Before heading into 2012, I sat back and made a list of all the highs and lows of my 2011 year. The ironic thing is that for me, 2011 felt like one of the most stressful years I’ve been through. It was a year of change, a year of ill health, a year full of anxiety. Yet when I compiled my list, I was surprised that I came up with more highs than lows. It made me realise that I had perhaps spent the year too focussed on the bad, the stressful, the negative instead of all the good. It’s definitely going to be something I focus on for next year.

So looking back, here’s what made me smile, laugh, comforted me and gave me many hours of joy:

• Starting a blog and realising just how much I love writing and sharing my thoughts.
• Celebrating 10 years of marriage and going on a fabulous cruise through the Mediterranean.
• Coming back to not only get my Two Oceans 2011 half marathon medal, but achieving a PB at the same time.
• Making a stack of new friends on Twitter and meeting some of them in real life.
• Coming to the decision that the Media industry is where I want to build my future career.
• Coldplay. #enoughsaid

The lows where I wasted too much time and energy and which got me down more days than it should’ve:

• Organisational change at work which I struggled with.
• 6 months of cortisone treatment to treat “trigger finger” associated with enteropathic arthritis.
• Putting on weight (almost 7kgs since December 2010) due to the cortisone. *sobs*
• Starting January off in a post-retrenchment office environment and watching some of my friends leave the organisation.
• Watching helplessly as two of my closest friends go through separations from their partners and realising that they’ve been hurting for a very long time. Then subsequently hearing of another friend’s divorce.

How strange that it took me a while to come up with this list. The lesson is that a whole year can fly by so quickly and yet it feels like just the other day that things happened. I had forgotten a lot of it and I’m sure there’s still stuff I’ve left out. I’m even more grateful for my blog now. I’m definitely going to use it to log all the important and special things that happen in my life next year.

But for now…

Good bye 2011…