My 2016

I wasn’t going to write another one of those 2016 in review blog posts but after I read some others and specifically this one from the wonderful Sara from me and orla, I thought it’d be nice to take some time to reflect. 2016 was full of contradictions for me. It started off pretty good, I met Paul Smith as well as Lis from Last Year’s Girl who’s one of the best people I’ve ever met. I also went to The Body Shop at Home Bloggers’ Event where I met a whole host of fantastic bloggers including the wonderful Sarah from Things Sarah Loves, you can read about her transplant story here. Another blogger I admire and got to meet a couple of times last year is the fantastic Ellis from Ellis Tuesday. I’ve been very lucky to meet some amazing women in 2016 and those bloggers are just a few.

It went a bit downhill from there. I stopped breastfeeding which sent my hormones absolutely wild. I’m pretty sure my hormones hate me. I would say I can’t wait to go through the change but I’ve been told it's absolutely horrific, so yay! can’t wait for that. Anyway, my hormones going batshit crazy had a knock on effect, my anxiety decided to get worse as did my health in general. So the middle of the year just wasn’t that brilliant, really.  I think I only started to feel better around October which was handy as I turned 40. My husband took me to Stobo Castle for the day for a much needed rest. 

my beautiful Vegan birthday cake was from Fig and Rose 

Then in November I received an email from Garnier asking if I would mind discussing their ad campaign for 2017 after they read this blog post. So I figured they were looking for some marketing research: did I like the packaging? what other colours would I like to see? etc etc but no it turns out they wanted me to star in their advertising campaign (with a group of other fantastic women)! I couldn’t believe it, I still cant tbh. It feels so surreal. I am going to write a full blog post about this as it was such an extraordinary experience for me. Plus I used to suffer from agoraphobia and severe anxiety/depression. When panic has such a deep hold on you and depression is telling you that you’re worthless and won’t be able to do anything ever again it’s hard to see any future. But there is a future. I won’t lie and sugarcoat it, it's damn difficult to recover from agoraphobia and many don’t. I don’t think there’s ever a *full* recovery, you just learn how to deal with anxiety in the same way as say a diabetic learns to take insulin. It’s usually a chronic illness that can be managed but holy shit is it scary, especially if you’re having several panic attacks a day. So yeah, I want to write more about agoraphobia and anxiety in general. I think the Garnier ad campaign launches in February, I’m not 100% sure about that but I will of course let you know about it.

I also worked with some fantastic brands and PRs and I hope that continues in 2017 (Hi *waves* work with me). But yeah 2016 was a funny old year personally with some incredibly low points but wow was there high points too.

what was your 2016 like?