How did you grow in 2020?

This has been some kind of year and it seems most people are just ready for it to be over, which I totally get. But I know I always like to look back and see how I learned or grew from challenging situations. So what's something that you learned from this year or someway in which it helped you grow?

I'll start: This year has taught me just how much I truly need other people. As something of a hermit, I figured that isolation wouldn't bother me. Was I wrong! I realized this on an intellectual level pretty early this year. But I've really been feeling it deeply of late the rare times I do see friends (outdoors, socially distanced and masked, of course.) Sometimes the tears just start flowing. Even small gestures of kindness from strangers have moved me in ways that I wouldn't have expected. The community here at permies has really helped me feel more connected and less alone through it all and I am super grateful for that.  
This year has certainly helped me grow in my ability to deal with strong and difficult emotions and to be more gentle with myself and others as they move through them as well.  

What did you learn and how did you grow this year?

I love this question Heather. Thank you for sharing how surprising and difficult and strength building this year has been for you.

There is so much I want to say about this, but some of it is far too tender. So I'll share some of the easier parts.

the pandemic required me to move twice in one year, instead of once, which was incredibly difficult, but which turned out for the best in a lot of ways.

I enjoy working remotely, not leaving home most days of the week, and I think it's really cool that this is becoming a new normal for a lot of people who can work from home. It saves so. much. time. and energy. and money.

I am re-shifting my priorities in really good for me ways that I didn't think were possible.

I love the idea that these experiences in 2020 helped us grow. I'd love to hear more from others, too.

I enjoyed having forced time at home.  I did get to see friends at a distance when I would do my every other week trip to get feed. I have a few people I drop eggs off for and we could chat from the window.

I tackled a few new projects.  Because covid buying even affected the supply of chicks here, I ended up getting an incubator as a gift from hubby.  I suspect he was tired of my compliants😀. My only broody hen will be 9 in a few months so I was hoping to incubate eggs from her.  At one point I had 76 birds, so my project obviously got out of hand but it was fun.  We taught our nephews how to process birds.  They have been wanting to go hunting and this was a good way for them to learn its not just hitting a target.  Taking a life is a serious matter.

We adopted 2 stray kittens.  Perfect timing cause you just can't laugh at kittens wrestling and feel stressed out at the same time.

We also have added 2 beehives.  We talked about it for a couple years and actually had the time to dig in and learn.

Our garden did horrible.  We had a six week stretch of no rain except for one hour.  Our garden did better in the fall both because now we have the bees to pollinate and we finally started getting rain.  We just ate our last tomato last Saturday.  

My only food sucess was with growing out meat and eggs (thanks chickens!) and our blueberries and grapes were great producers.

I've had fun experimenting with my kombucha flavors.  My husband surprisingly really likes the kiwi. I'm now hooked on cranberry ginger.

I'm hoping to improve my indoor growing this winter and also really want to have success with potatoes.  My best result was only 3 medium potatoes from a plant.

Even though I'm very sorry for what people are going through whether it's health, isolation, job stress etc., this has been in some ways what I honestly needed after a few rough years of caring for sick parents.  

Heather, I thank you for helping me think about the good and bad of this year.

This is a great question Heather, and a good way to reflect on the fact that many good things have happened this year.  We shouldn't just focus on the bad.

For me this year involved a lot of new things for my business as an artist, definitely taking me out of my comfort zone many times, but also providing some personal growth and new markets just in time to replace lost income from all the galleries that had been representing my work that closed.  For me this started with a couple of workshops where I did both the organization and teaching.  Previously I've just worked with different venues that organized them all and paid me a fee to come in and teach.  This time I rented out a facility myself and did it all.  There was much more money involved and I got paid in advance from all the students paying their fees instead of being paid after the classes were over.  However, I also learned that there is a lot of work behind the organization side, and quite a lot of time.  On a dollar per hour rate I was probably running around the same, but I do get paid very well for these classes so getting that rate for more hours wasn't a bad thing!  The scary part was near financial disaster when the center I was renting closed due to Covid literally 2 days after my last class!  Yikes if it had been earlier after all my expenses had already been paid out and then I had to reimburse all the students signed up!  Whew!

I also tried a side gig producing jigsaw puzzles featuring my own work and that of some other artists I know.  From a fiscal standpoint that one was iffy.  A lot of work to set up that hasn't produced much income, but at least has gone beyond the break even point.  However, much of that was initial set-up work so I might try a new group of puzzles this next year to see how it goes.  The best thing from this project though was that it forced me to develop an e-commerce section to my website since there was no way it could be profitable without an efficient system to take and fill orders.  Since I was doing that for the puzzles I also added in a section for tools I make and the actual artwork I produce, not really expecting that many people would want to buy higher priced art through a click to add to cart method.  I was wrong.  In fact, quite a few people were eager to purchase my art through the site.  Nothing like getting an automated email out of the blue letting one know they made a sale for a grand or more!  I certainly should have done this years ago!  This alone is what has done to most to offset lost sales through my art galleries, and I expect it to continue though the future even if the galleries recover.

I also got a residual income stream going by developing and endorsing a signature hammer bearing my name that another master tool maker is producing and selling.  I will likely be seeing quarterly checks from that for many years to come!  We also plan to develop another hammer in 2021.

The biggest step for me this year though has been taking the general decline in income as an opportunity to try semi-retirement.  My efforts through the years utilizing the sorts of Extreme Early Retirement practices talked about in the Building a Better World in your Backyard book have me in a space where I don't need to be working as hard as I had been, yet I kept coming up against an internal fear to pull back and slow down.  I crunched all the numbers and made it blatantly clear to myself that I could take a year with zero income and be just fine.  So since I wasn't losing too much in opportunity costs due to Covid I forced myself to stop working so much to see what happens financially when I'm living on just my passive income streams already in place and whatever I happen to make from what I do.  Then I started a new body of work that has no clear avenue to generate income.  I'll be honest, these changes have been VERY hard for me these past months, leaving me often feeling lost, adrift, and without purpose in life.  I still waver daily whether or not to keep picking away at the new work (which I'm not yet happy with) or go back to what I've been doing for the past couple decades, with the knowledge that I'll have a very hard time ever retiring from a mental/emotional standpoint.  Regardless of where I end up I've been learning more about myself and what makes me tick in the process!  As they say, "Growth doesn't happen in your comfort zone."

This is the year I learned to say no; and was shocked when everyone was fine with it.

The anticipated/feared "push back", arguments and demands rarely if ever surfaced. I politely said no, and everyone was actually okay with it...it still makes me shake my head in wonderment that it took me 50 years to lose my fear of that simple, two letter word.

I am self employed, working with the permies, in permies, literally every weekend, stat holiday, and school holiday, since 1995.  Although the pandemic has cost me untold clients and more untold dollars, I have secretly reveled in not being "obligated". I love my business and my clients, but I hate "being on the clock", with client needs interrupting my day.

For me, this year has been one of learning to put my and my husbands health ahead of my business and clients, without guilt or regret. Significant growth, for a people pleaser!

I also learned how little I need actual, in person, face to face time with others, and confirmed how much more I enjoy the company of animals to humans.

I learned my half acre truly is my sanctuary, warts and all.

Although history may look back on 2020 with a focus on the dark side, I refuse to allow a handful of horrific events to wholly define this past year. I intend to look back and embrace the self knowledge gained during this last year, and do my best to focus on the countless positive words, actions and events that ALSO took place in 2020.

Lorinne Anderson wrote: .... I politely said no, and everyone was actually okay with it...it still makes me shake my head in wonderment that it took me 50 years to lose my fear of that simple, two letter word.
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Funny thing is that I suspect from your work with animals, you know all about the effects of negative conditioning on an animal's psychological development and how patient you must be in dealing with that....it's so hard to apply this understanding at times to our own developmental path.  But this saying "NO" is also a growth step in my own life with unfortunately many *not* being okay with that change.   And that, too, has been an avenue with 'growing pains'..... learning that the rejection, sustained or temporary, from others is okay.  My partner certainly joins you in celebrating her the animals in her life as a 'life-saver' of sorts for her life trajectory.  Sometimes these personal truths arrive late in life, but as with my ability to get holiday cards into the mail, "...better late than never". :-)   Best to all in 2021!

In spite of all the challenges, I did far more to develop my homestead this year than in the previous 10.  Upon the insistence of my wife, we did do an inventory of our equipment/supplies and realized that, through some accident, we were well provisioned to deal with whatever life threw at us.  We became better at working outdoors and worse at working indoors.