Needless to say this is not the post I had planned to open the new year. I actually started writing this post in February 2020, in the lifetime that was comfortable and familiar, and here I am now 10 months later scrapping the whole thing and starting over.
This post was meant to be reflecting on a great year and sharing (at least) 30 things which I had done in the year I turned 30. Like a year of celebration.Obviously that never happened.
I suppose I owe it to my original post to share the few things that I did manage before the world turned on it’s head…
In January I jetted off to Luxembourg for a couple of days. A lovely wee country, but oh boy the hills – some streets felt almost like scaling a cliff! Honestly surprised I survived haha!
Also in January I was lucky enough to travel to Edinburgh with my family to see The Lion King in the Edinburgh Playhouse. This was my second time seeing the stage production, and if you’ve never seen it yet I cannot recommend it enough – it’s definitely one of the most incredible live performances in existence.
The final thing from my turning 30 list that I managed to do before the world turned on it’s head was VidCon LDN, a Youtube convention in London. This was a good experience and I’m glad I went, but looking back it makes me super uncomfortable to think of all those people so close together in the place that just a month later would become an overflow hospital to help the city cope with Covid-19…*shudder*
So yeah, that was my 2020…and then lockdown hit. In February I found out that my application for Miss British Beauty Curve had been success and that I would be competing for the title in August – needless to say that didn’t happen.
I didn’t have a terrible lockdown experience, I’m a ‘key worker’ so I was able to keep working but with the luxury (and trust me, I recognise this and feel humbled to have had such a luxury) to work from the safety and comfort of my own home most of the time.
Since my birthday is at the end of July I was lucky enough that it wasn’t a true lockdown birthday, but it certainly wasn’t the 30th birthday celebrations I had planned. I ate a takeaway in my parents’ kitchen, and we had a socially distanced outdoor tea party with my grandmothers. Oh, and I got a new hamster for my birthday (he is called Sebastian and as I write this he is demanding a treat and making sure that I cannot forget about him!).
I spent a night in Braemar (Aberdeenshire) with my parents, literally the weekend before restrictions were tightened back up after a taste of summer freedom. If nothing else, this was good for getting some pictures for the ‘gram when we visited Crathes Castle!
…and that’s it, really. That’s everything I did in 2020.
I do appreciate that that is still so much more than some people will have had the opportunity to do last year. I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to spend Christmas with my family, the first time we’d been together since last Christmas day and the way things are going, who knows if when we’ll next be able to be together again indoors.
I definitely don’t view 2020 like a lot of people seem to be. I don’t think it was the worst year ever, or a total disaster, or anything like that. I can’t say I was particularly excited to see the back of it. It was just a bit of a bummer sometimes, that’s all.
So let’s move, hello 2021!
So what do I want in 2021? I honestly have no idea. I want to take things as they come and see how things turn out, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not steering the ship. I don’t have any set goals (I could probably use last year’s goals, to be honest, I literally achieved zero of them!) but I have decided that this time next year I want to look back and think ‘yeah, 2021 was a success’. That’s the word I’ve chosen, success. I have no idea what that looks like, I don’t know if it’s an overall feeling of success or if it’s just success in a particular area of my life (e.g. career, content, health, relationships?). If you were hoping for some juicy resolutions, check out this blog post from a couple of years ago.
I have made the executive decision to make blog days Monday and Friday in 2021, and see how we get on. I previously said that blogs would come out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and Youtube videos on a Sunday, but what happened in reality was that I would just upload whenever I actually had something finished meaning that there were weeks on end with nothing and weeks with, like, 10 posts. What I am telling myself now is that blogs will only be posted on a Monday and Friday and Youtube videos on either a Sunday or Wednesday (or both if I’m on a roll!). So if I miss Monday and write a post on Tuesday, it likely won’t be posted until Friday unless it is particularly time sensitive. I’m hoping that this might be a better system for all of us!
So I think that’s it! What are you hoping for in 2021? Let me know in the comments and hopefully you might start seeing some regular stuff here again!
It would be an absolutely smashing start to the year if you want to join me on social media. You can find me on…
Kirsty Through The Looking Glass 