New Year, New Hopes

Welcome to 2022!

The rain is pouring down on my window while I watch “The Gardener’s World” – a spring edition. On the TV screen, plants are sprouting and flowering and you can almost feel that smell of a spring garden coming to life. A perfect reminder that after the winter, there’s always spring, and if I bear these two more months of rain and grey clouds, I’ll enjoy the beauty of nature coming back to life, again.

I didn’t start this new year very excited. Maybe because here, in the Netherlands, we’re in the middle of yet another lockdown. Last year we gladly said goodbye to 2020, with the hope of the vaccine and normal life on the horizon. But now, we realise the pandemic is still strongly going on and we don’t know what the year will bring.

The past year has been a challenging year for me, professionally. I changed my career path, leaving behind a good chunk of my life and I started building something new, which I didn’t know exactly what it will be. I felt brave, and I felt scared. I went through many doubts and many confirmations, and I don’t know if at the end of the year I was where I would have wanted to be.

The road in front of me is not clear, it’s just a blur and a mix of wishes, hopes and plans. For a control freak like myself, that’s pretty scary, but I go on. The year brought many joys, but many disappointments as well. Some from myself, some from the people around me. I discovered I had a too idealised image in mind about the creative world; that creative people and their behaviours are very much like the ones in the corporate world, if not worse, at times. I’ve got some direct hits from people I thought I would collaborate with, but I also met amazing people who were willing to exchange ideas and make something beautiful together. My skin grew thicker this year (although not as much as it needs to be). The entire year was a year of learning: from courses and from people, from my own actions and inactions. An important lesson for me this year was to trust myself: trust that I am making the right choices, that I am how I’m supposed to be and don’t have to change according to other people’s expectations, trust that I have what it takes to do what I want to do. Truth is, I’m still working on these and will do so for the next year as well.

It was a hard year in what regards my family, marked by sickness and death. I am glad I could travel to Romania, after almost two years, and visit them — twice. It was a difficult year for many people, so my thoughts are with all of you. I don’t write about my personal situation much, because I prefer to share nice things with you here, on these platforms, and I’ll keep it this way in the future as well. I want to inspire you or bring a smile on your face, because there are enough places online that bring us anxiety. But I couldn’t make a yearly round up without mentioning the hard times, especially because trying to be creative when you are worried about someone dear is almost impossible.

I call 2021 my year of freedom. Freedom from the 9 to 5 job, from giving away my time and my energy to people, projects and companies that don’t resonate with me at all. I’ve had my time only for myself, to do whatever I wanted with it (most of the time). I could go swim in the middle of the week, spontaneously plan a trip to the forest or take a nap at lunch time. I could pursue the directions I wanted in my work and in my learning. There was time to try many things, make many mistakes and also accomplish some things.

I like to draw the line and see what’s happened in the past year. I also like to make new plans, although I still didn’t sit and make any proper plans for 2022, because the future feels very uncertain and many of my plans were put on hold by the global situation. However, I know I will try to stick to my new direction, while being open to new opportunities. I will work on the blogs, photography, develop my new found passion for video and pursue the exciting project of creating and selling NFTs. I want to focus on local traveling, and show you as much of the Netherlands as I can – places and people alike.

I will also work part time on social media collaborations and hopefully this year will bring me some exciting ones. Hmm, and I said I don’t have plans yet… Is it too much? Is it too little? For the multipotentialist in me, this is normal. The limited number of hours in a day will determine, along the year, what I’ll be able to do and what I will have to give up. I am also open to suggestions so please let me know what you would like to see here on Amsterdamian and I’ll take it into consideration.

Another big wish I have for this year is to focus more on my health and well-being, even if that means I have to give up some of the plans. Nothing else is more important than being healthy (mentally and physically), and I’ll do my best to remember that.

The word of the year, for me, will be “perseverance”. I think it’s the perfect way to describe what I think it will follow.

How about you? What do you wish from this new year? Did you make any resolutions?

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