Reflecting once more.

Let's cut to the chase. 2025 fucking sucked for a lot of people. It sucked slightly less for us, but we've still just felt drained for a large part of the year in a way we don't remember doing in previous years - some personal projects falling by the wayside for months as work (and the general state of the world) took up increasingly more of our mental energy.

I can't entirely say it's been a failure in what we set out to do. 2025 was the Year of New Adventures for us. And we've embraced that spirit when we've been able to, learning about new tools, visiting new places, trying new foods, and seeing friends IRL that we've never had chance to before.

But it is also a year that has often left us exhausted. It is a year where a lot of the coping strategies we've built up... just weren't enough, particularly with starting on a big project at work that disrupted a lot of our normal patterns and things we'd otherwise got away with up until this point.

And that's prompted some research. Some reinvention. An increased amount of trying to find what gets our brain to goddamn behave (that isn't medication purely because I think we might struggle getting it in the current environment).

We had speculated about 2026 being our Year of Focus or the Year of the T-Shaped Professional, but I don't think that fully encompasses what we need - and what everyone else needs, as well.

And so, we are declaring 2026 our Year of Perseverance.
To survive, and to help others do the same. [1]
To do the tasks we've committed to; scheduling them better, making time on the calendar for them.
To not get too disheartened by the gap of ignorance when it comes to acquiring new skills - but also, to actually try rather than just falling down YouTube rabbit holes of things we could do.
To read more, and to share that knowledge.
To take some of the steps about gender we've been scared about doing. [2]

The world is a fuck, but we're still here. And we hope you'll still be here too.

❤ī¸đŸ’œđŸ’–

footnotes

  1. We were fairly consistently over our mutual aid budget for most months in 2025... which isn't a bad budget category to be over in. We're increasing that for 2026. ↩ī¸Ž

  2. The astute will notice this has been a goal before, but we've actually got stuff booked in this time round; blood tests in a couple of weeks. ↩ī¸Ž