My Watershed Year

Apparently I’m not the only to be glad that 2012 has moved on. For a while there, I was convinced that I had some kind of spell on me, and not the good mojo kind.

First, I had to leave my job for health reasons so I’ve been among the unemployed for what feels like forever.  Since March, I’ve been scrambling to either find another job that would not put in the same position as my previous one had OR figure out a way to make a living on my own. That led to a lot of stress and failed efforts.

As I’ve written about a few times, I lost my Pops after his long fight against COPD came to an uncomfortable and grueling end. This hit me a little harder than I expected since the family never expected Dad to outlive his prognosis by five years and I thought we were all prepared. As many know, there is no such thing as preparation in the death of a loved one. Loss is loss. The only good thing about being out of work has been the ability to be there for both my father, when he was still alive, and my mother.

I seriously thought I’d lost the ability to write until National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) came along and then the skies began to clear. I managed 53K+ words in the month of November and although I’m just now heading into the rewrite, I feel like someone who had been about to drown and was pulled out of choppy waters just before going down for the last time.

I honestly don’t remember much of December.  Visiting my daughter in Phoenix for Christmas is clear as a bell, but the rest of the month is a big blur.

That brings us to January, when life began to shift – for the better, much better. Blog posting came back. Story ideas appearing in my dreams came back, like how!  I dreamt about a business idea, and after fermenting for months as I applied for a business license and set up a bank account, etc., the vision is now reality. I’m off and running like a bat out of hell after my own business that sprouted out of a literal dream, from which I woke up laughing and saying these words, “Uncover Granny”; more about that in the near future.

Maybe it was my determination to get back on track. Maybe it was the turning of a new leaf at midnight December 31, 2012. Maybe it was my own desire to crawl out of a hole that had become way too cramped.  Writing down my resolutions helped. Waking up determined to change things helped. But, I swear, 2012 had me by the throat. It was truly my watershed year and now I can go on; clean, refreshed and believing in the future, again.

Does 2013 feel different to you, too?