2019 Retrospective
2019 has been a tough year for me with a lot of drastic life changes. It’s now 2020, which makes it a great time to stop, look back and reflect into everything that has happened this year.
This year, I’ve decided to focus less on my career and more on my personal life, physical and mental health.
This should be easily noticeable from my Github contributions graph in 2019:
There’s a sharp drop in activity around February/March. Not surprisingly, that’s around the time when I went through a long term relationship breakup and my life changed completely. That’s also around the time when I decided to start eating better and began following the Ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting.
In 2019, I’ve given zero talks and released no new open source libraries. Still, I’m perfectly happy with that. Doing this allowed me to redirect my energy to things that matter and have been neglected for way too long. I’ve started journalling consistently and sleeping better. As a result, I feel a lot less anxiety and am simply a happier person now.
In 2019, I’ve travelled to Brazil, Dublin, Spain, Mexico City, Chicago, New Orleans and the Netherlands. I’ve tried magic mushrooms for the first time and it changed my life. It was a year of a lot of firsts: First time Salsa dancing, painting, trying oysters and even ran my first half marathon! I started dating again for the first time in several years! I’ve tried hard to constantly push myself outside of my comfort zone. I started reading more frequently and listening to podcasts. By the way, my favorites are the Knowledge Project and the Tim Ferriss show.
Too much focus on work has completely blindsided me to problems in my life that went unnoticed for way too long. I was burned out and tired.
Towards the end of the year, I suffered a knee injury playing soccer and tore my left knee ACL. This is the second time this happens to me, the first time was ~8 years ago (2011) when I got my right knee ACL reconstructed back in Brazil. Now it’s time for the left knee. It’s not been easy to receive this news but it was a good reminder that I should be more kind with my body and take better care of it, instead of recklessly injuring myself all the time for no good reason.
That’s fine though. I can’t let that one incident ruin all the other good things that happened this year. Regardless, 2019 has been a great year, the best so far and I hope all subsequent years will just get better too.
