In the gap...

 

The few days between Christmas and New Year's are always a bit funny to navigate...you can't take the decorations down and get back to normal yet, but the main Christmas celebrations are finished...still it's nice to have a few days' breather as the year speeds towards its close.

I'm also a big fan of the "year in reflection" posts that start peppering the blogosphere about now.  It's a great way to catch up with events in people's lives I might have missed, as well as get a general sense of how the year has treated everyone.  For my part, 2012 has been something of a tough one - in fact, just about everybody I know in "real life" - and more than one or two online friends - has had a tough run this year.  I hope, if you've struggled some, had some hard knocks and, like me, are just plain ready for this year to be over there are at least a few useful lessons that can be brought into The Awesome That 2013 Better Well Be*

{* Gonna have to come up with a better title for it than this.  Any ideas?}

So, 2012...we survived another apocalypse, that's got to go on the "positives" side of the chart, right?  I was also blessed to see one my favourite singers, with a few of my favourite people. just before the year began winding down.  In fact, the year was punctuated with several wonderful trips to concerts, theatres, friends to visit - not as much as I'd like, but much more than I deserve and I am grateful to have more than a few happy memories of fun days out to add to my store.

On the flip-side...if 2011 was the year things with my vision problems kicked off, 2012 was the year they...didn't get better.  I bounced around specialists, clinics, tests, more specialists and eventually we've reached the conclusion that part of the broken is un-mendable.  But just a couple of weeks ago there seemed to be light on the horizon in the shape of tweaks to one of my lenses which will hopefully make my day to day vision a bit more liveable.

If I'm honest, I think "not getting better" hit me harder than things going wrong to begin with - it was this that made me re-think my job, and in effect a lot of little things that underpinned my whole life {I had to quit my previous job, no longer being able to drive has seriously hindered my independence, and reading the volume I used to is just plain impossible now!} and there's been a lot of fed-up-ness to do battle with this year.  Optimism gets tiring when there isn't the promise of getting better on the horizon, or when yet another doctor tells you there's not much they can do to help - and I did find that this bone weariness affected a lot of my ability to get excited about things or plan things or even be interested to a certain degree.  But I think sometimes - and this is something I'm really learning about myself - it takes a while to process things.  And sometimes "a while" is not a week or two, and sometimes it has to wait until after the event, because during it you're just coping with the here and now.  Still, it hasn't all been bad, and a lot of my processing has been in the background to general day to day life stuff, like finding a job I can do now, and jumping well and truly into the world of audiobooks {Oh hai there new obsession} and Radio 4 extra {happy dance}.

On the whole I'm feeling better on this side of 2012 than I was on the other - and I feel more like "me" than I have in what seems like a long while.  But still, I have to confess that I won't be sorry when Big Ben strikes 12 on Monday night and we can beckon in a new year.  Here's to 2012 bowing out with grace, and ushering in a year of GOOD for all of us.

But more on my plans for 2013 later.

How about you?