I can’t believe December is almost here. This year has flown by, and the past month has been strange. My goals for November caved under the news that I was losing my job. I’ve never been laid off before and it has been a very difficult and emotional experience. I was lucky to have some freelance work right away as I looked for a new position, and I’ve had some very promising interviews that I hope will blossom into good news this week. I have been trying to stay as positive as possible, but it is harder than I thought it would be to keep the cheerful face on all the time.

Despite quite a bit more time to myself than I planned, I havent’t been able to concentrate on writing unless it was for my freelance work or a part of my job interviews. I had to accept the fact that with all I have on my mind, National Novel Writing Month simply wasn’t going to happen for me. I have never been so stressed I couldn’t write. I’ve been so busy I couldn’t write, but this has been an entirely new range of emotions. Every time I have sat down to work on my young adult WIP, I haven’t tapped out more than a few lines at a time. I managed to choke out almost 8,000 words of my novel before acknowledging that my hard work was likely needed elsewhere, such as looking for jobs or preparing for interviews. It makes me feel like even more of a failure than the lay off did.

Thankfully, this time of year is about fresh starts. Looking back, October and November have been when I have sunk the lowest…and December and January are when amazing new opportunities have always surfaced. I am going to face 2012 knowing that it holds all the promise in the world and set my goals accordingly.

I am lucky to have some amazing writer friends who not only are awesome and fun ladies, but keep me going when I feel like I can’t do this writing thing. They have their own goals and I love seeing them accomplish new things, like book contracts (!!!!) and new drafts finished. This year we are starting a goals group to keep ourselves accountable and encouraged. I have been thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish in the coming year, and the job loss has actually helped me.

I feel like I’ve started fighting for what I really want again. I have been complacent in the last year professionally, assuring myself that things would get better if I just gave them time. Being laid off has been awful, but it helped me realize that I wasn’t happy. I don’t think I was being utilized as fully as I could have been, and I only have myself to blame for that. I made it clear that I could do things, but I didn’t push for them. That isn’t me…I am pretty confident and I make things happen. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t making things happen, and now that I have some distance from it all, I think it is because I wasn’t in the right place.

Fighting to find (and get!) the right kind of job has also helped me realize that I haven’t been fighting hard enough for my own dreams outside the workplace. There is always the idea in my mind that I can do things later, that I need to see my husband because our schedules are so opposite one another, that I need to have a social life, that I need to relax. Those things are all important, but they don’t fight for my dreams at all. They sometimes hinder moving forward on them, in fact. I need to start fighting myself for the time to make dreams come true.

I know that it won’t be easy…one of the things that was great about my old job is that I could leave work at work most days, and I had a great work-life balance. Doing what I really want to do professionally may mean that I have less of that balance than I have enjoyed the past year, and that means that I need to be even more deliberate about working the dream and goal time into the free time. I will have to make some sacrifices on occasion. But that is okay, because I am coming out of this corner fighting again, and I am willing to do the hard stuff.

Have you ever been through a hard time like this as a writer? What are you doing to realize your dreams in the middle of the rest of your life?