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Haley Elder
Haley Elder

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2022: New Year && Goals

The first few drafts of this post were rehashing the last two years in a bit more detail than I’m sure anyone would ever want to read about again. Instead, it’ll be a high level overview of what happened and future goals for this year!

2020 had started on a high note of pushing my introvert tendencies to be more social and connect with others and was quickly shut down; we all had to think of different ways to connect with others. Despite the doom and gloom of the year (pandemic, protests, wildfires), some good things did happen: meeting new friends, frequent walks/hikes, visiting family, attending my friend’s wedding, and others but 2021 is where it all went sideways.

Last year had felt like life had stagnated and it became more difficult to pull out the positive moments. A few of those positive notable events were moving to a new place, adopting my own cat pal, Tycho, planned out a solo vacation, and was featured in the CodeNewbie spotlight. To add onto the stagnation were some personal and professional events that had shattered my self-confidence, trust, increased my already bad imposter syndrome and really took a hit to my mental health and ongoing burnout.

To give myself the proverbially kick in the pants and pull myself out of this funk, I’ve envisioned my top three goals list for this year:

THE BIG THREE (ish):

  • Get a real developer/engineer role! (stretch goal: maybe even do some open source work?).
  • Run a 10k race! Aiming at Bridge of the Goddess 10k in September or so.
  • Read a book a month (maybe get into more audiobooks)! I hope to keep my Goodreads list updated and looking for recommendations.

I took the first week ish off to regroup and ponder how to write this out as the tail end of the holidays were a bit stressful and needed a break. On to 2022!

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started”

  • Mark Twain

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