Another Year Over, A New One (almost) Begun – Reflecting on 2017

December 30, 2017
Lucy Watts MBE
2017, assistance dog week, award, BBC, Blog, BLOG, central line, family, fundraising, grateful, human rights, life limiting, NHS, NMCCC, palliative, Patient Leader, PORT, quality of life, Together for short lives, TPN
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2017 has been an incredible year, I feel truly privileged for all the opportunities I’ve received, all the new roles and projects, all the experiences, places I’ve been, things I’ve done, people I’ve met. This year Molly and I started to give demonstrations in aid of Dog A.I.D. too, having given 4 formal demonstration this year. It’s been a massive year for me, the list of things I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of things this year, some big, many small, but nonetheless that I’ve given my time and energy to. I feel proud of what I’ve achieved. Proud of myself? Well, that’s a work in progress, I struggle to feel proud of myself instead always seeing where I could’ve been better, done more, work harder, achieved further but that’s me, I just am trying to find a way to be proud of myself and content with my achievements as they are, without always focusing on what I haven’t done or could’ve done better. I need to learn to appreciate the multitude and magnitude of all I’ve done up to this point. Hopefully next year I’ll be better at it! It’s just been an amazing year. Thank you to everyone who has played their part, no matter how big or small, you’ve helped me to move forwards into what is an uncertain future.

I feel blessed to have all the opportunities I have, all the people in my life, including my amazing family, to have all the things I need to survive thanks to our NHS and to have Molly, my ever-faithful Assistance Dog, companion and friend. I have a lot of struggles, negatives, suffering, upset, trials, challenges, hurdles to overcome and losses in my life, but I choose instead to focus on the plentiful positives of and in my life.

2017 has been amazing. I’ve had a great year in many ways. I have met friends I’ve known for years but never met in person until this year, I’ve made new friends, I’ve spent quality time with family in ways we haven’t been able to in the 10 years I’ve been poorly. I’ve achieved things and become involved with things beyond my dreams. I’m pursuing a project of my own that’s been in the planning for a very long time. I’m living a life I can be proud of, a life worth living.

So, here’s a summary of a successful, jam-packed year. Brace yourself. It’s quite a ride. Also, this isn’t all I’ve done this year, either – it’s a “I’m trying to be brief” summary so a lot of things are omitted.

I thought I’d start by sharing the demonstrations Molly and I started giving this year, with 4 formal demonstrations given. As a result of this and of other donations our total raised for Dog A.I.D. in 2017 is £1500. It’s amazing to give back to a charity that’s given me so much.

January 2017

We started off the year with me writing a piece for Muscular Dystrophy UK Trailblazers, after which I’ve written a few blogs now. I also became a Huffington Post blogger in February, writing a few blogs, including my first one which was Assistance Dogs and Access Refusals (read it here).

The major thing in January was the announcement of Molly’s “animal OBE”, the PDSA Order of Merit (after receiving it a few months earlier). We appeared, in photos in a tiny segment on Good Morning Britain the day it was announced, whilst I was at an appointment and we got back from London from the hospital before heading up to BBC Essex to appear on the Dave Monk Show regarding the award. Molly appeared in the Metro, Dogs Today Magazine and the Echo, and on various websites including the Daily Mail, the Mirror, The Times, Closer online, K9 Magazine, BT’s website and others. I then launched the www.lucyandmolly.co.uk website. You can read my blog about it here and on the PDSA website here and watch the video on YouTube below.

Also in January I attended the Dying Matters launch event, I wrote another blog for Muscular Dystrophy UK, ehospice shared about Molly’s award and the Open University Sexuality Alliance posted a blog of mine.

February 2017

February was a great month. I became a Huffington Post blogger, I attended a meeting and wrote a piece to go in a book on Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and worked on the Pseudo Obstruction Research Trust’s website and started working on a project for PORT.

Two big events took place in February.

On the 7th February we attended the House of Commons for a Together for Short Lives reception. It was our third trip to Parliament for Together for Short Lives, but the first since Molly qualified as my Assistance Dog, so it was her first time there. She even got her own dedicated invitation! We had a fantastic night, it was a fantastic event, I got to meet Leah (if you don’t follow her blog then you should – go to shouldhavebeenamermaid.com), and my friend Junior who I’ve worked with virtually loads but hadn’t met him until that day. It was a great event that signalled the launch of the “Lift the baby benefit bar” campaign and the continuation of the “Here For The 49,000” campaign and the launch of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Children Who Need Palliative Care. You can read about the event in my blog here . I also got to meet a hero of mine, the incredible lady that is Baroness Campbell of Surbiton (or as she once said to someone that just calling her Jane would be fine). Jane is an incredible woman, a woman with Spinal Muscular Atrophy who has done such great work, especially in the field of disability; she was instrumental in the campaigning for the Disability Discrimination Act which was finally enacted in 1995 and the Community Care (Direct Payments) Act 1996, she’d worked hard in various disability organisations, she was a commissioner for the Disability Rights Commission and then the Equality and Human Rights Commission, she was the founding chair of Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE – pronounced Sky), she co-founded Not Dead Yet UK, she protested and campaigned against the closure of the Independent Living Fund (ILF) and was appointed a Life Peer as a Crossbencher in the House of Lords in recognition for her outstanding work. I only briefly spoke to her but that made my day. She told me not to give up and to ensure it was me and my disabled peers leading things, not professionals leading things on our behalf. I promised her I would. This was another inspiration to continue to make my project come to fruition, which I’m still working on now, I hope to launch it in 2018.

Myself, Junior and Leah

On the 22nd February Molly and I attended the RISE4Disability event in Peterborough, at which Molly and I gave our first formal demonstration and where I also gave a speech about my life and work. We had a fantastic day there, the demo went really well and was very well received and we had a great time. I also nominated Together for Short Lives to be RISE’s charity beneficiary for the event which was great, they received £500. I got to meet some online friends there too, including Jo Southall who runs JB Occupational Therapy. She has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and uses a wheelchair and is also a qualified Occupational Therapist. She’s amazing, so do check out her website here. You can watch the demonstration Molly and I gave on YouTube here.

March 2017

In March I participated in various things, for various different charities/projects, including attending an event for Muscular Dystrophy UK Trailblazers, designing the Pseudo Obstruction Research Trust (PORT) charity banners, attending an event at Ford Dagenham for PORT and also Molly and I gave a talk and demonstration at the Rayleigh Trefoil Guild, who decided to raise money for Dog A.I.D. as a result; they raised £350 over 2017.

April 2017

In April I wrote a piece for the Inside Palliative Care newsletter about the Open University Sexuality Alliance, I continued supporting Dr Adam Farmer’s EVASION-CIPO project, reviewing the patient-facing literature and participating in a Skype call and I continued working on the PORT website.

Then disaster struck; my Hickman Line burst, necessitating being admitted to hospital and having a procedure to insert a new line, which is quite hard due to scar tissue in my jugular vein from all the lines I’ve had. Luckily, thanks to my absolutely amazing nutrition team and the Interventional Radiology team pulling out all the stops, I received my new line just 24 hours after I arrived at the Royal London and so was able to go home 2 hours after the procedure. However, all was not good and sadly this line was extremely positional – unless I laid completely still in bed, didn’t move, didn’t lift my neck off the pillow and didn’t breathe deeply or move my arm, the line wouldn’t work. This meant I couldn’t have my TPN as it was alarming every 2 seconds with even a slight movement. So I had to have another new line. Unfortunately, this insertion proved extremely difficult due to the amount of scar tissue, and ended up being a very long, painful and traumatic procedure (I have them done awake with local anaesthetic, which wears off extremely quickly for me) and I was very, very bruised and in excruciating pain afterwards (compared to normally coming out of a line insertion a bit tight and sore but not in pain). I was sent home 15 minutes after the procedure direct from IR and the ride home was horrendous – but at least the line was working.

May 2017

In May I was on the panel reviewing the Together for Short Lives Transition Awards grants, reviewing 12 projects and then participating in the deliberation meeting to decide the shortlist. I wrote another blog for HuffPost called “Dying Matters For Everyone: Dying Matters Awareness Week” (read it here), Molly and I appeared in the Pets at Home My VIP magazine, and I wrote a piece for Together for Short Lives on my end of life planning for a research project.

Also in May, I was privileged to attend Badminton Horse Trials courtesy of a wish granted by the Willberry Wonder Pony charity (a “Willberry Wish”). Willberry Wonder Pony was a charity started by the late, great Hannah Francis, a teenager who had bone cancer and was a keen eventer (a horse rider who competes with their horse in the equestrian version of the triathlon, known as “eventing”) who mobilised the entire equestrian world and who had her bucket list fulfilled and supported by everyone in the horse world. She then decided she wanted to set up a charity to do two things: one, to raise money to fund bone cancer research, and two to fulfil ‘horsey’ wishes for people with serious illnesses. They paid for us to attend Badminton Horse Trials on cross country day, as well as to attend the exclusive press briefing following the cross country and to meet the world number 1 rider, Michael Jung. It was an amazing day, more than I could’ve ever dreamed of, an item ticked off the bucket list and precious memories that will forever be with me. It has been a dream to go since I was 7, I’ve watched Badminton on the telly every year since I was 7 wishing to be there; and the Willberry Wonder Pony team made it happen for me. It was also a privilege to meet Hannah’s mum and to hold the original Willberry, who was with Hannah throughout her treatment as her “Chief Chemo Pony”. I also wrote a blog about our day at Badminton for their website. You can read that here.

We also had a trip to London on the 22nd May, which was made possible by Stephen, a volunteer driver at The J’s Hospice, who drove us up to London and took us round for the day. We went onto the Emirates Cable Cars, on the Thames Clipper numerous times, we went up the Shard, then back on a Clipper, up to the London Eye, before catching the Clipper back down to Greenwich Peninsula to get to our car and come home. We had a fantastic day, doing things we’ve wanted to do in a long time and getting lots of great photos and precious memories to treasure.

June 2017

In June I contributed to a survey for a piece of research, I attended the Big Bowel Event in Birmingham on behalf of PORT, I participated in a Skype conference (as we do every few months) for the Open University Sexuality Alliance and attended a meeting for the Hospice UK People in Partnership Group, of which I am a member. Also, I was invited to sit on the NHS England Children with Complex Needs and Special Educational Needs & Disability Board (CCN SEND).

July 2017

In July Molly, Mum and I with some friends participated in the Twilight Colourthon, a 10km fundraising walk around Southend, in aid of the Pseudo Obstruction Research Trust (PORT), raising £1257. You can watch a video about that here. I also had some events planned that I had to miss due to my admission to the Neuromuscular Complex Care Centre (NMCCC) at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery for my first neuromuscular “M.O.T”, under Dr Ros Quinlivan, where I had various tests and new management plans and at which it was hoped I would have my muscle biopsy but sadly it got cancelled – and as yet, has still not taken place.

However, for one of the events I missed, at which I was supposed to give a speech, I created a video that could be played instead, which has proved very popular even outside of the event itself. You can watch the video here.

During the NMCCC admission, blood was taken from my Hickman Line and the line wasn’t flushed properly afterwards so it blocked. The nurses used an empty syringe to force the blockage, which we later found out had weakened the line to such a point that less than a week after coming home from the NMCCC, when my nurse flushed the line, it burst completely, under the skin of my chest where the line is tunnelled. I had to go back to hospital – I can’t manage without 2 points of intravenous access at all times – and then a new line was placed, once again a struggle to put in and I was told no more lines will be able to be put in the right side of my neck, but I have the new line and it’s working well. I wrote a blog post about Charlie Gard at the end of July and you can read this here.

August 2017

In August my Charlie Gard blog post was republished on the international children’s section of the ehospice website (click here to see it) as well as translated Italian for an organisations’s website and social media. My Dying Matters Caring About Carers video was published on ehospice, I was invited to attend the next Patient Partnership Panel for the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in October and asked to write for the BMJ blog and I appeared very briefly on BBC Radio Ulster about digital legacies. From the 6th to the 12th August it was International Assistance Dog Week. I had planned a week of videos and activity to celebrate IADW and raise awareness of Assistance Dogs and of Dog A.I.D., who helped me to train Molly to become my Assistance Dog. I produced a video for each day, wrote some blogs, we featured in the local Echo and I also published a blog on HuffPost called “Dogs That Open Doors” (read it here).

Molly and I appeared on appeared on BBC Essex on the Ronnie Barbour show talking about Assistance Dogs and Assistance Dog Week and shared our story as well as touching on disability, my MBE, my condition/Charlie Gard/Mitochondrial Disease and other topics briefly. Listen to that appearance (with subtitles) in the video below.

September 2017

In September I attended the next RISE4Disability event, this time in Maidstone, where Molly and I gave another demonstration, again it was well received. Unbeknownst to us, our Dog A.I.D. Trainer Midge was at the event and she assessed us whilst there, signing off our annual reassessment, which was fantastic. I didn’t know she was assessing us either! Which made it even more special. It was a great event, RISE.

I gave a speech for Total Voice Northamptonshire at their advocacy event, on my experiences of advocacy. I was told it made a huge impact, reducing some to tears, including a commissioner who didn’t realise how vital advocacy services are – including for people like me who have capacity and no mental health conditions who currently don’t qualify for statutory-funded advocacy services. It was a great event.

I became a part of Living Life To The Fullest as a Lead Co-Researcher, a research project which seeks to forge new understandings of the lives, hopes, desires and contributions of children and young people with ‘life-limiting’ or ‘life-threatening’ impairments (LL/LTIs). It’s a privilege to be a part of it.

I wrote a blog for the Huffington Post’s Life Less Ordinary series, titled “Planning For The End Of My Life, Aged Just 17, Made Me Live A Life That Ensured I Wasn’t Forgotten”, which you can read here. This was translated into different languages for various HuffPost editions.

A lady called Claire Morris visited me to chat to me about my work and to get to know me and to also discuss a project the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA) were in the process of setting up and asking if I’d be involved as a consultant. I also appeared in a provocation piece Claire wrote, “Who Speaks For Who?” on Palliative Care advocacy which you can read here.

I attended meetings for the Pseudo Obstruction Research Trust (PORT), I had many phone calls and some Skype calls and various other commitments, and I participated in quite a few TweetChats (formal, guided hour-long discussions on a topic on Twitter, which anyone can participate in).

October 2017

October was yet another busy month. I participated in more TweetChats, Molly and I appeared in a paper and presentation, I commented on some pieces, participated in an Open University Sexuality Alliance Skype conference, I created a video which was used by the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA) for World Hospice & Palliative Care Day and I did a social media takeover for Rare Revolution Magazine.

On the 17th October I went to my first NHS England Children with Complex Needs and Special Educational Needs and Disability (CCN SEND) Board meeting, which was great. Then on the 19th October I attended my first British Medical Journal (BMJ) Patient Partnership panel meeting and was asked to become a permanent member. Molly and I went to the Lions of Leigh to give a demonstration and talk about Dog A.I.D., for which I received £50 and then the Lions donated a further £1000.

November 2017

November was also an extremely busy month (aren’t they all!?). I began my paid role as a consultant for the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance Direct Stakeholder Engagement in Palliative Care Advocacy project (read about it here). My Q&A blog around transition and young adult care was posted on ehospice (read it here) and liaised with people about various projects. I was also invited to sit on two Together for Short Lives Transition Taskforce Regional Action Groups. I started supporting someone with their research and discussed another potential project with someone I know. Then some very big things occurred.

On Wednesday 8th November I attended a Hospice UK People in Partnership group meeting. I was able to share with them the WHPCA project, with great interest.

On Friday 10th November I was invited to speak alongside Kath Evans and Amy Frounks at the Queen’s Nursing Institute Transition of Care Conference. The speech was very well received and I had a fantastic day, networking, learning about all the fantastic work going on and seeing old friends and meeting new ones. You can read my blog about the event here, read about the conference here and find out more about the QNI’s Transition of Care project on their website here.

Amy, Hannah and Molly and I

Molly and I with Kath Evans

On Friday 17th November I founded and set up the Palliative Care Voices network as part of the WHPCA Direct Stakeholder project. Palliative Care Voices is a network of direct stakeholders (people using Palliative Care services or with a life-limiting condition) and indirect stakeholders (their carers/families) coming together and having the platform to contribute to global Palliative Care advocacy. If you are a Palliative Care recipient or someone with a life-limiting illness or you are a carer of someone who is, do join our network. The private group on Facebook can be accessed here. Even if you don’t meet the criteria, do like our public Facebook page fb.me/palliativecarevoices or follow our Twitter @PallCareVoices.

On Thursday 23rd November I attended and spoke at the Patient Leadership Workshop Event run by Health Education East of England, East of England Leadership Academy and the Eastern Health Academic Science Network. It was a great success. I met so many amazing people and contributed a lot to the event. You can see a video about the event here, hear about the event here and see the images created by Graham Ogilvie, summarising the key points of the event, here. You can also read my blog about the day here.

On Wednesday 29th November I travelled up to the BBC to record a BBC Radio 4 programme called “We Need To Talk About Death”. The programme is hosted by Dame Joan Bakewell, and I participated live in the studio with James Norris of the Digital Legacy Association and Elaine Kasket (learn more about Elaine here and about some of her work here). The programme was all about digital legacies and digital assets. Also participating, via pre-recorded pieces, was Dr Mark Taubert (a Palliative Care consultant at Velindre NHS Trust) and some patients, as well as my friend Chelsea Corbett, and others. You can listen to it here.

December 2017

December was a quieter month in some respects but still extremely busy.

Maddie Blackburn, Chair of the Open University Sexuality Alliance came over and we had a Skype call with Dr Sarah Earle whilst she was here. We had a very productive afternoon.

Friday 1st December I also found out I am a Queen’s Young Leaders Highly Commended Runner-Up for 2018. You can find out more about the QYL here and see me under the runner’s up tab for the United Kingdom here. Whilst I didn’t win the award, I get a fantastic personal development programme which will help me grow and improve and hopefully help me launch my project.

I had numerous phone calls, Skype conferences. I also met a truly inspirational lady, Shelley Simmonds, whose son Fraser has a rare form of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy – rare in that most Duchenne boys will walk up until the age of around 10/11, but Fraser, 4, has never been able to walk. I came across Shelley and Fraser as they were fundraising for a wheelchair and having fundraised myself, I put them in touch with Wipe Away Those Tears who paid half the cost (as the Simmonds and friends and the community had already raised half the total cost). Shelley came over on the 6th December and we talked till fairly late, it was as if we’d known each other for years, we didn’t feel like we’d only just met. We had the most amazing conversation. We’re up for collaborating, both being active advocates for disability and illnesses so I look forward to that. More than anything, though, is that I’ve gained a great friend and an ‘adopted’ sister. It’s wonderful. I suggest you, my followers, check out Fraser & Friends on Facebook, which you can access by clicking here, but also check out Shelley’s amazing feet of climbing Mount Snowdon with 4 year old Fraser on her back, giving him an experience he would never otherwise get and raising a huge amount of money in the process – you can read about it here. Shelley was also an award winner at the recent Pride of Essex Awards.

Molly, Shelley and I

On the 10th December I launched my Palliative Care As A Human Right Video, which is a great resource for lectures, workshops, meetings, conferences and lessons. It’s freely available on YouTube. I hope to develop some educational resources to use alongside this, to create a full educational resource on Palliative Care as a Human Right. You can watch the video below.

On the 12th December I released my Palliative Care and Universal Health Coverage Video – watch it here.

From the 11th to the 15th December I curated the @NHS Twitter account. I had an enormously successful week, reaching 1.1 million people with my tweets, lots of engagement and fantastic conversations. I had a different theme for each day:

Monday was about Patient Leadership and patient involvement;
Tuesday was about Young Adult Care and experience and about Transition;
Wednesday was all about Personal Health Budgets (PHBs) – a topical first for the @NHS account, no one else had covered PHBs before;
Thursday was about Palliative Care and Life-Limiting Conditions;
Friday was about long term conditions and complex needs including self-care, resilience, coproduction, mental health and other related topics.

Throughout the week each day the followers chose a task to see Molly perform via a poll, which was posted at the end of each day. This proved very popular. The week was a great success and thoroughly enjoyable but busy and exhausting. I’m just so glad I had the opportunity to curate it, what an experience and opening up my life and my work with a new audience too. You can read about my curation here.

On the 19th December I attended the Transition Taskforce East of England Regional Action Group (RAG), held at an East Anglia Children’s Hospices (EACH) Hospice in Milton. Together for Short Lives set up the Transition Taskforce and these are run by the hospice members within each region for their dedicated RAG. Not only do I sit on the East of England RAG but I’ve also been asked to sit on the North London RAG too. At the meeting on the 19th I spoke about Patient Leadership and the event I attended on the 23rd November. Whilst there I also met (face to face for the first time, but we’ve been linked on Twitter for a while) Paula Davis, who you may know as the Mum of William in the fantastic series “Born To Be Different”. You may also, if you are aware of Wellchild, know that Paula’s daughter Jessie received a Wellchild Award in 2016. They’re an amazing family, and it was a privilege to meet face-to-face and talk with Paula on the 19th.

Christmas 2017

Then came Christmas, a busy Christmas this year as almost all the family (minus cousin Will) were together at Christmas for the first time in 2 decades. It was myself, Mum, Vicky, Grandma, mum’s brother Nick and wife Louise and my cousin Charlotte (Charlie) and her daughter Eloise, who is 4. We had the most wonderful Christmas together. If only Will had been there – and had Grandad been alive – it would’ve been even more perfect. It was just a very special Christmas, all being together. However, it did make me feel even more sad than usual that Grandad wasn’t here with us, this would’ve made this year to have us all together. I’m also sad he missed seeing my MBE which, as Charlie put it, second to him receiving an MBE himself, me receiving the MBE would’ve made his life. Death is a cruel old thing, it doesn’t discriminate. However my sadness was offset by spending time with everyone and enjoying spending time with Eloise, who was absolutely enamoured with my ‘swing’ (my hoist), fascinated with all my bags and tubes and loved my wheelchair too. Her innocence, and her complete lack of prejudice or preconceived ideas or feelings about disability was so refreshing, she found me being disabled cool thanks to all the things I have and treated me like she did everyone else, it was wonderful, even when I felt poorly and stayed in my room she kept coming out and playing in my room so I wasn’t left out. She’s just the most wonderful little girl, so kind, gentle and caring. I’ll miss her when they fly to Mozambique. I just hope this time, it won’t be another 3 years before we see them again. Christmas this year was about the most important thing time, and that is family and quality time with the ones I love. The best Christmas in a very, very long time.

Then on Thursday 28th December I appeared very briefly via phone call on BBC Essex as an update to my appearance earlier this year, with Ronnie Barbour, which was lovely. Only a few minutes long. You can listen to it here on iPlayer, it’s 1 hour 22 minutes in.

2017 Summary and Thoughts

So that comprises 2017 in terms of what I’ve done. Considering that isn’t all of it, you can see how busy I’ve been. Not to mention trying to sort out my care package going onto a Personal Health Budget (PHB) so I can manage the package myself, which has involved meetings, interviewing staff, sorting out training and more. Then there’s things I’ve done for pleasure, spending time with family and of course, not included in this summary, is the sheer amount of people I have supported, which I consider a privilege – being the one person people can turn to at times of desperation, feel able to open up about how they feel and feel comfortable sharing their worst moments, thoughts, feelings and experiences with me is a huge privilege.

I have had a truly amazing year. I feel honoured to have the life I have. Whilst my illnesses are tough and become ever more difficult to manage and overcome, I’m living a life I love. A life beyond my dreams.

Reflecting on 2017 is not all positivity and happiness, though, as I will now explain why. Living with a progressive, life-limiting and unpredictable condition is always tough. However, out of the three – progressive, life-limiting and unpredictable – I find the progressive aspect the hardest to deal with. They’re all hard to deal with but the progressive aspect of my condition is the worst part, for me personally. The continual loss of abilities, the repetitive cycle of grief, coming to terms with and accepting one thing just as another difficulty crops up and I face another loss; its tough. I struggle. It’s hard enough if your condition is static or if it flares up and down, but losing abilities knowing you’ll never get them back is horrid and distressing. At this time of reflection, as 2017 comes to an end, there is much positivity, but it hurts to look back on the deterioration in this year. It’s then tough to look ahead to the future, when you don’t know how much of a future you’ll have with. Each day is a blessing, we should all live with that understanding, as life is finite, life has a terminal prognosis itself. However, I can’t live one day at a time, which many life-limited people do, they avoid planning ahead for things due to the fear that these plans will not go ahead, to avoid disappointment. I am a driven, self-motivated person who needs things to aim towards, I’m very goal driven, but also a planner by nature. I need structure, organisation, things to aim towards. At first I did want to shy away from planning, but my nature and my work, have taught me that it’s better to plan and face disappointment than to not plan a future at all. So, much as my future is uncertain and every day is a blessing, I push forwards with dreams, goals, aspirations and plans, whether or not they will happen and however long I have left on this planet. As the saying goes, it’s better to love and lose than never to love at all – well, I feel the same about planning ahead; better to make plans and face disappointment, than to never make plans at all.

What are my hopes for 2018?

Well, I have many.

Let’s start off with my ‘work’ and ‘doing’ goals:

To write my autobiography.
To finish setting up and launch the charity I’ve been working on for a long time.
To do more paid work.
To get a speaker’s agent and do more speaking.
To do more media work.
To do more written work.
To blog on a regular basis.
To finish off my digital legacy planning & pieces.
To raise more money for Dog A.I.D. and give more demonstrations with Molly.
To set up an online school, for online courses on various topics, and to create educational resources and videos, such as my Human Rights Day Video.

My personal goals:

To learn to be proud of myself.
To meet more of my online friends in person.
To spend more quality time with family.
To take Molly on new walks, explore new places, take lots of photos.
To take Molly to the beach.
To develop my photography, practise more, use YouTube tutorials and online resources and maybe do a photography course.
To not work so hard all of the time, to learn that giving 200% 100% of the time is unsustainable. To remind myself that time off is okay and to accept perfection is not real.
To not allow toxic/nasty to upset me or ruin my life and not to give my time and energy to those who are not willing to support me in return or who will not appreciate what I do for them.
To complete my bucket list.
To have more ‘me time’ and downtime.