This is the start of a journey recording my progress through disease management, time management and self-actualization. I started this post on the last day of the year, but struggled to express myself without criticsm.  My intention is to silent that internal editor and simply record.

Exactly a year ago I started another blog. One year before that, yet a different one. And more than 10 years before that, I first registered my own domain – and faltered. Privacy is important to me, and it has gotten increasingly difficult to be private.

Yet I want to have my story told, for myself and others. I believe in stories. I was a journalist for a decade. I had some of the richest interactions of my life, listening to people’s stories. They shaped me. Some stories were exceptional, some mediocre, but they were all the lived lives of people I met and I loved hearing them tell them. This was my version of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

In my version of the human story, this past year started on a high and hopeful note. Then there began a gentle decline, increasing rapidly as the months progressed. My body put up quite loud protests to my treatment of it, resulting in several bouts of illnesses, depression, and, in October, a diagnosis of diabetes.

I am hopeful again the start of this year. Hubs tells me this will be our best year. I believe that. Now. To the degree that privacy is even possible online any more, I want to see that story unfold, and learn whether my hopefulness at the start is mirrored in 365 days.

I also believe in the restorative, curative power of making things. I make things from wood, from cloth, from words and from pixels. Of course, we are in some fundamental way, our own creations – the result of daily making. All this is the making of myself.

My sincere thanks for being my audience.