It was definitely a year

I think I’ve made clear that 2024 was not my favourite year. I’ve also been clear that the year absolutely wasn’t all bad—far from it, in fact. It’s just that for a lot of reasons, and no reason, 2024 and I just didn’t quite get along.

As always, I think that my blogging productivity—the number of posts I publish in a particular month—is a pretty good quick indicator of how I was doing that month. It’s certainly not a perfect measure, since there’s no quick way to differentiate between positive and negative tones/topics, for example, but the fact remains that if I had an unproductive month, there are probably reasons for that.

When the year began, I was full of optimism, not the least because 2023 had been my best blogging year since Nigel died—not as good as the days of old, but much better than any year after 2019. And then as 2024 went on it very nearly became my worst-ever full year of blogging—though I couldn’t have known that at the start of the year.

January, in fact, had a lot going for it. That was when I went on a trip to Fiji with family, and that trip included my 65th birthday. January 2024 was, in fact, was my most productive January since back in 2019 when I turned 60.

Things began slowing down in February, and despite many good things happening that month, when I went to check on the house on Auckland’s North Shore that Nigel and I lived in for a decade, up until February 2017 when we shited and the house became a rental, I found the trip unexpectedly challenging. Even so, I was still expressing optimism that month.

March was a bit worse, followed by a much better April—and then the wheels fell off and my productivity resumed falling. August had what would’ve been Nigel’s 60th birthday, and the following month had the fifth anniversary of his death—five years to the very day.

If the emotional, or perhaps existential, drag on me in 2024 was just about the significant anniversaries or emotional events during the year, then things should’ve improved after September. But, obviously, that didn’t happen. And yet, even some of what felt like my most difficult months, I nevertheless wrote blog posts that were positive, talking about things that interested me or that even made me happy.

Then the disastrous US elections in November definitely brought me down before humble December came charging onto the scene, saving the day. On Boxing Day, the post I published that day helped my blog pass the annual total for 2022, my worst-ever full year of blogging, and this month became my second best December since Nigel died, barely beaten by December 2020’s 35 posts. In fact, my two most productive months for the full year of 2020 though 2024 were December 2020 in first place, and this month, December 2024, in second place. An added bonus: The order I mentioned in that Boxing Day post arrived today, adding a nice pretty bow onto the final busy blogging day of a year that at its start looked so promising.

The larger lessons from all this is that my blog really is a reflection of me: When I’m not doing well, neither is this blog, and when I am, it does well, too. Underneath all that is an entirely different but equally important fact: This blog is a record of my life for more than 18 years. This blog has chronicled things I’ve done, wanted to do, or thought about doing, along with things that interested me, amused me, or even made me angry. I’ve talked about family, including my furbabies, and I’ve talked in detail about navigating through the loss of my entire family apart from Leo and me. So if it seems I place too much importance on my blogging productivity over a year, this is why: This blog is me—well, the parts I’m willing to talk about, anyway.

Someday I’ll be gone, as will we all, but there’s a good chance that long after I’m dead this blog will still be out in the ether—a fact which almost makes me want to delete it right now! Seriously, though, this year has taught me that this blog, with its nearly two decades of content, can be a great tool for me to understand myself. I think that’s a pretty great thing for a hobby to be able to do.

I can’t make any predictions about what will happen in 2025, and I don’t want to make the mistake of being as totally wrong as I was at the very start of this year. Instead, I’d rather just see what happens. To me, that's part of the excitement of every new year, anyway.

So, Happy New Year! I sincerely hope that 2025 is the best year yet for the entire world—and especially my little corner of it.