2022

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to the last Thursday of 2022! What a year it’s been. 2022 brought a bunch of changes, challenges, and revelations. To highlight just some of what happened:

I started my graduate studies in Spiritual Direction at United Theological Seminary.
I did a sleep study and found out I’m really bad at breathing when I sleep. I consequently ended up getting an APAP machine, and it has been life-changing.
In April I made a last-minute trip to Chicago to see a friend in a play, and got to catch up with some of my favorite people.
I went on my first big company trip to New York City in May and got to meet a bunch of the people I’d only known through screens for the past two years.
I got my Carrie Fisher tribute tattoo.
We made it back to Song School after a couple of years away; I took a performance class with Amy Speace that was also life-changing.
The end of August marked a whole year with Nova, and we had a party to celebrate her 3rd birthday.
I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in September, and that’s brought a whole bunch of new medications and routines into my life.
We talked my best friend into moving into our building, and we live in a sitcom now, and it’s wonderful.
I took a songwriting class online with Sue Demel through the Old Town School of Folk Music and actually wrote some songs that I’m pretty happy with.
I passed all of my first year of seminary classes.

In addition to all that, we helped several members of our chosen family navigate a variety of crises, and I started making some new friends at school and through D&D.

My big, overarching goal for 2022 was to learn to approach life with more curiosity and compassion and less of a need for control. I think I made pretty good progress, although there’s definitely still room for growth. It’s leading me straight into the goal for 2023, which is to lean into vulnerability and unapologetically ask for what I need. As my therapist reminded me a couple of weeks ago – “you don’t need to be perfect to ask for your needs to be met.”

I think I’m going to wrap it up there for the year. I hope your holiday season has been reasonably gentle and that you’re able to go into the new year feeling refreshed. I’ll send you off with these holiday photos of Nova:

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to the final Thursday of 2021, and the penultimate day of the year. 2021 has been…a wild ride, to say the least.

The last couple of years I’ve used my last blog of the year to look back on the goals I set back in January and see where I ended up. I honestly haven’t done a lot of looking back yet, or looking forward at new goals, but I don’t feel like pushing this out to next week, so here we go.

Goals I had at the beginning of the year, and progress on those goals:

Keep writing.
- I honestly didn’t think I’d made that much progress with this one, but as it turns out, I wrote 32 songs this year (about 2/3 of them in February for FAWM). Some of them are keepers (a couple I actually quite like). I had hoped to get a couple of things recorded this year, but that didn’t happen.
“Yes, and…” opportunities at work.
- I’d call this one a mixed success. I was promoted to team lead in February, helped nudge a couple of my direct reports along in their career growth, and am in the final stages of hiring someone new for my team. I didn’t take as much initiative in leadership projects as I had intended.
Keep investing in the communities and relationships that allow me to thrive.
- I feel good about this one, although there’s always room to grow. I have a good routine for checking in with a lot of folks virtually and have a couple of virtual communities that are really important to me. Going forward, I want to invest more time into local friendships, too, so I have people I can do things in person with whenever that feels safe again.
Try to internalize the notion that it doesn’t have to be perfect to be good or valuable.
- Still working on this, but I think I’m doing a better job of recognizing when perfectionism sneaks in. I’m letting go of the idea that “perfect” even exists, although it’s hard to not hold myself to that standard.
Keep doing the work to be an adult that my past selves can be proud of.
- I feel like I’ve done a lot with this one. I found a new therapist here in the Twin Cities about a month ago, and she’s commented that she can tell that I’ve done a lot of work in therapy in the past to get to where I am now. I can see the evidence of that, too.

Other things that happened:

Survived another pandemic year.
Moved back to Minnesota.
Missed Song School, which was super sad but was the right decision for us at the time.
Adopted Nova!
Applied for and was accepted into seminary.

I know I’m missing a bunch of things, but those feel like the big ones.