2017 has been a tough year for me - mostly financially. I have been working on paring down expenses and trying to actually live within my means. I have been working with a social worker and have figured out that I can possibly live on my pension if I am very very careful. If I can find a part time job: even better.

I am digging myself out of debt and depression. I didn't realize how stressed out I was from my job until I no longer had it— blessing in disguise, right?

I am hoping to be generally more together in 2018.

I don't love that my main access to you guys is via my phone- but my laptop is now well & truly freaked and U am not sure when I'll ever be able to replace it.

Anyway, 2017 was tough on so many fronts - I hope that 2018 is better.

I hope so too, Sumi.

Aw, Amy. MWAH!

2017 has been a shit show in most ways, but I'm really glad for the successes and triumphs that others have shared here.

May things fall into place in 2018, sumi. It sounds like you are on the right track.

I keep waiting for things to resolve enough for me to write up 2017, but still have tons of things up in the air. That pretty much sums up the year too. I should know better at this age than to wish the year to speed up and be over, and yet.

hippocampus, THANK YOU for the perfect book and notebook and novella and game! They were lovely to come home too.

My secret buffista gift got mailed today. It's only part 1.

Emily, thank you for the ornaments! (C'ville heart [link] ) They're lovely, and for a good cause!

I had a milestone birthday in 2017, and I celebrated in the BEST WAY, visiting Buffistas in Baltimore, North Carolina, Cincinnati, Dallas, and San Francisco. THANK YOU to Lisa, Amy, Flea, and Msbelle, who very generously put me up in their homes, and THANK YOU to all the Buffistas who came out to help me celebrate. Thank you also to everyone who looked me up when they visited NYC this year.

Therapy, as always, remains a struggle for me. I think I'm making very slight progress, but I keep banging my head against a wall trying to process my childhood trauma; much of which I still have trouble remembering, and was horrible in a way that I don't really want to admit to myself. In my personal life I am haunted by my past; I have been plagued by stretches of extreme loneliness; I am stuck in a career in IT that I am thoroughly burned out on; yet I am too afraid to make the changes I need to. Yet at the same time, I think I might be afraid of trying and succeeding? I'm somehow afraid of being happy? It's something that I have difficulty wrapping my head around.

All the while, I'm being bombarded by current events that make everything even more difficult for me. It constantly makes me feel like I'm trying to swim upstream in therapy.

Mostly, I guess, as a way of avoiding current events, I immersed myself into my photography in a big way this year. I'm shooting film almost 100% these days, and it has been fruitful for me in a big way. For the first time I feel like I have a clear vision, and that I am executing on it. It is extremely satisfying to snap an exposure and know that you got something amazing, and then to get the negative back from the lab, scan it, and have the results confirm your expectations.

However, I need to increase the visibility of my work, and I've completely failed at that. I've had some vague opportunities to exhibit my work that I should have pursued more, but didn't. I have the same troubles putting my work out there that I have putting myself out there in other aspects of my life. I'm afraid of rejection, but at the same time, also afraid of success. I'm not the failure my father repeatedly told me I was growing up, yet I still want to cling to that idea, decades later.

My apologies for posting about it a couple of days after I should have, but Msbelle is THE BEST. I got an awesome package of goodies, including art supplies, an adorable Christmas ornament, cute AND useful kitchen gadgets, a Wonder Woman water bottle, pecan honey butter and some deee-licious green chili jam (so good on pork).

Thank you so much, Msbelle. You are the nicest!

As for write-ups on 2017, I'm not sure if I'm going to or not. What I can say is that 2018 has a very low bar to get over in order to be an improvement.

I'm not done processing 2017 yet.

This was the first full year in our house in the suburbs. I still don't know how to make adult friends. My best friends who moved with us from Brooklyn moved away (forced relocation for a job), and I haven't met anyone new. I love our house, I love the schools, but I'm pretty lonely. And I feel like I'm failing as a parent because I don't know enough other parents to give my daughter a decent birthday party (she wants it to be at the rec center pool, but I literally don't know enough of her classmates' parents to invite that many people).

This was the year my ambivalence about working in the tech industry turned into a full-fledged midlife crisis, the end result of which is that I will be out of work at the end of February, with a generous severance package and no idea at all what the hell to do next. I'm applying for some graduate programs in food science and human nutrition, and also applying for jobs that I think might not make me miserable. Criteria 1 - they can't be any more than 25 miles from my house. (My current commute is 45 miles each way.) I think maybe giving up my current job will ruin us financially, but I also think that not giving it up will ruin me mentally and emotionally.

So, life goals for the year I turn 40 are: figure out what I want to be when I grow up and learn how to make friends.

I received a couple of beautiful ornaments from Kate P. THANK YOU! They are amazing. My name means lily of the valley and one of them is a beautiful red with lily of the valley all over it.

Politically 2017 was a dumpster fire; personally 2017 was a bit of a mixed bag. I had health issues in the spring (sinus infection and bronchitis, then a C. diff. infection due to the antibiotics for them). I had hoped to find a job back in the midwest before last summer, but that didn't happen, so I was stuck in a place where I hated to be outside for three months straight.

On the other hand, I'm finally taking some advantage of the local music offerings and attending more classical concerts—three last summer, a couple in the fall, and several pre-paid for 2018. And I'm attending these with friends, so that's good, too. Having amyth as a neighbor continues to be a delight, and I'm finding myself enjoying my family's company more with every visit. It's great when relatives you knew as infants grow into adults with whom you like to talk.

We're undergoing some restructuring at work. That's always worrisome, but the higher-ups have arranged for me to go to a major conference in March, so presumably they expect me to be around for at least another few months. That said, I'm still hoping to move back to MI as soon as I can find a job in my field there, so here's hoping. (Chicago or western NY would also be good.) So if anyone knows of a university or college in those regions that needs someone to work on their online courses, I'd love to hear about them.