2016, A Reflective Post

So this is it, my last blog post before Christmas,  and I'm up to date with brand collaborations and outstanding articles, something I've learnt this year is how much pressure I feel to do the best job for the companies I collaborate with, another thing is that since I photographed cocktails at the Science Bar, I almost always get invited to cocktail based events, I for one shall not be complaining about that anytime soon!

Whilst this year has had it's trying times and many challenges all I can see now as I sit here reflecting are the good times, there have been so many highlights like going to Barcelona with Harriet, visiting Stratford and having many Shakespeare moments with Abigail, walking Alpacas, exploring Amsterdam and of course I couldn't complete my round up without mention of meeting Mr France, he really is the sweetest geek.

When I started this year, I wanted to have great adventures, that was the main focus of my resolve for 2016 and I have done that both offline and online.  I finally found the strength to move on earlier this year and on the day I did I felt a huge weight being lifted off my shoulders and now my life is filled with happiness and smiling every day, I feel again, in fact, I have all of the feels, I have enough feels for me, Mr F and the whole of the land and I quite often have tears of happiness when I realise just how far I've personally and emotionally grown this year.  

Don't get me wrong, I still have anxiety, I still have moments where I suffer from almost crippling low self-esteem but every neurosis is something that's been caused over a period of years so I have to allow for the years ahead to heal me.  I remember a conversation on Twitter a while ago about The Phantom and whether Christine should have chosen him or Raoul, the overwhelming response was the Christine should have chosen The Phantom because love was the only way to heal him, we're all like that a little bit I think, we need to find our people, our crew, our squads, whether that be friendships, relationships, whatever, it's only when we view the world with love and let love in that we can be healed and live to our full potential, I hope to do more of that in 2017 than I have done thus far.

I'm taking some time off over Christmas, I just have one planned photo shoot on the 28th, it's a bit of a weird situation because I'll almost certainly be more active on Twitter for the next couple of weeks than I am normally but that's because lots of friends are away over Christmas, my children will be social butterflies and so it's my online friends who will mostly keep me sane, well the ones who are around, if no one is around then I shall just resort to talking to myself or Holly Bobbins, I do that quite enough anyway!

I cannot really say what will happen in the future, I literally have no plans currently, my hopes are that I'll get to meet Mr F in 3D and that's almost certainly going to happen in January, much, much excitement at that prospect even though our Skype dates are almost like having him sitting next to me, no really it is, if you've never tried a Skype date I can't recommend it highly enough!  What I would say is what we have found almost certainly cannot be defined or labelled and nor would I want it to be that way, I hate labels and being pigeonholed, I've had that for my entire life.

So I wish to take this opportunity to say thank you for staying with me this year, through the tears, the laughter, the moments of complete ridiculousness and absurdity, next year will be my 12th year of blogging, I'm not sure there are many others out there with a blog as old as mine and yet I am still small fry in the blogging world, I'd love to be just a tad more well known and I'd love my story to lead somewhere further, I know I want to continue to do more writing, oh and on the business front, I bought a couple of new domains yesterday, I have this idea for a website which I'm going to work on over Christmas, can't say too much though because it's just an exciting quirky idea in the corner of my mind at the moment!

So here and now to each and every one of you, I want to wish you the best Christmas ever, may you be with the ones you love and hold dear to your hearts, may you kiss often, laugh lots and hug like bears, have yourself a merry little Christmas now...