What I did in 2020 (because I’m secretive and you probably don’t know)

2020 Recap:

Jan: I got diagnosed with Hashimoto’s (an autoimmune disease affecting the thyroid) and the coronavirus began. Ivan and I were in Thailand at the time. I took two screenwriting courses, the first I’d taken in at least 7 years, “Writing the First Draft” by Pilar Alessandra and Second City’s “Sketch Writing 101.”

Feb-April: We returned to the U.S. with the goal of socializing as much as possible after being pretty isolated, but then the ‘rona came a roaming stateside so we went into lockdown. I started taking Sketch Writing 201.

April: Ivan proposed to me! I celebrated an incredible lockdown birthday with my family, and I began the School of Motion “Photoshop and Illustrator Unleased” course (an introduction to motion design). I finished a huge list of sketches from my Second City classes. At the end of the course I had 60 pages of sketches.  

May-July: Ivan and I moved to the U.K. eventually choosing Edinburgh for the long-term after liking it so much. Ivan did many many interviews with high-profile companies. I got screwed over by a corporate coworking space and learned a valuable lesson on how to protect myself and the importance of reading contracts!

July-August: We made friends and explored different areas of the city. We planned our wedding which we eventually set for September. August was honestly the most stressful month of my life to this date! I did School of Motions “Animation Kickstart” course where I learned after effects all while planning the wedding and working full time. Ivan didn’t help enough with he wedding planning and we fought about this.

September: Stress be gone, Cyprus bound we were! We got married on September 15^th and enjoyed a full week of holiday on this beautiful island, followed by another glorious week in Italy.

October: We adjusted to new restrictions in Scotland, discovering that we could no longer go out to meet our friends in the evenings or invite them over. This was a really hard adjustment after having a whole summer of more freedom, not going to lie. To make ourselves feel better, we went to Loch Lomond.

November: I remembered I had ADHD. Yeah, the most ADHD thing you’ve ever heard. I decided to take the Japanese N2 by December 2021 and bought a course to prepare for it. Ivan had a huge amount of interviews, including for his dream job at Microsoft, and the possibility of moving to Switzerland was brought to the table. While this was exciting, it did kind of make our situation a little less settled since we started bouncing the “Where should we live? Where do we actually belong?” questions again which are quite absorbing..and made us realize we are still not sure we know the answer to either question.

I saved and finally bought an iPad. I used Procreate and painted a portrait of my hero, Stay Abrams. Not so bad for my first digital painting.

December: I got really into analogue past times like calligraphy, writing in Japanese (on paper), and paperback novels. I decided to participate in the School of Motion holiday card project, creating a 3-minute animation, and am so glad I did it! This helped me realize that I want to pursue this area more seriously in 2021.

I decided to just accept the coronavirus situation rather continue to complain and plan around it. My work of figuring out my stuff is still not done yet after all and staying in one place will make that discovery easier.

I will happily write longer posts on some of these topics, such as the wedding, because I have a lot more to say about each.