It’s December 31st, 2019. WHAAAAAT? 🤯 I have no idea how we’re almost in 2020, but here we are! Just a few hours left of the year. (Hi to my friends around the world who are already in 2020! 👋🏻) Like many others, I enjoy reflecting on the year that’s almost over. This year, I’ve decided to collect some of my highlights from 2019.

(Warning! There will be lots of tweets and pictures.)

This is a total brag fest that I’m writing solely for myself. It’s my 2019 highlight reel that I can look back on when days get rough and I need a reminder that life is actually pretty awesome and I’m insanely lucky and privileged to be here. And when we get to 2025, future Cathrine can re-read everything and go “oh yeah, I remember that, we were so young and inexperienced back then, awww!” …like I do now with my old posts. It’s fun. You should try it! 😁

Lessons Learned in 2019

I also started writing about some of the more difficult parts of my year and what I learned from it… And in the middle of it, I realized that I’m not quite ready to share those thoughts yet. I still have lots of processing to do before I can turn my struggles into any kind of useful advice for others. I’m hoping to be able to do that in 2020.

But for now, I’ll share the short version:

Mark Manson taught me The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and it changed my life.

After reading that book in 2018 and reflecting on it for all of 2019, I’ve started learning to take responsibility for my own feelings, to set healthy boundaries for myself, and to choose my f*cks wisely.

So should you 💙

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After spending a week at MVP Summit with old and new friends, I feel energized. My brain has been refilled with lots of happy memories :)

And one not-so-happy memory:

I just left karaoke crying after being booed off stage by a stranger. Years of bullying came flooding back in seconds, killing all confidence I've finally built up. I'm ashamed of not handling it better, but thankful I have friends who care. Don't be that stranger. Be kind.

— Cathrine Wilhelmsen (@cathrinew) March 22, 2019

One. Just one negative experience during an otherwise fantastic week. One negative experience that objectively really wasn’t that big of a deal, followed by an absolutely overwhelming number of replies full of love and support. (Thank you 💙) And yet, this one negative experience has dominated my thoughts and feelings for days.

It’s easy to say that I refuse to let one stranger and one negative experience take over and push my happy memories away. Actually doing it is a whole different situation. No matter how determined I am or how much support I get, dealing with an experience like this is never easy for me.

I have trained my brain for many years to respond in a certain way, to gnaw at the negative even when it’s surrounded by positive. That habit does not change overnight just because I want it to. It’s something I need to actively work on to improve, and that requires determination and effort over time.

Writing is my way of dealing with things like this. Structuring my thoughts, describing my feelings, and reflecting on why I reacted the way I did is all part of my process.

But why are you sharing this publicly?

I’m very aware that my social media accounts are mostly highlight reels. I choose to focus on the positive things in my life, and so what most people see is the happy, bubbly, super excited version of me. I wish life was like that all the time :) But it’s not. Most days are not. Some days, you get flat out told that you suck, and instead of being strong and brushing it off, you end up crying and withdrawing from everything and everyone.

And that’s ok. That’s life. We’re flawed, and if we weren’t flawed, we wouldn’t be human. But being human also means we have choices. We can choose to take responsibility for our own feelings, get back up, try to learn from our experiences, and keep going.

Writing helps me. If I can also help someone else by sharing this publicly, whether it is helping one person understand why someone can react strongly to something seemingly small, or showing another person that they’re not alone in experiencing similar feelings, I will count that as a double win :)

So what happened?

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New year, new beginnings, new you, isn’t that what they usually say? For me, it’s more like pressing play after having paused everything during my Christmas break. I’m continuing my smaller life and priority tweaks instead of making big changes and resolutions :) But it is a new year. It’s going to be different than the last one. And the ones before that. (Like every year, really. Funny how that works.)

I don’t often write personal posts, but these life and priority tweaks might affect how active I will be in our community this year, so I felt like writing a little bit about why.

Oh, who am I trying to trick? I’m really only writing this so I could show off this picture of a pretty winter sunrise, taken from my parents’ house during Christmas :D

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I have written posts in the past about how to deal with technical failures as a speaker: Be prepared. Have backups of your files. Take screenshots or videos of your demos. Rehearse presenting your session with and without your slide deck. I have made plenty of I-wasn’t-prepared-for-that mistakes in the past, and I learned from them.

Last weekend was different. I was supposed to do a precon and a session at SQLSaturday Nashville. I didn’t experience any technical failures. I experienced what felt very much like personal failures.

On Friday, our precon got canceled due to weather.

On Saturday, no one showed up to my session.

I had not prepared for either of those things to happen, and I definitely had not prepared for both of those things to happen on the same weekend. I went through a whole range of emotions in a short amount of time, from embarrassment to disappointment to amusement.

Since then, I have debated with myself about whether or not to write this blog post. I have written and re-written it several times. I did not want to write a blog post full of whining and complaining, but I did want to share my experience as a reminder to both myself and others that:

• These things happen. It’s ok to feel disappointed, but don’t let it stop you from trying again.
• There is always something positive to take away from a negative experience.
• Life is full of ups and downs. Social media (especially my own) often focus on the ups, but life is not amazing all the time.

If you only needed a few reminders, feel free to stop reading here :) The rest of the post is quite long and a little more like a journal entry, really.

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