Title Was Longer Than I Wanted It To Be,

 I was going to name this blog post "Today I Made Some Decisions That I Would Make Again, Despite The Outcome Not Being What I Wanted It To Be." 

Since moving back to Manchester, whether we are classing that as two years ago or six months ago when I bought this house, I've been trying to reconnect with friends I haven't seen for a long time, and people I haven't spoken to in a long time as well. 

Despite the fact that plans went awry today, I don't regret making the plans I made to meet up with one of my friends. I don't regret that, in order to get a lie-in, and have more time to spend getting ready, I decided I was going to take an Uber to get there, despite the fact that the cost was something like three times what it would have cost on public transport.

The thing is, I was investing my money and my time into myself just as much as someone else. It was good for me to get out to a place I knew and hopefully with someone different. I spent today feeling safe outside of my home and outside of the environment I've spent the last two years in, but whilst my mum did need to come to the rescue so that I didn't need to get an Uber home or face a 35-minute walk and then two buses with an anxious dog, she did better than I imagined that she would have done. 

My dog spent today saying hi to more people than she normally does and not freaking out when the other doggies barked. She sat on my knee in the Uber and was so brave. I am so thrilled that she's as brave as she is. 

Then later on in the day, I learned that I woke up this morning to a world without a friend of mine, and I honestly can't say that I can put my finger on how I feel right now about that. Yes, I'm sad, I'm devastated really, and I'm angry because it shouldn't have come to this, but other than that, I'm still in a stage of utter disbelief. But knowing he's not here makes me even more glad that, even though I didn't get to spend the time with the friend I was trying to spend time with today, I put in the effort, because my friend knows I put in that effort, and he knows we need to try again to meet up, and losing one friend makes me realise even more how much I need to hold onto the others. We all need to hold onto each other. 

Happy New Year (Oh, Here We Go Again),

  I honestly thought that when I took the time to sit and count up the number of blog posts I wrote in 2021 the number was going to be smaller than 14. I had thought I had basically taken almost the whole year away from writing, but it would appear not. A lot of it was about running, a bit about dogs (standard practice for me, of course) and a couple were mentioning the new house. 

2021 was a good year for some things because it was the year I met my fur baby and fell truly in love with the girl, even though she weed on my carpets a lot. It was the year I found and bought my first house and started to realise how damn expensive getting everything I wanted done to it would be, though that's also been exciting because getting stuff done to the house just is exciting. It's also the year that I went back to Scouting and that has been an utter gift, even if at times I have wondered what on Earth, what manner of lunacy, made me think I wanted to work with kids, even if it is just for a few hours a week. It has been the thing which has got me out of the house, got me teaching and got me learning as well as socialising with the kids, the other adults, parents and just a whole other community that I feel really lucky to be a part of. 

Obviously, in other ways, 2021 sucked. Whilst COVID wasn't in as much control of our lives as it was in 2020, it was still hanging around like a foul smell and it has been sewing seeds of discord between friends, families and communities, with arguments over testing, masks, vaccines and who broke the lockdown rules however many months ago. We never really got back to the point where we could meet with other people freely and easily in the long anticipated return to normalcy, and that was bloody hard. As a family, we lost my granddad and at the funeral promised that we would meet again as a family as soon as we could. We'd lost one cousin (well, second cousin for me) before we lost my granddad, and then before we could plan the get-together we were all waiting on, we lost another cousin, and a smattering of other relatives and friends, and then we lost Akela. 

Obviously, there is no point trying to quantify all of those things and figure out if, on balance, the scales tipped in favour of 2021 being a good or bad year. There were points where it was amazing, there were points where it was terrible and there were others where it was awfully middle ground, and most of it is from these external events that are kind of beyond anyone's control. If it comes out as a good year, what does that mean? Does it mean I can sit and rest easy this year because last year was good? Obviously not. If it turns out it was to be considered a bad year, does that mean I have to 'try harder' this year to make good things happen? How do you even do that? I spend my life running around in a tizzy, always doing something, forever busying myself with something and it is utterly exhausting. I have started giving myself some time to relax and have a break as well, but if I'm supposed to be 'trying harder' what more can I do? Honestly, not a whole hell of a lot without splitting myself down the middle. 

I'm going into this new year feeling hopeful for a lot of things - driving, relationships, camping, all that sort of thing, but I'm also trying to be cautious to not overhype the things I'm hoping for in case this virus means some of them or all of them don't happen. So I'm not doing resolutions, I'm not going to get overly anxious about the run that's coming up at the end of the year - though I am going back to training for it in the next few days - I'm making no goals about my weight because if I stay chubby, I stay chubby, and I'm not going to make any real goals about what I want my career to look like in the next few months, because more than anything, I just want to be able to breath, get through each day and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Things will come together (or they won't) and this year I'm just going to try and let that happen without getting super wrung out over it.