ON AN YEAR THAT WAS

January 1, 2026 was the second time in a row I bent to a New Year ritual I had always kept at arm’s length. 

I made a vision board. 

When I made one for the first time, it was born out of curiosity. What would happen if I paused long enough to articulate desire? It felt more like observation than hope, studying my own instincts and patterns under a light.

Like the opening of Martin Luther King’s speech, I too had a dream, except mine was small and private. 

That choice to keep it private didn’t feel principled or restrained. It felt natural. I have never been comfortable narrating my future in public, especially before it has had the chance to resist me. There is something uneasy about turning dreams into display, about letting an unfinished version of yourself circulate among people who will never see the work behind it. 

What unsettles me more than the act of sharing is the way the New Year has become a framework for how we understand time itself. 

There is sudden pressure to measure time, to review it, to compress twelve uneven months into something neat and defensible. We’ve learned to summarise our lives the way platforms summarise our habits. 

Highlights, BTS, monthly dumps. A Spotify Wrapped for existence. 

Underneath all of it, the same question hums: 

Did it count?

I’ve never known how to answer that. Part of me has always believed life was meant to be continuous. Like water. Continuous and untitled. A stretch of days where you lose track of time because you are inside it, not standing outside measuring it. 

But then there’s the flip side of the coin. Structure has played a real role in my life. Breaking time into years, then months, then weeks, then days has helped me orient myself when direction mattered. Like floors in a building, the divisions make it possible to know where you stand, even if they say nothing about how the climb actually felt.

The friction between the two has always been there.

The friction between letting time carry me and choosing how I move within it.

New Year’s amplifies that friction. It asks you to resolve it publicly. It carries a demand to account for yourself and justify the time that has passed. 

For years, my response was to resist the day entirely. I treated it like any other date, stripped it of symbolism, and moved forward without ceremony. Avoidance felt safer than expectation, and continuity more honest than declaration.

This year, that friction surprisingly softened. I realised I’d already been living in cycles for the last few years anyway, with priorities shifting and focus rearranging itself along the way. The New Year finally felt like a pause that already existed, and that the date January 1st simply made it visible.

I let this moment exist. I let it breathe. I marked a transition by observing silence. Some things, I’m learning, don’t need to be explained to be real. They only need to be returned to, again and again, in private.

That’s probably all the vision board was for. A way of holding the right direction without turning it into a performance, while asking myself,

Not, who do I want to become?

But, who am I when no one is watching?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. 

And that, I believe, is the answer.

While you’re here, do check out other stories and blogs I’ve written. Linked here.