Dancing out of 2020

2020 Was one the weirdest years for most of us. Covid-19 took over the entire world and affected us all. The police violence against black people came to a breaking point in America and made the rest of the world reflect on themselves as well, though unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have made a dent yet. The typhoon hit the Philippines recently. And there is much more big news that went around the world. But for this post I’m just going to look at my year.

Personal

It was a very confronting year for me. It was the year that I committed myself to therapy. It is hard. And I have a lot to work on but I’m trying, and that is something at least. Some things just need to change so that I can be a better and relaxed me and ultimately a better mom for Merijn.

Merijn is just one that I am so proud of. Covid asked a lot of him at the start of the year but he adjusted to the new things as requested from him. He turned 4 at the end of August and he has grown so much. The primary school took a lot out of him (and me) but he has been doing great since October. He loves going. He loves counting and he is learning letters. He is doing pretty great at the moment. We’ll see what the future will hold for him.

I could talk about covid-19 at length but I kind of don’t want to. The whole situation has been hard for so many of us, and the lockdowns even more. As I write this the Netherlands is still in its second lockdown. It wasn’t easy for me or Merijn but we made it through so far so we’ll make it through in 2021.

Despite this being a confronting year I have had some good things. I started a bullet journal at the start of the year and I managed to keep up with it throughout the year. It inspired me to pick up my drawing again and I certainly think I have improved.

This made me finally make the jump to start drawing my own bookmarks and stickers. I created my own Etsy shop In Line with Annemieke. It is hard to combine with Merijn at home during lockdown, to really be able to move out of the hobby portions (which is what it is as long as I keep playing even). But I’d like it to grown more.

I also think I made some progress as a reviewer/blogger. I had some international publishers reach out to me directly to review for sequels, and I was in the acknowledgements of Intisar Khanani’s Brambles. These things made me proud.

Reading Goals

Next to all the reading challenges I did in 2020, I also had some other reading goals I’d like to look at.

Goodreads Reading Challenge 157/60 | Completed

So as you can see I finished this one quite well. I changed my goal to 120 half through the year and still managed to complete that easily. Yeay me.

5 Star Predictions for 2020

Book	Read	5 stars?
Tilly and the Lost Fairytales	Yes	Yes
The Black Prism	No	X
The Shadow of What Was Lost	No	X
Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky	Yes	No
The Ten Thousand Doors of January	Yes	No

So as you can see I read 3 out of 5 books and only one of those turned out to be a 5 star read. I do find it interesting to see what these end up being at the end of the year so I might repeat this, this year. The two books I didn’t read was because of how big they were and how little time I made for them.

Reading Those Series 0/15

I discontinued this goal and changed it to the great series read project. You can read the update for that here.

Mini Goals

Goal	Completed?
Reread Foundryside before reading Shorefall	No
Reread The Bone Season	No
Read The Rain Wild Chronicles	No
Finish the Riyria Revelations	No
Read the Books from my November German Amazon Haul	7/15 | No

I shall go hide in shame. 2020 Just was not the year for goals I think, haha.