I’m not only putting out the Welcome Mat for 2025, I’ve got my little hostess apron on and I’m inviting it inside for a nice cup of tea and a sit down – thats how thankful I am that 2024 IS OVER.

Without a doubt, 2024 has been the worst year of my entire life, and that’s including 2009 (where I was literally days away from death, had chemo, meningitis, spent 8 weeks in hospital, lost my hair, got countless infections, etc) and 2020 (where I spent 9 months shielding in a ~20 sq m cabin and couldn’t leave home for a total of 14 months). Both of these pale in comparison to the endless horror of being trapped in a body that doesn’t work, while watching it distort into some grotesque puddle in slow motion.

I do these Year in Review posts every year to try and celebrate the wins and find some joy and perspective in things that happened over the previous 12 months, and some years it’s harder than others. There were joys here, but every single one of them was hard-won, and only happened because I fought my own body to make it happen. Life is never easy (no matter what it appears on social media), but some years are particularly harder than what seems fair.

So with that in mind, let’s have a look back to see what joys we can uncover, eh?

Sigh. For the second year in a row I’m left thinking “ugh, good riddance to a rubbish year!”. And for the second year in a row I’m facing an unknown future of post-viral fatigue stretching out before me, then months and months of rebuilding my body (and my life) once that finally ends. And life feels unbearably bleak.

But hey, part of the reason I write these posts at the start of every year is so I can look back and at least appreciate the good things that happened – and there are always at least a few things! It’s human nature to remember the negative more clearly than the positive I think, and this reflection and reset helps me remember things in a more holistic way.

Even if I did only have 7.5 months in my year when all the rest of you got 12 to accomplish everything… (yes, I tallied it up and I was sick and bedridden for 4.5 months of 2023.)

I’m mostly posting these because I have a bit of a backlog of posts building up and I didn’t want to make them even longer than they already are – also one is a swimsuit from July and it’s November now! And because I felt I owed my long-term readers an explanation as to why I haven’t posted in nearly two months…

It’s been over seven weeks since I first tested positive for Covid. In total, I tested positive for 25 days (including a PCR at hospital on Day 24). During this time I had a wide array of symptoms but the worst was a crushing fatigue, at something like 10-20% of normal energy levels, leaving me stuck in bed for 23hrs a day.

For the past 15(!) years I’ve posted my year in review on 1 January, but not this year. I lost my sewjo around the end of September so I didn’t really have much to blog about. I waited for it to reappear (as I learned a long time ago there’s no point in trying to force it) and prepped a few projects, tidied a bit, planned a bit, and then fell into a massive “Interview with the Vampire” fandom hole (more on that later), and generally was happier in October and November than I’ve been in a long time (completely unrelated to the sewing) but that’s not the reason this post is late.

This post is late because, despite my best efforts (cycling to/from, FFP3 masking indoors with my CO2 monitor and otherwise staying outdoors) I caught a virus of some sort at the office christmas party which left me practically bed-bound with post viral fatigue for 4+ full weeks (no, not Covid, not flu, not RSV, not anything they swabbed for at haematology, but thankfully not EBV either). Like, 21+ hours a day in bed, and if I sat up for more than 15min to eat or drink, I’d have to lie flat for another hour. So sitting up to type was impossible, and I wrote this in pieces on my phone when I could, not being able to put it all together until I started improving a little bit in the past few days.

So apologies that it’s late, and for the blog silence for the past few months, but hey, 2023 can only get better from this dismal start, right?? Without further ado, let’s have a look back at 2022…