That was the Year that was
It’s the last week of the year, and in a few days, the sound of “new year – new me” will be deafening. It may come as no surprise that I cast off “new year’s resolutions” and bold statements of “this will be my year” some time ago.
Dropping New Year’s resolutions was simply a practical thing. Nothing that I did, be it tax, academic or competition, used a January to December format. As a result, I got into the habit of reviewing and adjusting when the time called for it.
I am lucky that I didn’t get trapped into needing a date on which to make a change. While my thoughts were far from consciously formed at the time, I picked up early that I could decide to change something straight away and that the difficult bit was acting consistently to drive and secure that change.
That said, I have been reviewing 2025 for a while now. I haven’t been planning this blog post, of course, but I have been pausing to review the year, so these are my thoughts. Starting with my health.
It started last Christmas with pain. The symptoms progressed in the very familiar way, and despite my best attempts and a stay in hospital I have not managed move the needle at all on getting anything done for this issue, now entering its tenth year. In addition to my normal daily life of disability, chronic pain and chronic illness, I picked up a stress fracture to the left fibula. I was again unable to get treatment, and so it lingered around from the end of January until November. I literally limped through the year with a fancy carbon fibre walking stick.
That is a very brief summary of a challenging health year. What I want to take away from this is not dwelling on the significant and serious challenges I have faced; rather I want to focus on how I constructively handled those challenges. Self-care has been my number one focus. Without me looking after me, 2025 would have looked very different indeed. I am proud of me, and the people who have helped me make it through in the way I have.
I could dwell here on the struggles, the challenges, the prescription debacles, and the daily smash your head against a brick wall that having a chronic condition unnecessarily brings to your life. I could spend a lot of time on how the Government’s war on disabled people and the rhetoric of the year has made me feel so insecure and threatened in a way that I never felt before. I feel vulnerable; it’s no way to live feeling that you aren’t allowed to have a nice thing, a nice day, or heaven forbid some dignity or independence.
People have it worse, but the existence of worse off doesn’t justify dehumanising another person; it highlights the structural injustice of how society is failing its members. That said, I am super grateful to the people who are around me, who look after and look out for my well-being as well as facilitate my participation in life far beyond what I can accomplish on my own.
So, 2025 has been a struggle. A struggle where I can recognise my resilience in the way I have been, so that, along with help, I have been able to broaden my horizons and manage my health in a constructive and positive way, acknowledging the hurdles and challenges. I still struggle with grief over the life that never was, and I still struggle with acknowledging and identifying myself as a disabled person who needs accommodations and adjustments.
My self-image has not caught up with who I am. 2025 was a year of positives. I have relationships that are maturing and a stability in my life that had been lacking for a long time (maybe in some ways always absent to some extent). I am blessed to be living a life that, struggles and challenges excepted, I enjoy. I love what I do. My frustration is that my creative life wouldn’t exist without my disability and illness, while my disability and illness stand between me and everything I want from my creative life.
That is a good frustration, and I am grateful to have it. Going into 2026 I want to build. That is build out my website, build my writing practice, build my technical skills, build my overall creative repertoire. I want to learn the lessons and skills to express what I have inside to the fullest.
I don’t have a detailed plan of everything I will be doing, after all, my health can sink any of those ships at any time. I hope to attend things in person this year. I am not sure how I am going to work that as a practical endeavour, but I have people who are so supportive and enabling that I have no doubt that possibilities can be made concrete.
The first part of 2026 is going to be devoted to publishing my first Chapbook/Zine of poetry. Currently, I am thinking of publishing a free online pdf zine that can be downloaded and published and an assembled by me printed poetry zine. The idea would be to have these run in parallel with each other, with different materials in each.
Alongside that, I am keen to continue and develop my video skills, maybe even making a short film to accompany a poem one day. I want to develop my own voice so I can do spoken word and voice my own work. This is a big project due to physical factors with my voice. Not an excuse, I want to get speaking my work competently at least. I also want to develop my fiction writing, and I have a project or should I say, work in progress (WIP) for that.
Most of all, I want to keep sharing and connecting with people through my writing and poetry.
So, until the New Year, keep on, keeping on!
