On Not Beginning Again

All The 'Happy New Years' Got Me Thinking.

Dunkeld Cathdral on a cold morning.

All the ‘Happy New Years’ got me thinking.

Every January we are offered the opportunity to start again. Begin anew. Fresh start. But what if you can’t? What if you don’t get that blank page?

This year a period of very poor health has spilled from November into January. I start 2026 amidst its sticky residue. Time has formed clumps. There is no reset, no blank page. Instead I am working back through last year’s journal, writing in any spaces I can find.

The cultural idea of ‘midnight’ on 31st December depends on the assumption that reset is always possible. I didn’t hear the bells. I went to bed at 10pm. For me, a deviation from my carefully curated schedule would have cost me dearly, when I am already down to pennies.

Some may suggest that I make resolutions or plans within my limitations, but with respect, go fuck yourself. Right now, resolutions feel like a taunt. I plan while my body laughs.

What troubles me is how easily we allow the language of ‘reset’ to exist in a world where systemic issues are real. Health does not reset on command. Care responsibilities don’t dissolve when the ball drops. Racism doesn’t pause until March, keen to give us a well-deserved head start.

For me, and for many others, the work is not in beginning again but in continuing. Continuation is far less aesthetic than renewal, harder to commodify, and it doesn’t lend itself to announcements, before and after photos, or public commitments. But it is honest.

We are not very good at recognising this kind of work. We prefer thresholds and breakthroughs. A catharsis. But what happens to the in-between? To treat it as an interlude is to miss the point. The middle ground is not an interlude. It is the whole thing.

Beginnings are legible. They fit neatly into productivity, wellbeing, and self-improvement economies. Continuation, by contrast, resists this. It produces no saleable narrative beat and cannot be easily sold back to us as transformation.

When we organise our culture around renewal, we devalue the quieter labour of holding things together, of getting through. That labour becomes invisible, even to the people doing it. Sure, maintenance and repetition aren’t sexy, but I know that anything beyond can cost me too much. This is not giving in, it is not resignation. It is realism. Most lives are not built around beginnings.

I am not uninterested in change. I am uninterested in pretending that it is always available, or that it arrives at midnight.

So, this is how I have entered 2026. Not with a clean page but with a pen hovering over old ink, writing in the margins where I can. I am not starting again, I am continuing, carefully.

Happy New Year. Same old life.