Contractual obligation blog post #1

In what can only be described as a fit of madness a few weeks back, I finally reneged on my long-running really funny [citation needed] new year’s resolution to never make any new year’s resolutions thus automatically failing all my new year’s resolutions, and instead followed the same Discord crowd that got me posting here last time into making a full-on 5×5 grid of the damn things as a bingo card to try and complete over the course of 2026. Maybe I’m just easily peer-pressured or maybe I’m finally insufficiently depressed (well? I think that’s a valid word, I just can’t quite compute the idea of describing myself that way yet) enough to actually think about hopes and dreams and goals and self-improvement and all that guff. Being realistic, I strongly suspect my main motivation to tick things off will be an urge to do better than everybody else rather than fearing failure or actually wanting the challenge, but hey: motivation is motivation.

And that leads us here, as one of the squares to tick off is to blog every month, caught up as I was at the time in a wave of thinking I might have things to say after a non-zero number of you seemed to like/resonate with that December ramble. The truth is I have no plans for what to do here. I’ve started a few drafts over the last few weeks that have fizzled out into nothing, much like this sentence. Eventually I promise I’ll get around to that thing about music I loved in 2025 if only to formally add myself to the chorus talking about how great Ninajirachi is, and I claim full credit for her putting Brighton on the tour schedule, but my two most played songs of the year so far are by Gracie Abrams and Geese, which I feel speaks volumes about how scattergun and disoriented my listening has been of late.

Trying to have any ideas while in the midst of [redacted current nonsense] and endlessly reflecting on last January, comfortably the weirdest and worst and longest year of my time, feels even more pointless than usual. I beg and I plead for time off and peace away from it all, but any time a quiet day does come around I’ll invariably end up spending it in bed just feeling drained and with my brain taking the silence as a cue to remind me of all the woes, real and fake and old and new alike. This particular version of post numero uno started life yesterday, a Wednesday that began with two hours sleep interrupted by anxious vomiting (both fun new recurring features of mine the last couple of years) before productivity peaked in the hour after I was meant to finish working, had me in a grand depressive spiral for a couple of hours before I finally took my meds, ate some food, watched the Community bottle episode and came back to my senses. But it’s a regular pattern.

At my worst, I feel resigned to my default being a feeling of worthlessness and endless, endless fear. Whatever happens, and whatever steps I might take to mitigate it and improve my life and those of the ones I love, I always just end up back in the hole wondering what the fucking point of it all is. It happens less than it used to for sure, and I’m generally far better at digging myself out of said hole when I find myself there, and I know I’m more likely to avoid these slumps if I keep myself busy and occupied and around people rather than idling insignificantly. But, alas, that’s where I was last night, and pretty solidly for a week earlier this month. My therapist at least pointed out was my first proper extended dip since September or October. That’s something, I guess.

Anyway, back to those resolutions.

I’m making fairly good progress on a few. My New York Times crossword streak now sits at 29 days, my best since November 2024. I’ve successfully made it outside every single day so far too, accepting it’s probably easier to just get out of my pyjamas and wander down the road than quibble with myself over how much leeway I can really give myself with that over the course of the year just for the sake of a few more minutes wallowing in bed hiding from the world. Cinema trip number one was Marty Supreme and by the time I’ve done next month’s Charli XCX doubleheader of The Moment and “Wuthering Heights” I’m pretty sure I’ll have met that goal in just two months. (I think the full 2020-5 list is Oppenheimer, Interstella 5555 and Hot Fuzz in case you were wondering.) Elsewhere, barely a week goes by where I don’t at least think about moving or tidying or running or any number of really basic things that might just improve my life and wellbeing or anything, and surely that counts for half! And then the Lego thing is really a deal I made with myself last summer where once I’d handled a particular Big Scary Thing at the very least I’d come away a delightful Nigel Mansell minifigure at the end of it, and Amazon keeps showing it to me at 35% off at the moment, but also why make things bigger and scarier when life is probably going to do enough of that for/to me regardless.

That feels like quite enough for part 1. I’ve avoided the temptation to cheat the system by publishing a single word at 11:59pm on the last day of January. Come to think of it, not trying to pull that sort of rubbish and only end up cheating myself seems like a pretty reasonable idea for a 26th…