On thinking about 2026
Is it too late for a recap & goal setting post? Too bad!
Call me a Millennial basic bitch, but I love a good January goal setting session.
A new year always energises me with its unknown potential. I’ve done this most years, having even dabbled in setting Word of Year intentions of years past. However, the last two years I didn’t do this.
In January 2024, it was very obvious to us that the first half of the year would be us getting the house, my body and our minds ready for Penny’s entrance, but the second half was a complete and utter unknown. In January 2025, we had just set a date for the wedding, I was really looking forward to going back to work, and didn’t really give much thought to the upcoming year.
From January, 2025 snowballed in a way I didn’t expect. Nothing dramatic happened; it was more a year of a thousand cuts. I was tired. Not because I needed more sleep (though don’t we all?), but because I was so deflated and drained. Even now, conjuring the energy to describe those thousand cuts makes me tired.
There were many beautiful moments in 2025. Getting married. Visiting Greece with my nephew. Having my entire family in my house for a night, in my city for a week. Feeling more influential at work. Watching Penny grow and play and experiment.
But, I underestimated how much physical and mental work goes into returning back to work with a child in nursery for the first time, renovating two of our main rooms at once (now with a child), and planning a wedding.
In many respects, we had it easy. Penny loved nursery and I loved returning to work, neither of us breaking down at the door during drop off. We could go on holiday and stay at my in-laws while the wall was taken down in our house. After learnings from the bathroom renovation, we hired someone to tile the backsplash. Our wedding was really small, and because we had the reception at a restaurant, there were many things we didn’t need to sort out.
Until mid-October, I really thought we crushed the year. We completed all three of our major projects for the year by problem solving and just getting on with it. When the three of us got sick for two months due to Penny going to nursery, we persevered armed with cold meds and tissues. When work got too much, I was able to hire help. When we got home from Greece to a home covered in dust, we enlisted my nephew to help us clean. When we felt that all of our day to day belongings were chaotically organised between our house, our car and Ian’s parents house forty minutes away, we collected them all back to our house, hooked up the oven and turned our bath into our sink. As the wedding date got closer, I enlisted help through my brilliant colleague, and Penny’s grandparents got more time with her over the weekend while Ian and I bashed through the house.
When we boarded our flight to Morocco for a short honeymoon, I think we were both aglow with that feeling that we did it. I had sorted work out to be more sustainable mentally for me. We had renovated the last rooms of our house and built a beautiful kitchen, living room and dining room that we got to host both of our families in. We had the most beautiful, most intimately us wedding.
And then, a blaring fire alarm at 3am a month later changed everything.
Running frantically out of our bed, half clothed, Ian rushed to Penny and I rushed to the ‘fire’, only to be met with water pouring down on my head in the kitchen. The brand new kitchen we had only been using for a month now covered in water.
We put down all the towels and bowls we owned, trying to contain as much of the damage as possible. We sorted out the cause from our neighbor and eventually the flow stopped. Insurance claims were made, insurance interviews were had, insurance payments were made.
I cannot adequately describe the level of deflation we both felt for weeks. All of our hard work, potentially needing to be completely ripped out and redone. Not by us because we were tired, but by someone else who would erase our claim, erase what every weekend for four months went into.
A couple weeks later, Ian went in for another knee operation. The recovery from this one was no weight, no pressure at all on his knee for three weeks. He could do little else than sit on the couch or bed, knee propped up for three weeks. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, Penny, and Finn were all handed to me. It just so happened that the most senior meeting I’ve ever prepared for fell the day after his surgery. And it just so happened that Penny had some viral rash that week that looked like hives. It meant I had to decline the meeting the morning of, visit the GP multiple times, and go back and forth from nursery several times in a day throughout the week. On top of the cooking, cleaning, working, laundry, and Finn chores that were there. I could have asked for help, but how do you ask for menial help when you feel like you should be able to do?
Anyways.
I knew I wanted to intentionally reset for 2026. I don’t have a single word for 2026 but if I can boil it down to a feeling, I want to feel more free. Free from thoughts about work invading my non-work time. Free from the threats I see in most interactions. Free from an overscheduled calendar. Free from feeling like everything is a duty.
I want more fun, more lightness, more things that fuel me.
Over the holidays, my sister-in-law mentioned how her sister (or maybe colleague?) organised their goals around five topics: Personal, Family, Relationship, Professional and House. The idea is that you set just a couple goals under each topic, and I loved that approach. I do a lot in my community, so I’ve added that as a sixth topic.
On 05 January, after dropping Penny off at her grandparents, I found a brand new notebook and lit a candle at my desk.
Personal: I want to finish this book and become a UK citizen.
I should probably just say that I want to prioritise my writing this year in ways that I haven’t in years past. I love writing, but it is a fickle hobby if I’m honest. Sometimes, my mind is totally in it, the words flow, I can see the plot. Other times, I genuinely have no memory of what I’m trying to write and it’s like trying to get my thoughts out of mud.
Last year, I thought I wouldn’t be able to apply for British citizenship until the summer. Once you’re on an Indefinite Leave to Remain visa, you usually need to wait 12 months to apply for citizenship. But since Ian and I are now legally married, I can apply at any point. I’d like to get the ball rolling in February.
Family: I want us to have more adventures outside the house and record more of our family history.
I’m defining adventures very loosely here. It could mean a walk to the park, around the block, going to soft play, etc. We just have to get out of the house on the weekends, which to be honest, shouldn’t be so hard at Penny’s age.
In terms of recording more of our family history, that means I want to get more photos in printed albums and write down the stories our family has told us about previous generations. I’d love to start writing down a family tree for Penny.
Relationship: I want to have more fun with Ian.
Last year, we had a lot of fun as a family. And while Ian and I squeezed in a couple dates nights - and I suppose a very short honeymoon! - we didn’t really have a lot of fun, just the two of us. As mentioned above, it was a very duty-bound year.
For us, this looks like putting monthly date nights in the calendar that we can’t override. While we’re starting January off with a date at our local wine bar (we’ve got a voucher!), I’d love at least six of these dates to be something other than dinner / drinks. For March, I think we’re going to do a Kintsugi class which is definitely new for us.
Professional: I want work to take up less time in my head.
For me, this looks like going back to therapy. My threat and drive were superpowered against each other for most of last year, and I need to get better at managing them. Intellectually, I know what I need to do, but I’d like to go back to therapy to have more accountability to actually do it.
House: I want to finish our finishing jobs and save hard for the next house.
Now that the house is ‘done’, we’re starting to look for the next one. We really don’t need to move for a long while, but we know we’ll be quite particular for our next house so it may take awhile. After our wedding, we haven’t touched the house (other than cleaning up after the flood…did I say how tiring 2025 was?). There are loads of little bitty things to finish before it’s completely photo ready for a sale.
Community: I want to continue being active in my community.
In the face of the onslaught of news that continues to make me feel powerless, one area that everyone has true power is within their communities. If I can’t change the US Government, I can at least look at my own city, my own neighborhood and get involved. Last year, I joined the Grange Prestonfield Community Council and became a Board member of the Super Power Agency.
On top of the goals, I put a theme for the month that would help prioritise certain goals and actions. January’s was “Clean”. February’s is looking like “Submit”. We’ll see what comes from the other months.
It felt so cathartic to just get these intentions down on paper.
A funny thing happened after writing these goals out.
A day after I wrote down the goals above in my shiny new notebook, we saw a new property alert that met all our future criteria. We looked at the house, saw so much potential, put in an offer, and are now waiting to hear back. It’s likely to be rejected, but who knows what might happen with the property. BUT, what did happen on the back of that was that we starting finishing those finishing jobs and scheduled a slew of appointments with agents to get our flat valued.
Over the weekend, a friend asked what would happen to these goals if the offer went through. I said I would probably rethink or reshuffle them so that we prioritise moving and the house. She countered saying that if we moved house, I’d probably need the other goals just as much to make sure this year wasn’t a repeat of last year.
It made me really think about the purpose of goal setting. I am a believer that just because you set a goal you are not beholden to it. You have the right to change or stop proceeding with that goal for whatever reason. But if the goals you’ve established are to ensure a certain outcome or feeling, then maybe those goals need to be protected - or at least considered - no matter what event life throws at you.
And maybe that’s why 2025 was so hard. I had no goals, no guiding light. I was fighting each fire as it appeared, stopping too infrequently to rest and recharge. I never truly checked in with myself to ask how I was feeling and how I could feel better.
So, here’s me putting in more effort for a freer 2026.
Absolutely brilliant how you connected the flood moment to the lack of intentional goal-setting. I went through something similar last year when I dunno, just kept reacting to things without checking if they actually aligned with where I wanted to go. The idea of goals as protection rather than restriction is something that rarely gets talked about, but it's spot on whenyou're dealing with unexpected chaos.