Today, on the last day of this year, I want to talk to you about possibilities and about belief.
On January 2 this year, as many of you know, I gave birth to my first child. I have talked about this on the blog before but both before and after the birth of my son, I heard a lot of “you can’t” from people. Many women I know, for some reason, kept listing for me all the things that I wasn’t going to be able to do or achieve now that I had a child. And of course, the moment someone tells me I can’t do something, I’m determined to do just that and prove them wrong.
I had a difficult pregnancy and a difficult childbirth, but when I came back to work two months later, I was committed to bringing everything I had to both my business and my kid because I didn’t want to shortchange either, and because I believed it was completely and entirely possible for me to do this as long as I had help and understanding from my husband.
My husband and I share household duties and on the weekends, he’s almost exclusively in charge of our child. We didn’t have a nanny, either full- or part-time, but we have a cleaner who came in regularly.
I mention these caveats because I don’t want someone to read this entry and think that having a full-time career whilst being completely in charge with a child is impossible. But I don’t want you to think it’s in any way easy or effortless either. I had help, from my awesome husband, my own parents, and my amazing cleaning lady, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not being able to achieve all that you set out to do. But if you can get some help in your personal life or your business, there’s no reason you can’t have a career of your dreams just because you now have children.
I realize that my sharing this list of all that I’ve achieved this year may, to some, sound like bragging, but after thinking about it for weeks, I decided that I wanted to do it anyway, not only because I want to be the voice among all those naysayers who says, “Look, you can do it! I did it, here’s the proof,” but also because I’m very very proud.
It’s been an amazing but difficult year, but I’ve always believed that you achieve what you put your heart to, no matter the obstacles, and I want to live that, show that, by example. I want that in the future, when there’s a young writer pregnant for the first time and everyone around her is telling her that freelancing will be difficult, that she shouldn’t think about work, that there is NO WAY she can continue having the career she had pre-child, she can come to this blog entry and see the list of things I did in my first year as a work-at-home parent and know that she can do it, too. YOU can do it, too.
So here then, is all that I’ve achieved professionally this year, working five days a week, part-time, most weekends off.
1. Queried, sold, and wrote 30 articles.
2. Started working with 4 new publications. Let go of some of my lower-paying clients from last year.
3. Finished writing the first draft of a novel I started in 2011.
4. Wrote 11,000 words of a second novel and outlined a third.
5. Wrote a book proposal and snagged myself a NYC agent (straight off my top 10 list).
6. Finished writing 35,000 words of the non-fiction book (that my agent and I will be selling next year).
7. Started a newsletter/mailing list and added 500+ subscribers.
8. Got active on social media, wrote 163 blog entries, and made an effort to increase my numbers on Twitter and Facebook.
9. Read 60+ books.
10. Started a rare books business.
I celebrated my 10th year as a journalist in 2012. Ten years of writing queries, articles, and essays. 2013, for me, is a year in which hopefully I’ll be able to take the leap into books, into nonfiction works, but also fiction, which has always been a dream of mine. It took me ten years to get to this point, it may take another ten years to get to what I’m dreaming of today.
But I know, as I knew ten years ago, that believing in the possibilities is what will get me there.
How’s your year been? What accomplishments of 2012 are you the most proud of?