I am honestly still kind of in shock that it's the end of December. I know that people make jokes about this all the time now, but time really does feel like it's been so strange since March 2020. And somehow, here we are at the end of another year, and I don't know exactly where the time has gone.
For the first year ever, my family decided to travel for Christmas, and we spent almost a week in Washington, DC at the most gorgeously decorated hotel I've ever been to!
I keep thinking back to how I felt this time last year - I was definitely a lot more isolated, but it also seemed like there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon. We'd just gotten the exciting news that the first vaccines were being authorized, and that the rollout was going to get started. It made it feel like it would only be one year of "missed" holidays.
I figured there's no more appropriate time than Thanksgiving to share how grateful I'm feeling for all of you. This year (really, this year and a half plus) has been full of ups and downs, but it makes me so happy to know that I have this little corner of the Internet to share it all with. I'm so, so grateful for all of you and your support - sometimes it still blows my mind to think that people I've never met before come here to see what I have to say!
I know that a lot of my posts here and on Instagram seem kind of like "business as usual," but honestly, my life is still far from "back to normal." I have been able to go out more than before now that I'm vaccinated (and boosted!), but I know that I still have to be careful. I am really, really still avoiding crowds or places where people will be unmasked for long periods of time, because even a mild case of COVID could hospitalize me.
I mentioned in my Life Lately post this week that I've felt busier lately than I have in... probably the past year and a half. It's honestly been a bit of a struggle - on one hand, I'm really excited to have things to do (safely), and to see people that I hadn't seen in months and months. But on the other hand, everything just feels like a LOT right now, and it's hard to add more plans to everything already going on, even if they're things that I want to be doing.
At the end of last month, I had the chance to talk to the incoming first year students of Carnegie Mellon's engineering program about the importance of diversity in STEM. It was truly wild to be on that end of orientation events - it forced me to sit with the reality that my own orientation was fourteen years ago! It just doesn't seem possible.
I turn 33 today!! I am very much a birthday person, and am happy to be able to share my birthday excitement with all of you!
On Friday I had the incredible honor of doing a takeover of Elizabeth Holmes' Instagram! I put up a Q&A box during part of it and got SO many good questions, and then put up another Q&A box on my own Instagram on Sunday because there just wasn't enough time to answer them all. I'm going to answer a few of them here in more detail - some that I already partially answered, and some that I didn't get it.
I've mentioned before that July is Disability Pride Month - in fact, I have another whole post about it. But I want to be upfront about the less positive side of being disabled, too. There are days that I don't really feel like cheering about my disability pride, because I'm just too beat down and frustrated. Last Friday was one of those days.
