MG Mason Creative

There are several things I set out to achieve in 2022 that never came to be. I had goals and targets, and I was going to smash them all and shout about them all over social media.

But I didn’t.

I had a content plan for the whole year. Despite coming up with some great ideas for Instagram reels and blog posts for this site, I didn’t stick to it.

I wanted to complete more Udemy courses in 2022 too.

I barely got through less than half of what I wanted to achieve and finished a grand total of zero Udemy courses.

I didn’t publish the two novels I thought I’d publish, though I did publish a short story collection.

It’s easy to feel like you failed at times like this, even when others would not consider that you failed.

This is the side that many freelancers don’t want their clients, potential clients, friends, and family to see. We want you to see us as “smashing it” or being the badass kerpow!

We don’t want you to see the unachieved goals, or the ideas that changed, or all the things we said we’d do and didn’t, the lost motivation and the stuff we tried really, really hard at but never worked and we decided to redirect our energies.

We don’t want you to see the new product and service ideas that never came to pass because we never told you about them.

Stuff happens and we’re not unfeeling robots

For three years, I, like many others, have been running on a weird kind of survival mode as global crisis after global crisis has come forward. We had to deal with daily news of forest fires burning, a pandemic raging, Russia invading Ukraine, and Europe seeing record high temperatures. Add into that skyrocketing energy costs in a country already paying the highest prices in the world for our electricity and gas.

Some of us have dealt with personal issues through all that at the same time.

In my case, following several personal mental health crises in 2021, another course of therapy ended in 2022 that led to some revelations about long-term life patterns.

In the autumn, a whole load of pennies dropped at once which led to my coming out on the asexual spectrum (specifically, demisexual) and going over past romantic history to try to understand why stuff happened the way it did, and why certain events had certain outcomes.

But also… priorities change

It would be disingenuous to claim all these missed deadlines and unachieved goals were due to those things listed above.

No, I re-found a love for the short story which led to the release of the Spooky Salmonweird collection. I founded The Ace Space, a publication at Medium (click the image to visit the publication).

Will I achieve all the things I want to achieve this year? It’s too early to know. I’d even say it’s too early to think about it considering I had COVID-19 before Christmas and only just now getting my energy levels back.

The goals I set out last year remain for this year though, albeit with some modification.

• Finish and release Studio Salmonweird
• Complete the Photoshop Udemy course
• Blog here more

If I don’t achieve all those, it will be okay because there is always another year.