The end of this decade has really crept up on me. I can hardly believe that is now 2020!

This time last year, I wrote a piece on setting New Year Resolutions and how I'm not really a fan. Instead, I prefer assigning a word to the year as an intention.

With all that said, I want to take a quick look back at what has been an incredibly formative decade in 10 photos.

In 2010, I was 15. I had just received my dSLR (a Canon 550D that is still going strong to this day) and had just begun my journey into learning photography.

Despite being right in the middle of the dreaded International Baccalaureate, I was photographing throughout 2011!

In 2012, I finished up at my sixth form and started my undergraduate degree at the University of Stirling!

2013 was the year I founded The Travelling Quill!

2014 is hard to summarise with just one photo! I did so much travelling in this year, it was a bit exhausting. Asia in January, Africa in June and a semester in North America in the autumn.

In 2015... I actually did some uni work, but also managed a few trips here and there...

In 2016, I graduate and started my first job, which took me to some very exciting places in and around Scotland!

2017 saw me visit somewhere a bit more out of the way, Gibraltar, as well as some more touristy destinations in the US...

In 2018, I started working in the third sector, but still managed time to visit Bruges and manage another trip to the Highlands!

And lastly, 2019 was when I threw myself into art (but still managed a trip to Italy!)

It's a bit overwhelming to look back over all of these memories! I remember being a kid and working out that I'd be 25 by the time 2020 came around. It seemed light years away and I could hardly wrap my head around being that old. And yet, here I am! Mid-20s and trying to navigate all that comes with Being A Grown Up.

I'm not sure just yet what word I'll set as my intention for 2020, but I suspect it will be more academic than previous words as I'll be heading back to university to begin my Masters degree in September! Looking back over the years as shown me how different I am now to that quiet girl who fled London to Scotland aged 18, and how much I've grown in confidence as my own person.

Here's to many more adventures in the new decade.

A few years ago now, I was studying New Year's Resolutions. I was in Canada for a semester at the University of Victoria and I had a class called Motivation, Emotion and Wellbeing. In this class, we spent a portion of time examining historic and current research into why people do what they do - and why they don't do what they really should do.

• Why does a student only begin an essay the night before it's due instead of writing it during the week?
• Why does a person recently discharged from hospital not do their physiotherapy, despite knowing its importance? 
• Why do people give up their New Year's Resolutions after a couple of weeks? 

I think understanding the process of decision making has been a huge help in actually achieving goals. Now, a disclaimer. Just because I was a student in that class doesn't mean I'm now cured and have perfect motivation for everything - far from it. But people don't just do things. There are a number of factors at play before a person decides to get up off the sofa to go for a run - too many to go into now  - but my take away from that portion of the class was that New Year's Resolutions are way too specific. 

Uh, yeah, of course you're going to give up on your goal when what you told yourself on the 1st January was "I'm not going to eat any processed sugar at all and I'm going to go to the gym three times a week - no matter what!" No matter what? So nothing can get in the way? What happens when you get that cold that's been going around and you miss an entire week and a friend makes you a carb heavy meal to get your strength back up. Ooops, guess I broke my resolution. Time to give up. 

That kind of statement is extremely harsh and inevitably brings up a load of guilt when you can't fulfil it. So in my research for this class, I came across the idea of assigning a word to the year. Just one word but it needs to encompass what you would like to achieve. For example, when I first read this in 2014, I knew my word for the year was 'travel' as I had visited three continents that year and grown a lot as a person because of it. 2016 was 'career'. My focus was getting my first graduate job but had I not achieved this, my resolution word would have still been kind on myself. If I had got to the end of 2016 and not got that job, I had still progressed my career by graduating from university.

By staying broad, you make things achievable and there's room to breathe when you need a break. I love this as a concept because it ties so nicely in with No More Zero Days - the idea that even a little progress is better than no progress at all, no matter how seemingly insignificant it may be.

So all that was a very roundabout way to announce that my resolution word for 2019 is 'creativity'! I want this year to be the most creative one yet, whatever that may look like. I have a lot of different projects bubbling away and I know that there will be others that will be very spur of the moment too, like this flower pressing frame below (only 85p, thanks IKEA!). I can't wait to see what 2019 brings!