Let’s just say that this year has been epic, stressful, and full of ridiculous, massive changes in both my personal and professional life. If you had told me in January any of the stuff in my life right now would have come to pass, I might have laughed at you in disbelief.

So. Wow.

I apologize for being a bit vague. When I decided I wanted to a recap, I sort of forgot that I am shy and also private. Still, I can tell you about all the good stuff, like being a part of Pandamoon Publishing as their editorial coordinator, a shift which took me by surprise (to say the least). I also have more energy than I did at this time last year, thanks to more judicious managing of my mental weather, and even though I’m swamped with All The Things I Want To Do, that’s… really not a bad thing. Inspiration has snuck its way back into my life, too, and I’m working on projects that I’d either set aside or was allowing to percolate, and I am forging better relationships with my family and taking more action to accomplish my goals.

The frustrating and stressful stuff I want to leave behind with 2015, and even if they follow me, they’ll — of a necessity — be different than they were and hopefully more conquerable.

Part of why I think I’m had a pretty danged good year comes down to a single moment and, like all truly life-changing moments, it was brought about by a cat.

Over Thanksgiving in 2014, I brought home a cat from Colorado. Her name is Pica, and she’s probably the cutest cat on the planet. (Not that I’m biased.) I bring her up now because when I was trying to sort out the logistics to bring her back with me, my friend told me something that sort of settled in my bones. I was upset that he’d have to go to great lengths to get her her shots on short notice, and that it would be inconvenience and effort on his part because of something I’d done that could have been avoided if I’d gotten my act together earlier.

He said: If it’s important, it’s worth the inconvenience.

I’m probably paraphrasing a little, because time and turning it over and over in my head has polished it down. Those words — if it’s important… — stuck in my brain. If it’s important, it’s worth the obstacles. If it’s important, it’s worth the pain and inconvenience and dealing with your own failures. If it’s important, it’s worth making it work despite the hard stuff. Packed into ‘if it’s important’ is a wealth of meaning, about throwing yourself forward and picking yourself back up and taking action after action after action.

If it’s important, it’s worth the inconvenience.

There’s an underlying message of compassion in that, when said from one person to another, but I think I was struck most by the acknowledgement that important things are hard and sometimes those hard things are larger than just me. And, sometimes, in being larger than just me, they will leak out onto others, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Or any less worth it. Or my friends any less willing to help me make things happen.

What really gets me is that ‘inconvenience’ is never a factor for me when I try and help others, so I have no idea why the rules were different for me. Now that I know that they were, however, I’ve been working this past year on internalizing this idea of ‘if it’s important…’

I credit this handful of words with a lot of my drive in 2015. In evaluating what I found important, it made me make changes in my life that gave priority to the stuff I wanted to focus on, and helped me decide to live a little bit more outside of my head and in the real world where I can actually make a difference.

So here I sit, at the end of 2015, doing what I love, in a place I’ve made my home, with friends I held onto despite the distance, at the end of my first full year with the most adorable cat in the entire world.

And, friends, I believe that’s important.

So very important.