How Did I Grow This Year?

A few small wins for little ol’ me.

That picture is actually from April 2023 in Fiji, but I liked it, so I used it on a 2024 post. Humble-brag. Sue me, son.

I think people can often get to the end of years and either performatively recap their wins, as I just did mentioning a trip to Fiji from a different year, or bemoan their losses (real or imagined) and focus on the next year and what will be different.

What is absent from both models is a brief pause to reflect on how you grew as a person in the past 12 months. I will now try to do that.

Employment

I’ve mostly been freelance since November of 2015, with a few W-2s mixed in there along the way. Usually, either via my fault (70%) or their fault/layoffs (30%), my W-2s don’t last a full year and I’m back into the freelance void, now competing with AI on writing project type stuff. Well, this year I started with a full-time job at a church, which I got laid off from (I think the second-in-command pastor disliked me, although I have never been totally clear why), then had a few freelance gigs, then had a newsletter job that I got laid off from (I had a Gen Z female boss who seemed to also dislike me, although I was never sure why, but since I’ve been laid off, they’ve laid off a dozen other people, so some of the…