I had a plan for this year. I don't remember all of it anymore — which tells you something about how much of it actually happened.
What happened instead was this: I was the only parent and the only child, at the same time, in the same weeks. There wasn't a version of the calendar that held both of those jobs gently.
I did them anyway.
There were mornings I woke up already tired — before my feet were even on the floor, my chest was doing the maths on everything the day was about to ask of me. I'd catch myself holding my breath somewhere around 7am and not know how long it had been like that.
I didn't choose most of what got reshuffled this year. The order of things just changed, and I was the one left holding the new order, whether I'd agreed to it or not.
There's a particular kind of grief in watching your own plans slide down the list, quietly, without you ever formally deciding to deprioritise them.
Nobody tells you it's happening. You just notice, one day, that the thing you used to call "your potential" has been sitting in a drawer for months, and you're not entirely sure when you put it there.
I won't pretend I found the silver lining straight away.
Some days it just felt like falling behind while everyone else's year seemed to be going roughly to plan.
But somewhere in the middle of it — I want to say breath found me, but really I just kept coming back to it, the same practice, every day, whether I had the energy for it or not — something shifted that wasn't only endurance.
It wasn't relief exactly.
It was closer to clarity. A kind of energy I hadn't expected to have this year, and, underneath the exhaustion, something unmistakably like joy.
I don't have this figured out, and the year isn't finished. What I do know is that the breath is still the thing carrying it — one session, every morning, whether the day has room for it or not.
This is the first of a few things I want to share about this year. Not the whole story — some of it isn't finished, and some of it was never fully mine to tell in public. But this part is: life didn't go to plan, and breath is what's getting me through the part where I have to live it anyway.
More soon.
Come and Conspire with me.