A year of Vickipedia

Thank you, and here's to 2024!

This week marks the beginning of a new year (HIYA 2024!) and also one year since I left full-time employment and started this little newsletter that’s become a solid, enjoyable part of every week since. Thank you for sticking around this long! Welcome, if you’ve just joined us! Vickipedia has become a lovely way to scratch the itch of personal writing, and a great way to keep myself accountable and on a schedule every week.

I always find myself feeling a little jittery and on edge at this time of year. I find the concept of a new year and fresh start exciting, but don’t like the pressure around celebrating it - NYE is always the worst night out of the year, a hill I will die on. This year I’m extra jittery because it’s a forthcoming year full of great possibilities, building on everything I accomplished in 2023. But nothing is exactly clear, no plans are laid solidly. Everything is new. It’s both incredibly exciting and extremely unsettling.

In that first newsletter, I mooted what 2023 might look like. I toyed with the idea of a podcast that didn’t happen (but still might, one day). Reading it now, I can sense my own nerves and excitement. I spent most of last Christmas with my neck in a homemade brace; an acupuncturist I visited around that time told me it was a sign from my body that I was fearful. I guess I was.

When I left my job at STELLAR this time last year, I had no idea what was in store but I did have a schedule of sorts. I had a book deal to write a novel for Penguin and a solid deadline, but I had absolutely no idea how that was going to go. I’d never written anything longer than my college dissertation, and didn’t have a clue if I could even sustain a story for over a hundred thousands words. I was nervous, but more than anything, I was excited. The year felt full of opportunity, a fresh new season in my life.

I’m pleased to report that it was just that, and it’s been mostly brilliant. I’m very proud that the book is now a reality, and that it’s called REALITY CHECK. It’s coming out at the beginning of May, and more on that soon! I’ve learned that I can do big, scary things, and that dreams really do come true.

Besides the novel, I didn’t have a notion what else I was going to do. An author-in-waiting needs to do other jobs to earn until (and often, long after) their book comes out. I ended up writing a lot of features, and rediscovering my love for the medium. I figured out what kind of things I liked doing and more importantly, what I didn’t. I learned SO MUCH; mostly that I really love writing about lifestyle and culture, interviewing interesting people and relating to others through telling their stories.

I learned what I could do without, which was a lot of the extraneous stuff that surrounds a career in media - elaborate press drops, glamorous events and work trips. These things are of course LOVELY, but in reality they mean very little.

I learned that I’m perfectly capable of sitting with nothing pressing on the schedule, something that would have terrified me in the past.

I’ve learned not to look too far ahead. I’ve always very much been something of a forward planner, but we never know where life is going to take us. Writing the novel, I was forced to think in set blocks of time, because I had little control beyond them. Time is precious, and finite. I’ve been guilty of rushing through it in the past. Living in the moment (even the difficult, gut-wrenching ones) has become so important to me.

I learned that advocating for my own health was possible and life-changing. Four months after my laparoscopic surgery and Mirena coil insertion, I am feeling SO MUCH better, and excited to get back in to a health and fitness routine.

I’ve learned that my anxiety issues are not fixed (and this is something I’ll write about in more detail soon). That despite years of experience and meds and CBT and logic and exercise and a natural sunny, positive disposition, I can still get big frights that throw me for days, weeks even. That when I’m rattled, my stomach is the first thing to go awry, and my self-confidence the second. The latter is more dangerous.
It is in these times that I really understand the point of living in the now - of not fortune-telling, catastrophising, getting lost in what-ifs, of not giving in to those cognitive distortions.

I’ve learned what’s important, and in what order.

I learned that most people are kind and nice and supportive, and that a few bad apples don’t spoil the whole barrel. I’ve learned that the world feels scarier than ever before, that heinous acts can happen, that people who feel truly justified in their beliefs can make things happen, both good and bad.

Now it is 2024. I turn 38 at the end of this month. My book is coming out in mere weeks. It’s time to start the other kind of work, the kind that goes in to promoting and selling a novel. To try and turn that in to a long, fulfilling career. It’s time to really focus on what I’ve learned. It’s squeaky bum time, as they say in football.

Happy new year, lovely gang. I love yiz.