The Newness of the Year

I noticed bloggers doing retrospectives for New Year's Eve, so I went back and looked at my posts for the year. Turns out this year was really front-loaded with almost all the interesting stuff happening before the end of July, which I covered on my blog Birthday post.

Yeah, there have been great moments, but this also has been a rough year in a lot of ways. I can't quite bring myself to say good riddance to it, though. They say hardship brings growth, and I've had just enough hardship to grow, I suppose--on both personal and professional fronts. I often wonder what my life would be like if I were still teaching... I don't think I'd be the more mature and confident person I am, and I don't think I'd be dreaming what I'm dreaming now on the career front. The problem is putting that confidence and dreaming to work...

But there are actually huge bright spots. The MilBlog Conference still stands as the highlight of my year both personally and professionally. It would take a dozen posts and more personal revelations than I care to make in order to explain, but things that had been developing since I encountered the blogosphere just crystalized at that conference, and I came home a different person with a different view of the possibilities.

And while all my motivation to keep developing Valour-IT was to help the wounded, it's growth into a stable and respected program has helped me too; it opened to me new aspects of myself. I laugh when I think of it because in some ways I'm still not sure how it all happened, how I got swept up in this amazing project and ended up in a leadership position.

It's all actually kind of frustrating. I've been feeling for about a month now that I'm on the cusp of something, something involving both the personal and the professional development I've undergone behind the scenes finally breaking through. So many potentials are lining up that if just one of them would become reality, everything could change. But individually they are 50/50 at best and nothing has happened yet, so I don't let myself hope too much.

I guess my mood and situation are quite appropriate to New Year's Eve: it's all new and unknown and full of potential. Here comes Baby New Year! Let's see what he brings...