Ten Years Gone By

Yes, we’re a mere few days away from 2010.  I know, a lot of people will argue whether a decade ends at the 09 or the 10.  But I like 2010, it’s a nice round figure so that’s when MY decade  is going to end.

I’ve seen a few posts going around looking back across the past decade, but I thought I’d do something looking back across the past decade for me personally.  So much has happened in this past ten years, I think it’s important to reflect upon it, and also in how I’ve changed in that decade.

The year 2000 saw me enter my late 20’s.  It also saw me hit my first year of working as a librarian.  I just celebrated a decade with BCCLS back in June, so this decade has had that touchstone all the way through.  When I started I was  hired as a casual library assistant out in the south region libraries, but almost automatically started doing temp gigs at various libraries while permanent staff were on holidays.  In 2000 I started working a temp contract in the branch support team, and in 2001 was hired as a permanent, full time team member of the Library Systems team.  When I first started it was all data entry, admin and gopher work.  I was promoted in September 2008.  Nowdays I pretty much focus on digital media, with work around AV gear, asset management and social media.

One of the biggest things in my life in the past decade has been my health, both physically and emotionally.  In February 2005 I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) after 20 years of begging doctors to find out what was wrong with me.  Within 12 months of that diagnosis, I was also diagnosed with clinical depression.  Both diagnoses have been major influences to changes with my life.  I got help for both conditions and the improvement in my quality of life is massive.

In 2003, I lost my wonderful friend and colleague Rob to cancer.  I had never had someone close to me die before, and it was a huge lesson to learn.  I still miss him to this day.  He was a beautiful person and had a huge heart.  I wish he could have stayed here with us for longer than the 49 years that he did.

In November 2003 I took my first interstate holiday, with my first flights.  I went to Melbourne for a fortnight and had a fantastic time.  In 2005 I went to Western Australia for a fortnight and fell in love with the western state.

I’ve had some lovely visitors here too – from other states, the US, Germany and the UK over the years, which has been wonderful.

I started blogging in September 2006, in preparation for my first overseas trip.  That’s what this blog started out as (go read my archives to see my trip posts) and it created a bit of a monster.  I’m a blogging fiend now!

And yes, I took my first trip overseas.  3 months (well, 77 days) in the US, with a jaunt up to Canada to see my lovely friend Ian.  It was AWESOME.  I met a lot of my online friends in reality for the first time, and found some absolute kindred spirits.  So much that I cannot wait to go back over there to see them again.

I had a some relationships that didn’t work out, but in hindsight, I’m bloody glad they didn’t!

Last year I finally got my act together and got two more tattoos.  I plan to get many more in the future.

Over all though, the biggest changes have been in how I feel about myself.  I went from being highly depressed and borderline agoraphobic (other than work and home, I refused to go anywhere for years) with a rock bottom self esteem and no confidence at all, to someone who is comfortable in her own skin, happy and confident, and feeling positively adventurous.  I no longer hide myself away, I shed all the toxic people in my life and live life with positivity and gusto.  It’s true that your 30’s are WAY better than your 20’s.  All that anxiety about what other people think, or whether or not I’m doing the right thing has gone.  It’s a wonderfully liberating feeling.

So, what has seen you through the last decade?  What achievements, changes and experiences really stand out for you?  Share in the comments, won’t you?

Advertisements

December 28, 2009. about me, achievements, depression, experiences, lessons, memories, struggles, thoughts, travel.

One Comment

  1. triberingers replied:

    Firstly thanks for sharing your thoughts with us again.

    My last ten years have seen me married (something I thought would NEVER happen), saw my mother become an invalid pensioner (again, never saw that coming), leave a workplace I had been at for over ten years and move to a new town and a new job to be closer to my mother because of her failing health (no I couldn’t move all the way back home and she knows that), lost some friends, gained some friends, lost my beautiful Opa who besides my husband is the ONLY positive male influence I’ve ever had in my life.

    Happy 2010, hope it’s fantastic for you!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

w

Connecting to %s

Trackback URI

  • The History of Sleepydumpling

  • Blogs I Dig

  • %d bloggers like this:
https://sleepydumpling.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/ten-years-gone-by/
sleepydumpling.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
50992
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7RQSH3HWBAUFOK4Z333OSAWG3RIIEP7N
<urn:uuid:62a87d1a-8452-4407-83ac-892217940077>
2018-06-25T03:40:29Z
192.0.78.13
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:PUOPIHETE5BYNUBJ4GLFQQWX3WEHY3CG
<urn:uuid:eb1239e2-e4a3-48d2-ba72-13b3b0b5bd20>
https://sleepydumpling.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/ten-years-gone-by/
response
<urn:uuid:ba002ff3-1b89-4251-b250-c11ec2c92fe8>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-136-156-31.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf