How 2023 Was My Year of Growth

And why 2024 will be even better

One of the best activities you can do for their mental health is reflecting on their life journey. Even if progress seems small, and you’ve seemingly made no progress since your last review, there are signs you’ve progressed. Sometimes you have to think about things in detail.

With the end of 2023 imminent, it’s this mindset in mind that leads me to write this article. After all, practise what you preach, while growing as a person in the process, is best practice.

Reflecting on Medium

In June, I joined Medium. I’ve been navigating the world of freelance writing here. I have enjoyed my time writing here. It’s also been fun engaging with other creatives and learning from them. I’ve also begun building more confidence in my writing and feeling able to share my work with others.

However, I’ve also been thinking about what direction to take my writing in here. My initial niche was moving abroad and international travel — which is still important to me — however, I’ve also been trying to incorporate sustainability, another passion of mine, into my writing.

I’m still working out how best to build on this long-term and what is the most sustainable writing schedule for me. Right now, I’m leaning towards a biweekly schedule. The reasons for this relate to my career path in general, which I’ll talk about later.

Reflecting on my career path

My main goal, especially since my birthday earlier in the year, is to sort out my career. This is harder than it sounds because I have multiple barriers to work that I’ve had to address over the last few years.

So, let’s start with the positives.

I finally have a firm direction where I wish to go career-wise. I aim to move into some form of green job. Ideally, I’d work from anywhere I want in the process. I have managed to start connecting with other like-minded professionals if any of you are reading this, hello) and am hoping to seek more opportunities in the new year to connect with others. I’ve never truly had this before.

Additionally, I’ve had some success with my YouTube channel side hustle. While I hoped to have over 1k subscribers by the end of 2023, I am not far behind (900 subscribers) and already have a winning formula. While I haven’t earned any money yet, I’ve found it to be an effective form of self-care and a way of expressing myself while building a portfolio.

Now for the challenges.

I’ve been forced to confront and unpack a lot of personal trauma that affects my confidence and abilities when handling the workplace.

Unfortunately, the lack of support for complex trauma and how it affects someone’s ability to work is very poorly understood. I’ve only recently found a resource to deal with this, even though I needed this years ago. I also haven’t really had the support I needed to achieve my potential career-wise. All my achievements I’ve had to do entirely by myself. This lack of support is why I’ve had so many issues building a career.

I’m unpacking all this stuff now because I haven’t had rapid success with building side hustle streams as rapidly as I anticipated. I planned to build some income online before looking for a therapist privately. Contrary to what many people claim, in the UK, therapy does not exist unless you pay for it or get extremely lucky with a charity. There is also no support or understanding for this in employment services either.

Because of this and the lack of resources, I thought I had no choice but to return to work full-time first (even though on reflection, I was not ready to do so till earlier this year).

I will write more about this soon as I have a lot to say.

Regardless, I’m glad I have done this and can start planning a strategy more effectively.

How I aim to grow in 2024

I’ve set myself a very ambitious goal. By the end of 2024, I aim to be either out of the UK or have a firm plan to leave with hard dates. The two possible scenarios in which I aim to do this are either:

• leave on a digital nomad visa in a remote-based role
• leave on a working holiday visa and settle down elsewhere later.

I’ve already written about this in some form on Medium, which has helped with research.

Do I believe this is possible? Yes, but it will require lots of work to land job opportunities and acquire passive income. Given how much I’ve developed in 2023 (especially in comparison to where I was when the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020), I’m optimistic that I will make further progress to get to where I want to be.

There are many sub-goals within this bigger goal, which are worth achieving in their own right. Even if I fail at achieving my main goal, achieving these subgoals is still a massive feat.

I also aim to keep furthering my employability skills. I need to get better at networking. I believe in-person events are where I’m best placed to do so.

I also want to fully monetise my YouTube channel to turn it into a side income stream. In an ideal scenario, I’d grow it enough so that if I needed to rely on it for income, I could do so.

As mentioned earlier, I plan to fully settle into a writing routine on Medium.

Final thoughts

2024 is gonna be a year of growth for me. I’m confident this will happen as long as I work to make this happen.

I’d also like to take a moment to thank everyone for all their support, whether it’s just reading posts on here, Linkedin or elsewhere. You helped make my progress possible, thank you so much.

Here’s to an amazing 2024 — for all of us.

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