6 months in...

How time flies. It seems just weeks ago that I started with a blank page and a rough idea of where I thought this year was going to go. Now I'm halfway through, it seems like a good time for a bit of a reflection on how things have gone so far.

The aim of the year was to see what kind of changes I could make to my life whilst retaining a fairly "normal" kind of life - full time job, busy social life etc. But actually, the deeper into the project I get, the more I have found myself questioning as to whether I want a "normal" kind of life. The further down this path I go, the further I want to take it.

And fundamentally, most of what's changed so far has been internal. Yes, there have been physical actions - giving up supermarkets, starting car sharing, switching banks... But what's changed far more than these outward signs has been my mindset and the way I think. I think far more about my life, my possessions, my money and my actions than I did before. I feel far more in tune with my environmental interests and beliefs, and feel that my life is slowly shaping to reflect this. But my target of where I want to get is moving further away.

As I learn more about sharing networks and collaborative consumption, I find myself more open to giving things away and sharing the things I have. Since stopping watching TV and installing adblocker on my internet browser, I feel less affected by advertising and the media and freer as a result. The more I loosen my emotional connection with things and belongings, the less I care about them and the less I buy. The more I learn about provenance and manufacturing, the more I realise the importance of buying good quality and well sourced things, reflected in what I have bought over the last 6 months. Where once I might have seen waste, I now see potential.

It's difficult to know how much of this change in my direction and perception has come through this project and how much from a journey that I was already on (one that led me to start the project in the first place). But I can say that the speed at which I'm moving down this road has been far accelerated by this project - the decisions I've made and the people I've met through it have changed my thinking and actions in ways that I didn't expect and still find surprising. And the people have been one of the highlights for me - it's led me to meet some truly amazing and inspiring people who I hope I will keep in touch with and continue to learn from in the future.

It's also made me look quite critically at myself and my life. I think this is a good thing, but I have a tendency to be overly hard and critical of myself and what I achieve (something my friends have been trying to beat out of me for years), and have really struggled at points so far this year with feeling quite uninspired at myself and feeling like I should be doing more. Trying to strike this balance has been one of the hardest things for me about the project and I'm definitely not there yet.

In some ways I feel like I've achieved a lot - I've stopped going to supermarkets (apart from a few exceptions), switched banks, rescued furniture, reduced my waste, changed my eating and food buying habits, learnt to fix my bike, started the car share process, gone on holiday without flying, couchsurfed, moved into a more community minded house, made presents instead of buying them, switched most of my toiletries to better alternatives, volunteered for good causes, got excited about jam jars and become a regular user of my local library.

But then I sit here and realise how far I still have to go. I still struggle with eating meat and buying well sourced meat when I'm out, I'm still a car owner, I still buy clothes from high street shops, I eat less organic food than I'd like, I still buy from websites like Amazon, I still use some regular toiletries, I don't recycle as much as I should, I still waste food and don't eat as seasonally as I should.

So here's to the next 6 months...