I’ve not done resolutions for years and instead, I decided to switch to goals and that’s working much better for me. There’s less pressure that way, and as it’s a goal, I’ve something to work towards.

I honestly can’t remember if I made any goals at the beginning of 2023, other than completing therapy and making it to the end of the year, by making it to the end of each day.

Because I have done the work to look at my limiting beliefs and gained an honest view of who I actually am from facts and not from someone’s opinion of who they think I am or who they believe I am, my confidence has grown. My anxiety has lowered, and I'm much better at stopping negative thoughts now, so I don’t get stuck in a negative self-talk track and end up in a downward spiral.

In mid-January, I found out that the store I had worked in for the last fourteen years was having to close after the landlord wasn't willing to renegotiate a new lease from May this year. It was defiantly a shock to be told that news on a conference call with the rest of the store team and a few people from head office. As we were on furlough from work and not seeing each other daily, it took a few months for the news to sink in. There were initial hopes of reopening the store from April 12 for a closing down sale before closing down the store and sending the stock and anything else to the head office.

On April 10th 2018, I posted my first ever blog post on Blogger after only creating it the day before. I'd been thinking about starting a new blog for a while and then one day I decided to just do it. What did I have to lose? Absolutely nothing! I started with prompts from The Blurt Foundation who did thirty days of word prompts that month which they called a Self-careathon where the words were things like; obstacles, support and recharge. I managed to do all the prompts even though I started late as they were for the duration of April. I found that while writing the posts that it was helping me to feel a bit better as I focused on how the cues reflected my mental health journey.

As you can see from the title, this is part two of a post that I wrote in January of this year. If you haven't read that one or you would like a refresher of what I talked about, you can head on over here to read that one. Over the past few weeks since publishing that post, I have had additional thoughts about the subject of making friends as an adult, that I wanted to voice.

This post started as notes on my phone after chatting with a friend on Instagram back in June 2020. She'd posed the question on her stories a few days earlier about feeling the pressure to buy a home as an adult, instead of renting a place.

I replied with "It's what society expects; marriage, kids and a mortgage, although not necessarily in that order." And when she agreed I added, "So if we don't have one or any we feel like we're failing. Even though we're not."

As a kid I wasn't the most outgoing, I was shy and quiet. I had a few friends but as I moved around a lot due to my dad being in the army, we never managed to stay in touch. This was the days before the Internet, social media and mobile phones. To stay in touch we had to write letters or *gasp shock* call people and actually speak to the other person at the end of the phone line! I mean. The horror!!!

Late last year, I was asked by one of the pastors at my church if I would share my testimony as part of a message where it would be an essential part of it. I said I would think about it as it involves domestic abuse trauma from my past that I'm still working through.