Cameron
Dias-Doyle
Hi, I'm Cameron, and I'm a software engineer living in Edinburgh, Scotland.
01 January 2025 - 4 min read
Three years and one day ago was the last time I wrote in this blog. So much has changed in that time, but I’ve never felt the block on writing shift until recently.
Oh my, so much. Since I last wrote here, my relationship with Jú has grown massively; we moved in together (into my old flat on the Royal Mile, which was a bit of a tight squeeze with Charlie, Tommy, and Tegan too) in August 2022. In October 2023, in the span of a week, we got engaged and moved out of the Royal Mile flat into a place in the suburbs of South Edinburgh that we bought together (I have my own office now! And Jú doesn’t need to work from the dining room table), and then in September this year, we got married up in Perthshire. I think I want to write about the wedding and marriage separately though. No details yet.
I still don’t do “specific goals” anymore, preferring instead to pick a theme for the year, which I have done since 2022. That year was the Year of Language, which was incidentally also the theme for 2024 (2023 was the Year of Running Again, and I ran a marathon PB in Amsterdam that year).
A big reason that this approach appeals to me is that since I was 18, I’ve always retrospectively titled my year in the style of a Friends episode: “The One Where…” with a big event or change (good or bad) that happened to me. Distilling the calendar into a single
This year will be the Year of Writing.
I had to write more than usual this year, and honestly it took me out of my comfort zone, which I was surprised at since I used to really enjoy writing. Granted, I’ve never had to write my marriage vows or a best man speech before, but I still didn’t think it would be as daunting or difficult to write as it was.
Therefore, I’ve decided that this year I want to write more. Some on here, some personal things, probably some things that are just for Jú. I’ve also got myself a One Line A Day journal which I’m starting today. I have no idea if I will actually write something every day for the next five years (and I’m also not making it a target to do so), but it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
My previous year’s themes are not going away either; I have signed back up for another semester of Portuguese at the university, and I got in to the Chicago Marathon in October, the training block for which will likely be a big chunk of my year. But not the theme; what I want to be the focus this year is my writing above all.
Since I went to think about them anyway while I was writing, these are my year titles. They aren’t structured, clean, or even necessarily coherent, but they’re representative nonetheless.
The season breaks don’t actually mean anything, but I guess I would kinda group the stages of my adult life like this if I thought about it.