the six month countdown to what will be the largest personal growth journey of my life begins today. i don't think i have fully processed what it will mean and how that event will alter our family dynamics forever. all i can say is that i put my trust in You - holding fast to Your promise that no one, thing or circumstance will be able to shut this door that You have chosen to open for us, as long as it is part of Your glorious will.
in writing this narrative of my life over the past year i had to wrestle with both loss and coming to terms with my latent inner demons which i never knew were buried so deep within me. losing something which was almost life itself was both numbing and sobering - and perhaps a part of me has not fully healed from that episode, which continues to manifest itself in occasional thoughts of "what ifs" to shake my confidence in god (waiting and being able to do absolutely nothing is the hardest bc it requires faith in its purest essence). i also finally figured out why i had made an idol of my own life goal and set arbitrary timelines for myself - timelines which i used as key markers of success or failure to either affirm or beat myself up as i saw fit. i figured out why i tended to overcompensate - i needed to be my own trailblazer to define what success looked like for me because teenage me had been broken by the world leaving her behind. but there is a silver lining in every brooding cloud - in those dim moments i saw and experienced the love of family and the beauty of marriage.
marriage. 2022 was our first year of being married, which m had to remind me is an achievement in itself. we were just reflecting on how 2022 felt like it flew by and a large part can be attributed to how much fun we had in the past year doing life together. i am convinced that marrying the right person for oneself is one of the most important life decisions one will ever have to make, just bc one will spend so much time of one's life with that person once one crosses that bridge from dating into a god-ordained bond that even the state recognises. being able to find joy in the boring, mundane things in life together is the gift of marriage life. i remember saying in 2021 while we were at the beginning of house and wedding preparation that i wished we could skip over to the "sleepover forever" part. the "sleepover forever" part remains one of my favourite parts of marriage life - ending the night tucked in bed and feeling snuggly under our toasty sheets, chatting about everything under the sun until one of us falls asleep. i used to be a nocturnal owl, but at the beginning of our marriage i told myself that going to bed together over the next 365 days and beyond will be one of the small ways we continue to invest in us, and it has now become my favourite way to end the night.
2022 was the year where i exercised the muscle of staying put and sinking my roots - to the outside world it may have looked like a career lull but i feel grateful to have stuck to my own path that was the most ideal route to hone in on the narrative i wanted to write for myself. i made the most of being where i was. in my first year of being in the job i had struggled with understanding what good looked like. i am now in the midst of being what good looks like, and this is really what i want to get out of this role before i leave. my favourite triumph of the past year was becoming (almost like?) friends with the cmo of one of the hardest customers in our patch (who had really intimidated me at the beginning of the year when i took over this particular account) and watching my consistent hard work and sincerity pay off with our growing relationship, culminating in a full renewal with incrementals despite the account being flagged up as one of the few accounts with the highest attrition risk. the arduous journey we took continues to give me hope in the value of the work that i do. in 2022 i also took on one of the most prestigious enterprise accounts in our patch that used to be managed only by directors - i feel a sense of pride when i think about the unprecedented breakthrough i had with this account by establishing and leading a recurring cadence across all the business units' stakeholders. i now have a seat at the table and that was a result of hard work, boldness and god's favour. 2022 was also the year where i was both exposed to and dipped my toes into "chief-of-staff" in tech kind of work. it takes years to build a personal brand and credibility within the organisation - it was only by staying put that this opportunity opened up. i am grateful that i got to see and do things that people my age do not usually get exposed to. it was definitely more work but also a lot more visibility, learning and brand-building that i got to do.
and so, i would say that 2022 wasn't a bad year at all. 2022 reminds me of this image i saw that really resonated with me. a picture is worth a thousand words, so i'll leave it here as an apt wrap-up to this season of sowing:
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