It has been a long, long, long year. At least to me. At the beginning of 2015, I was still in school, still going through the motions of writing papers and attending practicums. Then came graduation, and the sudden realization that I had No Job – this coupled with the organization of BlytheCon Vancouver had kept me busy. I was applying for jobs left, right, and centre along with trying to keep on top of things behind the scenes for BlytheCon. Then BlytheCon was blissfully over and I still had no job, but no I had no excuse for not putting even more energy into finding a job because I didn’t have BlytheCon to distract me.

And might I say it was really, really a low blow to the self-esteem every time one of my classmates that I graduated with posted about how they were going through orientation or aced an interview or how much they were loving where they were working? Jealousy and envy were my very close friends at that point. Of course I realized that nobody in my shoes were going to post things like “LOL, still unemployed” – which is something important to note: people put their best forward on the internet.

But once I got a job (!) and started going through orientation, it just all went a lot faster. Suddenly I had a full week of orientation, and some workshops, followed by more orientation, and then a whole bunch of orientation shifts which kept me really busy and also unable to spend as much time on my hobbies as I had grown accustom to during my ‘sabbatical’ between end of school and beginning work.

That makes the time that I spend with my friends and family more valuable, and the short moments I do get to interact with dolly people online or in person that much better. I don’t ‘waste’ time on the internet anymore, instead it’s quite deliberate visits to certain sites, making sure I don’t fall down the rabbit hole that is Netflix for hours and hours on end anymore because I need to be up at 5:30am the next morning. Life has changed a bit since I started working, and that’s a good thing. It means that I need to work on finding a work-life balance as well as having a greater appreciation for the time I have for the people around me.

The day that I wrote this, I spent some time writing in some holiday cards for people near and far from me, because I think it’s important to share with people that they mean something to do you.

Have you sent out your holiday cards yet? It’s getting down to the wire to have them hopefully arrive on time! And do you send them to Blythe friends?