Reflecting on Q1 2026: The Winter of Preparation
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At the start of the year, my main ambition was to not fall apart.
After what grief did to me when Mum passed, I knew better than to rush into chaining myself to a strict writing schedule in 2025. I wrote and worked, but it was flexible and forgiving. I took things one day at a time and retreated back to being a sobbing mess whenever I got stuck in a grief spiral.
The temptation with grief is to treat it like a backlog. Head down, push through, catch up, and return to normal as quickly as possible. But I knew how that would play out. I would poke my head up from the trenches, declare "I'm back!", and emotionally soil myself within a few weeks. Apparently, some things just take as long as they take. I can't bully them into being over because my calendar says it would be convenient.
Still, at the start of the year I made myself a promise: I would write in public again. At least two pieces every two weeks, something I was proud of, something with a twinkle behind its eyes.
It's just over twelve weeks since I made that promise, and I've written six newsletters, six articles, six stories, and the tally of public displays of emotional incontinence stands at zero, which is frankly better than I expected.
So. What's changed?
I have a theory. I'm not entirely sure it's right, but it seems to be the closest thing to truth I have right now. I think my fundamental understanding of how life works has changed.
Since basically forever, I think I believed that life was like a video game. You potter through, do the quests, rack up experience, beat the bosses, and hit the next level. I translated that into the real world as reading enough books, fixing my sleep, healing my childhood, and collecting all the other ornaments and habits of a top player in the game of life. With time, that effort would compound into something reliable: peace, steady income, and the feeling of being, at long last, finally sorted.
That way of thinking served me well at school. School is a contrived place designed like an obstacle course you have to conquer, with clear badges of structured progress. I think that's why so many university students find graduate programmes appealing: they're familiar, and they drag out the video game illusion a bit longer.
But once you're out of the playground of education, you'll inevitably collide with the realisation that jumping through the hoops is no guarantee of unlocking some higher level. Sometimes you just fall face first in the mud, which, if you're deeply bought into the idea that life is a role-playing game, is frustrating, disheartening, and quietly devastating to the implied belief that life is fair. For a time, I think I was coasting through with a broken-hearted optimism, hoping that one day my expectations of how things should work would pair with how life actually works. That's what got me thinking that life is more honestly like a game of Snakes and Ladders.
Snakes and Ladders is a simple game that smells like childhood. More snakes than you'd like, fewer ladders than you were promised, and the dice don't care how well you've been behaving.
Take the last two weeks. It's been more snakes than ladders, and the ladders were short.
The dishwasher broke. I chipped my tooth on a pizza and had to arrange emergency dental work. My vacuum cleaner died. Then one night, an itchy, wheezy, sneezy coughing fit led me to discover that my bedding had been infested with spores from a black mould invasion. Half a day went on scrubbing the linen cupboard; another good chunk of the week on washing and drying eleven loads of laundry, which in turn made me the proud owner of ten kilograms of white vinegar, one of the few things that reliably kills black mould. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I'm fairly sure a magpie stole one of my socks. Again.
Under my old model of thinking, I would have taken the chaos personally and symbolically, like a verdict that I was inept at playing the game and should have stayed in bed.
This time, I was a bit miffed, tired, and mildly vinegar-scented, but any malice I might have projected onto the universe was gone. I cleaned the mould, washed everything, booked the dentist, muttered a dark curse at the dishwasher, and then sat back down to write. And I got the tooth-chipping pizza for free, so there were a few ladders to appreciate along the way.
All that's to say, I think I'm living less of a lie now. I don't think I can prepare away the snakes. The idea is comforting, but it made me brittle, because when the snakes arrived anyway, I wouldn't just lose my footing. I would lose my explanation for how the world works.
Instead, what I've been trying to build is something more like a relationship with uncertainty rather than a defence against it. To accept that at best, you can try to get luckier. And the way I think about luck now is simple: it's where preparation meets opportunity. Opportunities are constantly coming up, but to seize them you have to be prepared. Rebuilding my health, my routines, my flat, my finances, my capacity to sit at a desk without feeling electrocuted. I needed to do all that, but all that means is that I'm ready. It doesn't mean anything is happening.
At some point, you have to pick up the dice and roll.
That's what the beginning of this year was all about. Rolling the dice and surfing the waves of whatever comes up. Sending the newsletter, standing on stage, walking back into rooms that used to terrify me. Writing this, now, for you.
Some of those rolls have come up well. Others, not so much. But when the snakes appeared, I didn't take it as proof the game was over. I moved my piece, found the vinegar, and waited for my next turn.
That, I think, is what has changed. Not that the board is safer, and not that I'm unbreakable. Just that I trust myself to keep playing.
For now, that feels like more than enough.
