With the year drawing to a close in just a few hours, it’s time to look back and reflect.

I’ll admit that, when I look back, it’s way too easy to see the bad things and harder to see the good things – even though I’m not exactly sure why. I often felt stuck and unsure in many areas of my life. And it had a noticeable impact on what I hoped to achieve.

Writing

Writing was going well in the first half of the year. I was making a second pass on the changes I made based on feedback from 2022 and had a good feeling about them. I decided to seek out some more feedback and managed to get some in spring. And while the feedback wasn’t exactly bad, it showed me that there’s still much more work to do on the story than I thought.

Which is where the problems began. I wasn’t able to get any decent idea as for how to solve those issues. I had one or two very vague ideas and found these insufficient and not enough to actually solve anything. Combined with the fact that there are still mechanical issues (such as descriptions and using the five senses better), this all ended up being a problem that seemed too tall a hill to climb, and I ended up in the worst writer’s block since I started. In the second half of the year, I wrote one new scene in July and edited one chapter… this week. Fear that I have no idea how to go on and losing passion for writing has been holding me back a lot lately, and I have yet to find a way out.

Maybe I’ll just have to try and power through it somehow…

Reading

Reading followed a similar pattern as the previous years – I had a decent pace in the early part of the year – winter and spring, but it fell into the background in summer. Eventually, I reached the 20-books goal… yesterday. I managed it with significant help from re-reads (hence the lack of book reviews in the later part of the year) as I found myself unsure what I wanted to read next.

The fact is I did one beta read early in the year, which Goodreads can’t track as the book isn’t out yet, so I technically met the goal in early December.

Hiking

If nothing else, I had quite a good year when it comes to hiking. I had a strong start, enjoyed some snow during the winter, and used many opportunities to go hiking on my own. My sister is also getting back to hiking, so she’s sometimes accompanying me (she claims it’s mostly because her current job is more sedentary than her past jobs). I noticed that I’m still getting stronger given that the amount of fatigue I feel from the longer hikes is much lower than before. I’ve returned to several places I haven’t seen in a while (though the weather wasn’t always favorable).

The good parts? I managed to set a new personal best for hike length at 38km (after almost exactly 10 years since I set up the old record at 36km), which I managed to do in just 6,5 hours. And, as said before, with much less fatigue. I managed to set a new yearly best at 1109km (beating last year’s 1085km) despite the weaker end of the year because of the weather or the whole overheating mishap that had me taken to the hospital by a chopper during my holiday.

Personal life

In the end, I think what I faced in my private life affected me in other areas – especially when it came to my doubts (which probably contributed to making writer’s block worse and dragging it out).

When I moved out from my parents in April 2022, I had this hope that maybe I would finally start dating. Which… didn’t really happen. I downloaded a dating app in late 2022, and it led me to exactly 0 dates so far. Fact is, I wasn’t exactly bothered by that. Instead of dating, I was beginning to think that maybe I’m a lost cause in that regard (after all, I’ve been in love only once in my life so far, in my teen years, a doomed one-sided feeling that had eventually gotten me to try writing almost 10 years ago).

Then, a woman I see during my daily commute caught my eye – at the time I was way too close to swearing off any romantic involvement forever. Sometimes, I am quite surprised by the irony of things in my life. Long story short, I eventually began to fear repeating the same misery with my teen love more than I feared rejection, so I gathered my courage and talked to her. Long story short, she’s married, so things won’t be going anywhere ever, but I was glad that I managed to actually overcome my shyness for once. And that helped me to accept reality way faster than I expected.

In October, I chatted up a woman who seemed a similar age when I was hiking, and while I had a good feeling from our conversation and we exchanged numbers, she eventually stopped replying to my messages, which I found worse than outright rejection – probably because of my tendency to overthink situations where things aren’t exactly clear.

As a result, I feel more unsure about where I’d like my personal life to lead than I was at the beginning of this year, with more doubts about myself and my “worth” as a potential partner and whether I should even make any further attempts at dating.

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As a result, I have very mixed feelings from the past year. I do hope the better parts will prevail in 2024 and that I will find some direction for myself. There are definitely exciting things I’m looking forward to, and I guess I should focus on those.

I hope 2023 was kind to you – and free of confusion and doubt. And that 2024 will be a good year.