I have been seeing a lot of stuff recently about New Year’s resolutions, about how 2011 sucked and how 2012 will be better and I wanted to write something about that. For me, a New Year’s resolution is largely redundant seeing as I started to radically change the way I lived my life two months ago. I have made a lot of choices about what I want to be doing that I am proud of and I hope to continue this into 2012 and beyond.

However one of the things that I’m finding frustrating is how slow the process is. I’ve made some interesting discoveries about myself that I really want to capitalise on, but it’s so difficult to see progress. Particularly I have made an effort to put more energy into relationships that I find nurturing and less energy into the relationships I find less nurturing and sometimes even draining. The problem with that is that it’s hard to fill the gaps left by people I used to spend a lot of time on who I now want to move away from. I have opened my heart and my schedule up to new people, but so far not many new people have presented themselves. To be fair I probably couldn’t deal with too many new people right now anyway, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are times I wish it happened sooner.

One of the other frustrations I have is with work. I know I will have to get some sort of job to keep myself afloat and make sure I don’t start living off my savings but with my new found freedom and need to do things that don’t kill my soul my job options are severely limited. I am not willing to work full time anymore, but there are far less part time jobs available than there are people who want them. I am starting to become concerned that I will find it hard to find work, but I should just have faith in the universe that it will find me an awesome job soon and I am expecting a lot to have call backs on the first day back from New Year’s break!

In the positive column I have recently found an awesome new house in Malvern. It’s a three bedroom ground floor apartment in a great location, with lots of space, and light, and my new housemate seems really positive. She’s not the sort of woman I would normally hang out with so I hope that I am able to learn some awesome things from her in the next part of my journey.

I have made some awesome discoveries in my art – particularly with my photography. I REALLY REALLY love my new camera! It’s amazing! I have booked myself in to have a 3 hour course in how to use the functions that came free when I bought the camera in a couple of weeks. I hope it gives me some more insight into things like how to change the white balance, what the aperture does etc.

I have started being more proactive with approaching friends who are arty with ideas. Today I started to set up a project with a friend that will involve writing/drawing on my body as a canvas and then taking photos of the results for this blog and our portfolios. I was inspired by a blog I read here where the author was auctioning off a similar experience.

My writing has been harder to see improvements in. I am very pleased that I am still really inspired to blog, but other writing, like poetry or short stories, has not been so forthcoming. It is probably to do with my own lack of discipline that I have not been as productive with this. I am considering a couple of short courses at the CAE (Centre for Adult Education) in Melbourne to see if forcing myself to study writing and forcing myself to produce sets me off onto some sort of roll. There are people out there who don’t believe you can teach people to write, and there is something to be said for that argument, but I think even if it is an exercise in how I don’t want to write it would probably be useful. And of course there are likely to be other lovely writers there who I can befriend which would be lovely.

I guess what I wanted to do with this post is to say thank you so much for everyone out there in the blogosphere for believing in me, to everyone who thinks I’m doing the right thing, to everyone who said they have never been happier as when they are living for themselves, Thank You! I truly love the decisions I’ve made in my life recently, and while there are new stresses in my life, I would much rather be dealing with these than with trying to keep myself sane in the world where I used to live. I think I have started something truly wonderful and I look forward to seeing where the next year takes me!

In the words of the great Douglas Adams “I may not have gone were I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be”.