Goodbye 2020!

2020 is almost over, and while I won’t be sad to see it go, an awful lot of good things have happened for me, though not as I expected! I thought now was a good time to take a look back on the things I’ve achieved, as well as checking on the 22 goals I wrote when I turned 22, and my 2020 Reading Goals.

22 Goals Check-In

Habits I Want To Form

• Get into a proper work routine. Yeah, so I’ve almost done this! It’s not perfect, but it’s getting there.
• Write fiction regularly. Yeah, so about this one… Have Not Done.
• Exercising regularly. I am still doing this! I’m not running currently because I don’t want to run in the dark, but I am doing home workouts 2-3 times a week.
• Cross-stitching. This is a sort of! I have started a new project, but I haven’t picked it up for a while.
• Taking water to bed. Another big no to this one! I’m awful at remembering.
• Read more non-fiction. I haven’t done this yet either!
• Go to bed by 10:30. I usually go to bed around 10:30, 11 at the latest, so another sort of!
• Play ukulele more often. Not done this at all!
• Short Term Goals
• This category is a bit embarrassing, so let’s just say I have started to think about my 2021 reading goals, and I have sorted my deferral out. The rest? Nope!
• Long Term Goals
• I have been unhauling books to get my physical TBR down, and I have been saving money to help with my MA! I’ve done a bit of work on sorting out my Spotify library, and I have been cooking regularly. My WordPress followers is currently around 750 so I’m working towards that 1k! The rest are still… works in progress!

2020 Reading Goals

• Read 70 books. CHECK! So far I’ve read 78, and I’m pretty confident I’ll pass 80.
• Read more diverse books. Of the books I’ve read so far, 26 were written by AoC (9 were Black). 19 were written by authors not from the UK, Ireland or the US. That is, still, overwhelmingly white, but I have discovered a lot of authors of colour that I love and will read more books by in future, as well as having other authors of colour that I’m planning to read in 2021.
• Read the books on my TBR. Mixed results with this one! I read a lot that weren’t on my TBR, but also a lot that were.

Blog Achievements

I’ve had this blog for years, but I’ve never really had that much time to invest into it. Obviously this year, that all changed. At some point, I decided my target was to get 12,000 views in 2020. For context, in 2019, my blog got just over 250 views. I started to post regularly in Feb/March, and in April I got almost 1,000 views! Since then, I’ve only had one month under 1k views, and on December 12th (as I am writing), I’m around 200 views away from my 2020 goal and it’s entirely possible I’ll have reached it by the time this post gets published!
I wish I’d recorded things like how many followers I had when I started posting regularly to see how far I’ve come, but I know it wasn’t very many. My twitter has grown from maybe 100 followers to 1200, and my Instagram from a couple of hundred to over 1600! My blog now has around 750 followers, but at the start of the year I had under 100 followers, if I remember rightly. I’ve also maintained a regular posting schedule for 9 months now! I’ll talk about my plans for my blog in 2021 at the start of next year, but keep an eye out for some big changes around here soon…

Personal Life Update

I mentioned at the start of this post that a lot of good things have happened to me this year. At the start of this year I was a single undergraduate with no experience of working full-time. None of those things apply to me any longer!
In February, I reconnected with my ex-boyfriend, and we worked things out and got back together, and we’re planning to spend Christmas together which I’m super excited for!
I got offers from two brilliant universities for MA programmes I was really excited about, and have a deferred place secured at one of them.
I completed my degree in May, and was awarded a 2:1 Honours degree in July! Technically, I’m a graduate, but we obviously haven’t been able to have the proper ceremony yet due to COVID, but the University is hoping we will be able to have a ceremony this coming summer.
When I decided I wanted to defer my MA degree, I didn’t really know what I was going to do for a year. I started my job hunt after a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. I didn’t get that job, but then I realised that I wasn’t really limited to just applying to work part-time student jobs anymore. I started applying for publishing jobs (pipe dream really), and then realised that teaching was probably my best bet. I applied for some tutoring jobs, and some TA jobs, and ended up being offered 3 TA positions in the span of two days! I’m now studying for my Level 3 TA qualification, while working full-time as a Level 2 TA.
I also bought my first car this year! He’s a Peugeot 107, and I named him Victor.

And… I think that’s about it! Let’s reflect on some of the positives of 2020 in the comments! Did you reach any blogging milestones? Did you change careers, or go freelance? Let’s celebrate!