bunnypip: (Default)
We miss you too!

Fingers crossed for the latest iteration of The Plan xxx

Date: 2022-01-02 08:43 pm (UTC)From: [personal profile] sfred
sfred: Fred wearing a hat in front of a trans flag (Default)
I'm glad you're set to be less overworked in 2022. I hope to see you this year!

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