2015 Year in Review

January 3, 2016

2015 was a year of big changes for me. The biggest was starting on the path to divorce and moving into my own apartment. For the first time in my life, I'm living completely on my own. That feels very different, and very exciting. I also had my first anxiety attack earlier in the year. Since then, while I haven't had any more, I've definitely felt more anxious and vulnerable than before. This is strange, since prior to the attack, I always felt like I didn't worry about anything. I'm still mystified as to why it happened.

Continuing the health-related theme, in December I noticed that I had lost ten pounds since the last time I'd been weighed. I chalked it up to my new method of commuting since moving into the apartment - walking to work. I'm not convinced that was completely the case anymore, but it was probably a big contributor. The holidays erased half of that loss, but eh, I can recover from that. I established a habit of doing push-ups every morning after waking, I'm working on my nutrition, and I joined Bodyspace, a fitness social networking run by Bodybuilding.com.

At work, I went from being sole operations engineer on a legacy platform to lead operations engineer on a team that helped launched a brand-new platform to, in October, digital operations manager. Granted, I'm a “working manager,” and still spend a lot of time on the engineering side of things. Starting in November, I began budgeting in earnest. I'm much more aware of where my money is going and for the first time in well over a decade I feel in control of my finances. I've kept it up, and by this point I think budgeting has become a daily habit. 2015 was very stressful. 2016 seems full of promise and I'm very optimistic about the future. Here's to a year of health and personal growth!