End of Year reflections

So, according to ChatGPT, this mess is what my 2024 looks like.

What’s ITANCE? 😅 What’s ERANGEN?

What are the weird symbols looking like 302U2E? 😆😆😆 

It looks like a sort of hallucination, especially because the farthest place I’ve ever been this year is 145km from Brussels, excluding commuting between Italy and Belgium.

I haven’t been to Paris this year, I have never been to London.

Whatever.

Since being self-employed, I’ve been a bit of a workaholic, but at least I realized it, and this year, I did something about it because it’s not healthy. To me, my business feels almost like a child, but whereas I do enjoy identifying with what I do, it’s sick not to have a life outside of it.

What did I do?

In January, I decided to get myself a daf, an Iranian drum (tell me how this video cannot be mesmerizing), and I played a little bit with it, but without a method, no teachers, etc, especially no feedback and no regularity in what I was doing, which means that after the interest of the first weeks faded, well… it started to get dusted.

The progress was not that fast, the enthusiasm was decreasing… always the same pattern.

I started taking classes in a small group offline only in September.

Above all, I know that I have something to do every two weeks. This doesn’t prevent me from often waiting until the last moment to do my homework because it’s just how things happen.

I know my chickens: that’s why I got rid of classes and based my way of working on exercises.

However, I’m in no rush, the classes are not expensive, I’m happy like this and I see few results, but they’re there. For example, this is what happened some days ago with my boyfriend at the piano, when we were squatting the stage of a jam session in Brussels:

Would have I ever thought about giving a far-from-perfect performance IN PUBLIC? 🤯 

Of course not.

But still, despite everything, apparently we were not hurting the ears of the people there too much, otherwise they wouldn’t have said “Mais c’est bien!” (it’s nice!) when we said “ok, we’re leaving”.

I was seriously surprised when I said “C’est bien? Bah, on continue alors” (was it fine? Ok, then we’ll keep going). 

To me, this was one of the biggest achievements of this year. Attending jam sessions with my boyfriend allows us to start another circle of social life here in Brussels and the environment is honestly beautiful, superchill. I’m very happy we can do something together and I’m convinced that this variety brings some fresh air into my brain.

For the rest, well, I introduced the monthly program back in January and slowly but steadily it’s become the pillar of my work because I follow on average around 20 people and 15 come from that group, while the others are old students with the previous model or so.

Less than two months ago I decided to base all my system on that program.

Two months ago I remade my website from scratch.

I sent 221 invoices and made 30% more than last year.

It’s been a year of a lot of twisting and tweaking that likely will bring results in 2025. Hopefully.

I’m happy but not fully satisfied haha, I just look forward to being able to implement all my ideas 🫠

Wish you a very nice Christmas and a Happy New Year ❤️