Doctor T Designs

Typically I spend the last week of the year I taking a look back at what I’ve read, how my skating year went, how much Burda impressed us, how successful my sewing has been, and what I want to do next year.  I’ve followed this schedule every year since I started blogging.  This tradition harkens back to the days when my blog was Sew Skate Read and not Doctor T Designs.  At the time, these year end wrap ups made more sense; I’d posted a lot about all of those topics back in the day, but much less so now.  While I’m still reading quite a bit, I just didn’t feel like a book review post really fit in with my blog anymore; the focus just hasn’t been on reviewing books, except those related to sewing, and I really wasn’t excited by the prospect of doing a full post on the books I’ve read this year.  Possibly this speaks more to the books I’ve read this year than anything else, but I just haven’t felt motivated to do a year end wrap up post, so for the first time in the history of my blog I won’t be doing my traditional Reading Roundup.

I’m not doing a skating review post for a similar reason.  I think I’ve known that I’m done competing for a while now, but this year really solidified that for me.  I have been on skates, but not seriously training.  I am working on maintaining and upgrading my judging credentials (which will take up a significant portion of the month of January for me), but that sort of activity doesn’t really make for good blog fodder, and, in general, I think it’s actually much better to leave this part of my life off of social media now, for hopefully obvious reasons.  Skating is something that’s always going to be at the edges of my life (well, maybe more than just at the edges), but not in a way that is convenient to write about on a public forum.  Suffice to say, it’s still a significant part of my life, but is no longer a significant part of my blog, so it doesn’t really warrant an end-of year post any longer.

As a physical outlet, I have been actively participating in Lightspeed Saber League, a competitive lightsaber combat sport, which has also been taking up a good deal of time.  I’ve been with this group for several years now, and I really love what this sport is growing into.  Again, my own involvement is not really worthy of generating it’s own year end post, but it is worth mentioning as being an important part of my year.  With the lack of skating I needed to find some way to stay physically active, and this has been it.  I’m definitely not competitive in this sport on the same level that I was in skating, and I think that is ok.  The competitive side of me needs a bit of a rest, I think.  In the past I’ve always been the super competitive kid, even for things that I had to work really hard at.  But it seems I’m not quite that way anymore.  Something is slightly off.  Everything just… feels different. 

It’s a bit disconcerting, actually, to have this sort of mellow empty space that used to be filled by something as driving as the need to skate.  Skating and competing have been such a large part of my life for so long that I’m not really sure how best to make space for new, different things.  How best to rearrange my life.  I’m not entirely ready to let go of the some things, but I also feel like I don’t have enough time to spend it on things that ultimately don’t add up to something beneficial.  It’s perplexing, somewhat.  Ultimately. this has really felt like a year of preparation for transition.  Nothing has really changed for me this year; I’m in the same job, in the same activities, without any new major life goals.  But I can feel this starting to change.  I’m starting to realize I do have new goals, and I have new ambitions.  I’ve been lost for a little while.  Likely due to exhaustion more than anything else, I expect, but still lost.  I won’t say I’m really done being lost yet, but I will say that 2018 has allowed me to wander around in an unhurried way, to look around for a new path, and I know I really needed that.

Looking ahead, I expect to have a very busy 2019, with hopefully lots of changes to come.  I will be traveling a lot to judge skating competitions, which will be exciting, and I hope to be looking for a new job.  I’ve been working as an independent contractor since I graduated, and it feels like time to move on. There are a lot of reasons for this, not least of which is that I’m feeling really bored with my current work situation.  This isn’t a change that will be happening right away, but it is coming, and I am anticipating a radical change in both my schedule and wardrobe needs.  Possibly it will mean less sewing (both for me and for others), probably it will mean less blogging, but generally I hope it means more stimulation and excitement surrounding my work.  It feels like time for change, and even though changing up my year-end blog routine is a small one, it feels like the right step for direction I’m headed.