Goodbye 2017
It is currently 6:18am and I am feeling incredibly nostalgic about the year that we’ve just had. In some ways it flew by, but when I scroll through my camera-roll and my instagram account I realise how much has actually happened. 2017 was the year I trained to become a teacher and graduated with ‘outstanding’. It was also the year that I managed to secure my first real adult job, earning enough to be taxed and of course most importantly having my own class of children to teach!
Teaching
This has been the aspect of my life which has been the biggest change. I went from being a student myself, to a trainee, to an educator all within a couple of months and it was such a whirlwind! Alhamdulillah I feel so blessed to be able to say that I have achieve my childhood ambition to become a teacher and I am on the whole, really really loving it. However theres a small part of me which wonders if I did dive into this a little too quickly. I had no break between A-levels – uni – working full time and YES we teachers do get a lot of holiday, but it isn’t really classified as a proper break, especially the ones between half terms. I’m really enjoying teaching and although it is stressful and tiring, it’s actually not as scary as I had imagined during my training year. Will I be teaching solidly for the next decade? Probably not. I think I will definitely be taking a break of some kind, even if thats half a year to travel and get myself sorted and the other half of the year supply teaching. I mean I have to get through my NQT year first! So let me slow down and walk, before I gallop haha, however that is where I’m at with my thoughts on my career. Yes of course your career is important at the age of 22, but I do wonder if this need to be chasing the next goal constantly is really healthy for anyone and I knows its taken a toll on myself, emotionally, spiritually and to a certain extent mentally. I hope I’m not just jabbering out nonsense and that at least one of you will be able to relate!
Youtube + blogging
Starting my channel was another huge life change in 2017 and to some people that might sound ridiculous – life change?! But honestly it was a decision I made after YEARS of building up the courage and confidence to do and it wasn’t an easy one to make. However, I am absolutely loving it. It’s no secret that I was becoming pretty complacent with my beautiful little website that I genuinely love. This corner of the net is where it all began when I was just 18, and now 4 years later I can say I have video content to go alongside it. I’m not going to make promises about how often I will be blogging – it would be easy to set unrealistic targets just after x-mas, when I still have a whole week off from work and the business of full time teaching actually seems pretty far away! However I do want to still continue and I am going to carry on planning posts for here and hopefully, eventually crossing them off my to-do list. I will be most active on youtube now, at least for as long as I can be…but sometimes theres nothing like properly writing out your feelings, with your feet up and your hair tied in a messy bun!
Self-image and confidence
I was looking over my goals that I set in January 2017 and one of them was ‘to lose my muffin top’. I have to say, getting the flu at the end of this term was probably the best thing to happen to my muffin top, because I had zero appetite and couldn’t eat even a quarter of the amount of junk food I usually consume. Honestly I think I’ve realised that the gym life is not compatible with my full time work schedule – I’m too demotivated and exhausted to drag myself there after work and the weekends are now filled with either sleep, marking, catching up with loved ones and more sleep! I think this year I’ve really embraced what I look like, more than ever before and I honestly believe my job has a big part to play in that. Yes I’d like to be a little fitter, but being a role model to the children I teach has genuinely changed my mindset so much. I would hate for any of them to be hung up about how they look on the outside, because the reality is, their character is so much more important and then more times I found myself saying and thinking this, the more I realised that it applied to me too. It’s bizarre how the simplest of things, stuff you already know, can suddenly make a whole lot more sense when you’re saying it with real sincerity to children half your age.
The importance of reflecting | one line a day memory book
If you’re all caught up with my videos (high-five!), then you would have seen an adorable little memory book in my ASOS haul, which is titled ‘a line a day’. Though I’ve always wanted to purchase a book similar to this, I massively under-estimated how much peace and happiness it would bring me. I initially wanted to wait till January the first, but then I just had a change of heart and wanted to document a particular day and it’s so odd, how literally writing 2-3 sentences (if that) to summarise the day, my feelings, emotions, a key quote or nice little moment just brings so much content to me. It really makes me feel more collected and calm and already I’m enjoying looking back at the previous days…and I’ve only been using it for around a week and a half – so you can imagine how awesome it’s gonna be to look back in a year or two i’a! Anyways I just wanted to say that it is such a small thing that has really uplifted me and I highly recommend it.
Alright that is enough rambling on from me, I just want to say a massive thanky-you if you’re reading this, because that means that you stuck around despite my very infrequent posts. Also if you’ve already subscribed to my channel – thanks! And if you haven’t, I’m going to leave my 2017 high-end favourites as well as a little vlog to give you an idea of the kind of content I’m making. I am CONSTANTLY trying to improve it btw and it really is a massive work in progress, from the lighting to the audio, to how I look and sound…making videos is not as easy as it may seem haha, but it’s what is keeping me sane inbetween the constant thoughts about work right now – so I’m going to embrace the creative challenge ^_^
I plan to be posting a little more than 1-2 times on my little website in 2018! And I really hope you all have the best start to the new year. I’m feeling a lot of different types of ways right now – hopeful, confident, determined, ready for hard work and ready to set myself goals that I am going to strive to achieve in’sha’Allah. I’ve never felt quite this way before at the end of the year, and although I can’t pinpoint quite what it is, I cannot complain ^_^