Happy Hogmanay Everybody!

Ok, I know that I said I would have another blog done by the night of Hogmanay, or at the latest the day after... But I got a little distracted again. Sorry! Better late than never I always say! Anyways, I won't make this one very long, just wanted to kind of summarise 2018 and also the things I am hoping to do this coming year :)

2018 recap:

  1. 5th of January: Turned 18 - legal in most countries!
  2. 14th of March: Led the student walkout against gun violence at my high school - much scarier than I thought it would be when I volunteered haha
  3. 24th of March: Led the March against gun violence in Portland and spoke in front of thousands of people (didn't help that I'm so short so nobody could really see me #shortpeopleproblems) to try to have a positive impact on the world :)
  4. 6th of April: Went to watch the Hamilton musical!! 
  5. May: Took the tens of hours of tests and got the IB diploma - woohoo!
  6. 9th of June: Graduated from High School - another woohoo!
  7. 24th of June: Started volunteering at Youthline (the teen crisis text/message/call line in Oregon)
  8. 22nd of July: The most worthwhile use of hundreds of my dollars (Demi Lovato concert)
  9. 31st of August: Mt. Jefferson hiking trip with my dad
  10. 21st of October: Ran my first 1/2 Marathon! For the record - fun but painful
  11. 3rd of December: Went back to Holland again
  12. 10th of December: Went to Scotland - and still haven't left! :) 
2019:
  1. Finish the 50 books I'm reading for my Gap Year Bucket List
  2. Go to Sri Lanka
  3. Do more outreach (teaching about suicide awareness and stress in high school and middle school classrooms) with Youthline
  4. Road trip down to California
  5. Go skydiving
  6. Move to Scotland - scary, but exciting!
  7. Start Uni at the University of Stirling
  8. Road trip to Canada? 
  9. Learn how to actually cook things without setting them on fire
  10. Start playing football again!
  11. Re-save all the money I've spent on this trip to Europe 😅
Thanks for all those that have stuck with me through these randomly timed blogs and through 2018! While last year was a rough one for me, everything I've had the privilege to do would not have been possible without everybody that supports me. Thank you so much, and I hope that 2019 brings amazing things for everybody :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July Reading Challenge: 'The Hate U Give'

Image
Well, this challenge has not exactly gone the way I had planned for it to go - and that's ok. Last week's book was 'Women, Race & Class' by Angela Davis, but as you may have noticed I didn't post a blog or host a discussion. The truth is that I have not finished that book yet. Davis' words strike me in many meaningful ways as she talks about the involvement of women in the fight for equality and thus I have been reading it slower in order to fully comprehend the importance of what she writes. I will still do a blog and discussion about it but I don't want to put pressure on myself to rush through it and not see the importance. In order to stick to the challenge more closely, I will do the report on 'The Hate U Give' today (followed by the discussion), read Ibram X. Kendi's 'How to be an Antiracist', and end my challenge with Angela Davis' book (in August at this point). To people reading these and following along with the challeng
Read more

Relapse Sucks

Image
Hello hello, hope everybody has been doing ok and having a great summer! One of the last times that you heard from me was about how I just finished treatment and everything was rainbows and unicorns. I would love to tell you I still live in that magical world but unfortunately, life is never really like that. Things haven’t been great and I wanted to share my experience with that as it is part of my gap year. Previously I think I unintentionally sent a false message that mental health sucks but if you get treatment then everything goes straight back to being great again. That isn’t my experience though, and not the experience of almost everybody I know so I wanted to do a follow-up post about that. About what a relapse is in terms of mental illness, and what that has been like for me personally. It hasn’t been easy, that’s for sure.  When you read the word relapse, one of the first things that come to mind is probably about drugs. Am I right? I think we tend to get very stuck in t
Read more

July Reading Challenge: 'An American Marriage'

Image
Happy Saturday everybody!  As you may or may not have noticed, this post is a day late (sorry!). Considering we are still in quarantine, this week has been preeetty busy: we may have gotten a dog (still doing a trial period), my fam has been feeling a bit under the weather, and I've started working again (yay!). Long story short, my apologies for being late with the first post and discussion.  Now, onto the book! For those who didn't read it or weren't able to finish it in time, here is a brief summary of "An American Marriage" by Tayari Jones. SPOILER ALERT! "An American Marriage" focuses on the story of a Black newlywed couple, Celestial and Roy. Early in the book, Roy gets accused of raping a woman in a motel  while he is actually sleeping innocently with his wife in another room. He is arrested and incarcerated with a sentence of 12 years. He ultimately only serves 5 years of that sentence when he is proven innocent in the Court of Appeals. Throughou
Read more