2023 has brought change for me but in the best ways - starting a job in the legal industry helping victims of domestic violence and moving in with my partner. As I have done since 2017, this is my reflection on 2023.
I have thought about writing about this before on various occasions, but tackling this topic scared me and I wanted to make sure my experience was recent enough that it felt authentic. I debated whether to even post about loss and grief because it is so personal and is such a complex and difficult process.
Death is a taboo subject in our society and it makes people uncomfortable. As no one knows what happens after death, it often feels intimidating and is one of those subjects that we avoid thinking about until we are forced to confront it. But the truth is all of us will experience loss at some point, and not talking about it only makes it that much harder when we have to go through it. As loss is something everyone will encounter at some point, and it is rarely discussed I thought it might be helpful to document my experience for somebody else to read.
The end of this year wasn’t what I would have hoped but that doesn’t mean that the whole of this year was bad. In fact, I would say the first half was pretty good and I really enjoyed this summer. 2022 has had some good memories, even if there were really difficult times. As I do at the end of every year, I wanted to document what I have learnt in 2022.
“Be happy”. A quote that everyone has heard and has been repeated so often. “Whatever you do just be happy” and “search for your happiness” - as if it were that simple. Like happiness is something you can pluck out of thin air and then you are sorted. A magical cure if you feel depressed and something that somehow can make your anxiety or any other problem just disappear.
Dear reader,
I’ve had the title of this blog in my drafts for a while but didn’t quite know how to tackle it initially.
Having spent most of my life in the education system, there was always an obvious next step. Progressing onto the next academic year. I grew accustomed to the sense of security of knowing that I would be returning to school or in my later years, university. No matter how difficult life got and the things it threw at me, that seemed to be the one constant and something that helped ground me. Sure there were changes, like going from primary school to secondary school and secondary school to sixth form. Then sixth form to university and these had their own challenges, as all new phases do. But, there was one constant in it all, there was always a clear next step for me, even if it was different to the previous one.
