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dolorosa_12It's the first Friday open thread of 2026. In customary fashion, I'm going to use the following prompt, which I feel is the right question with which to start a new year:
What are you planning to leave behind in 2025, and what are you planning to pick up and/or carry forward into 2026?
I think this is the first year in which I don't feel I have anything to set down. My two major causes of strain — work, and social media/real-time live reporting of current affairs, and the anxiety spirals they brought on — are things that I've largely cracked, so I want these habits to continue, rather than having problems with things that need to be changed.
In general, I feel I've developed a lot of good habits (which in my case means routines) that I want to carry on into this new year. These include exercise and movement, attitudes when it comes to work (my job basically involves people coming to me for complex, time-consuming help at points of crisis, often in a high degree of stress or distress, and I've worked hard this year to reframe things so that I've stopped making other people's stress and distress my own), displacement/distraction activities when particular news or current affairs items would previously have sent me into a month-long anxiety spiral, and a trick (borrowed from certain series of books that are important to me) of imbuing the ordinary labour of every day life with a sense of magic and significance. I want all these things to continue, and am pretty confident I'm able to make that happen.
When it comes to picking things up, I feel as if I say this every year, but I also feel an added sense of urgency sparked by some stuff I witnessed with my extended family when I was back in Australia in November: I really need to do some conscious, deliberate work to build in-person local social connections. I don't have children, I'm an immigrant married to another immigrant with no family in the country, and the UK's social services are cut to the bone, and while Matthias and I are able to do everything that we need, I have long-term fears around this for the future — for times when we're not relatively young, physically fit, with no chronic illnesses or injuries. Back when I was a student in Cambridge, I had a great friendship group of fellow postgraduate students, and we were each other's support system — we helped each other move house, we gave each other furniture, we used our contacts and knowledge to help with various bits of life admin and networking for jobs, etc — but all that is gone, as everyone has moved away, and the easy effortlessness with which I fell into those friendships due to simply being nerdily obsessed to the point of doing PhDs in the same niche subjects and willing to overshare deeply personal stuff upon first meeting while hanging out in the pub or at house parties in rented sharehouses is something I've never been able to replicate. But I feel so lost and daunted in this regard (and I don't like making public commitments to things that I'm not confident of being capable of achieving) that I don't even know what concrete things to state about it in terms of the prompting question I'm asking in this post.
On that rather fraught note, what about all of you? Do you have anything you want to leave behind, or carry with you?
What are you planning to leave behind in 2025, and what are you planning to pick up and/or carry forward into 2026?
I think this is the first year in which I don't feel I have anything to set down. My two major causes of strain — work, and social media/real-time live reporting of current affairs, and the anxiety spirals they brought on — are things that I've largely cracked, so I want these habits to continue, rather than having problems with things that need to be changed.
In general, I feel I've developed a lot of good habits (which in my case means routines) that I want to carry on into this new year. These include exercise and movement, attitudes when it comes to work (my job basically involves people coming to me for complex, time-consuming help at points of crisis, often in a high degree of stress or distress, and I've worked hard this year to reframe things so that I've stopped making other people's stress and distress my own), displacement/distraction activities when particular news or current affairs items would previously have sent me into a month-long anxiety spiral, and a trick (borrowed from certain series of books that are important to me) of imbuing the ordinary labour of every day life with a sense of magic and significance. I want all these things to continue, and am pretty confident I'm able to make that happen.
When it comes to picking things up, I feel as if I say this every year, but I also feel an added sense of urgency sparked by some stuff I witnessed with my extended family when I was back in Australia in November: I really need to do some conscious, deliberate work to build in-person local social connections. I don't have children, I'm an immigrant married to another immigrant with no family in the country, and the UK's social services are cut to the bone, and while Matthias and I are able to do everything that we need, I have long-term fears around this for the future — for times when we're not relatively young, physically fit, with no chronic illnesses or injuries. Back when I was a student in Cambridge, I had a great friendship group of fellow postgraduate students, and we were each other's support system — we helped each other move house, we gave each other furniture, we used our contacts and knowledge to help with various bits of life admin and networking for jobs, etc — but all that is gone, as everyone has moved away, and the easy effortlessness with which I fell into those friendships due to simply being nerdily obsessed to the point of doing PhDs in the same niche subjects and willing to overshare deeply personal stuff upon first meeting while hanging out in the pub or at house parties in rented sharehouses is something I've never been able to replicate. But I feel so lost and daunted in this regard (and I don't like making public commitments to things that I'm not confident of being capable of achieving) that I don't even know what concrete things to state about it in terms of the prompting question I'm asking in this post.
On that rather fraught note, what about all of you? Do you have anything you want to leave behind, or carry with you?
no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 07:38 pm (UTC)At the end of 2025 I stepped down from a committee role in my ice hockey club, because I basically wasn't doing the job properly and didn't see that I was going to improve any time soon. Thankfully a wonderful person has stepped up to the gap. I guess that is something I am leaving behind. I wish I could say I was leaving behind my tendency to overcommit, but I think that's probably a work in progress.
I will carry forward my ice hockey commitments and friendships. In complement to your "picking up", I am actively nurturing the friendships I make through ice hockey, and trying to enjoy each of them for what they are. Some of them are very close and strong friendships, but then there's the whole gradation through warm but not intense friendship to "we exist near each other sometimes". And especially with the students, I'm reminded that people leave this university town every year, as well as people arrive. But I'm trying to enjoy the friendships that I have now while I have them, and to make the small efforts to stay in touch with those people who moved away. Trying not to mourn the departures until they occur.
On a really banal note, I have just re-signed up to my old gym membership, and I plan to literally pick up weights (and put them down again) more often in 2026.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-02 09:22 pm (UTC)I'd like to carry forward courage. I think the thing I'm proudest of doing last year was whistleblowing on aforementioned unbearable job, and it was a really scary thing that I did because it was the right thing to do and it's the only avenue I have to possibly helping my ex-colleagues have a better work environment. I think I'll need that bravery this year in particular, so I hope to keep it going.