Last year was an amazing year for me! The year was filled with opportunity, challenge, and a few stumbling blocks here and there but overall it turned out wonderful and I learnt alot from it. Some of the highlights were:
Completing university: After graduating from a BCom in 2013 I thought to myself, "Never again". My good friend Alex thought otherwise, and roped me into enrolling into a Master of Information Technology and Master of Information Systems. It was a gruelling task of juggling full-time work and study, and at times incredibly stressful, but I survived and will be graduating with a distinction average. I learnt so much through the course which could be directly applied to my work, and it was lots of fun.
New employment: I left my old workspace of four years to a new opportunity at Intershop as an Application Support Engineer. It was terrifying to begin with, being the second IT firm I've worked at. Trepidation was unnecessary as everyone was very warm, welcoming, and willing to take me under their wing. It's interesting moving from infrastructure to software, and trying to adjust away from a sysadmin towards an application engineer's mentality. It will take some getting used to but the experience of working in enterprise level projects is amazing.
Fitness: At the start of the year weighing in at 96kg, I set myself the goal of dropping down to 80kg. I've crushed that and ended the year weighing 75kg, a loss of over 20kg! it required a lot of discipline and self control, but it was definitely worth it. The energy is so empowering some days you feel like you could conquer the world.
Health: Between 2010 and 2013 I was admitted to hospital five times for adrenal crisis events, the final hospital visit lasting eight weeks due to contracting golden staph. That admission was excruciating and I promised myself never to fall into that situation again, and I'm proud to say I'm on a three year no hospitalisation streak.
Panic attack(s): In October I experienced a panic attack for the first time in my life. For a week I experienced a series of nightly panic attacks, waking up in cold sweat and suffocating. I attributed it to a mix of stress and heartbreak, but the experience taught me more about myself, and how to better care for my mental state.
Relationships: With the completion of studies I recovered a huge chunk of time, which I've been using to catch up with all the friends and family I've neglected over the years. I'm so fortunate to have such understanding and patient friends wait all this time and still welcome me with open arms. Truly, friends like these are a blessing I want to cherish forever.
So many great things have happened in my life in 2016, it was a truly amazing year and I hope that 2017 will be just as awesome (or even better)!