welcome 2026!!

Perhaps it’s a bit foolish, but… I feel really hopeful for this year. Not in a world-way, our country is going to shit, I’m terrified of what the world and humanity is coming to, we’re facing insane economic uncertainty, etc etc, but personally? I feel like I can make some changes that will at least make my personal life easier. And I have some things this year that I’d really like to do, and some ideas that I’d like to focus on to give me a direction for this year.

For this year, I’m going to focus on a few keywords and colors that are going to be inspiring me and keeping me on track for 2026!

I’d really like to focus on “magnetism” and “connection”, with this being represented by the color RASPBERRY. Throughout 2025, I gained a confidence in myself that really ingrained in me that I have a naturally magnetic personality. While previously, I may have shunned away from this and thought it was some freak god-complex or temporary insanity, I’m learning as I grow up that this is something I can lean into and own. I don’t need to be humble about something that is deeply me.

So this is something I would like to explore! I’d like to keep being loud, and bold, and brave, and friendly to a fault, and vibrant. Because I feel like that’s the most “me” that I can be! :) And I’d like to use this to develop and nurture my “connections” with others (see what I did there?). For most of my life, I’ve been unintentionally taught to stifle myself in one way or another to be more normal and palatable to others. I’ve kept interests, passions, hobbies, and jokes to myself so as to make others not like me. But people DO like me, because of AND in spite of the things that make me, me. So it’s easier and most authentic to myself to just be the way that I am, whether others like it or not. Authenticity is a big focus for me this year, and as uncomfy as it is to be my full self around others, it’s easier than being someone else, and having to lie to keep up the act.

I’m also focusing on “connection” in the way of connecting with my body and how I feel, emotionally and physically. Another keyword this year is “decentering”, which is represented by TEAL – I’d really like to decenter my life from food, useless technology, and guilt. I need to let go of things that no longer serve me, and unburden myself from the weight of physical weight (in terms of weight loss, and how my current body weighs me down and prevents me from moving, brings me pain in the form of sciatica, and limits me from being able to be comfortable and happy in a space), the weight of stupid fomo for not knowing trends and memes and exhausting updates, and the weight of guilt I feel from my inadequacies and failures at work.

It weirdly helps to go back to something I heard in passing during my deep YouTube days as a teen, from an anime called Kodacha – the phrase (maybe slightly different from the original) goes “There’s no point in worrying about things you can’t fix!”. And I think that this mantra will help with some of this too.

So yeah! Big goals for this year. :)

And lastly, represented by CHARTREUSE, I would like to focus on kindness and grace. I have a tendency to be quite emotional and reactionary, and while sometimes this can be useful (in keeping my values strong and standing up for what’s right), I can also recognize that it can make me easily irritable and defensive.

This year, I need to make a mental talk track for myself that allows me to work in a little more grace and understanding for others. I want to give myself an opportunity to not fly off the handle and think negatively about others when they hurt me, piss me off, annoy me, etc – people are people, in all their wonderfulness, their stupidity, their unkindness and thoughtlessness, their brightness and humor. I have to learn to not give the same emotional weight to negative actions as I do positive ones, and I think that will help my perspective overall, about myself, my job, and the people around me.

In the spirit of decentering from technology, I’ll be doing a bit of a digital detox this year. I’m starting with some basics:

I’ve already deleted Tiktok to help force my brain to go a little slower. Other social medias, like Tumblr and Pinterest, are ones that take a bit more time to absorb, to think about. Tumblr is text posts, which forces me to stop and read and think, and Pinterest forces me to think about where I can put things that inspire me – how to sort and organize what I see with what I like to collect and store in my boards. I’m not so foolish to think that this is a perfect solution – I still spend FAR too much time on my phone, but it feels less… intrusive. I have less of a hard time stopping myself. Still hard, but a bit less so.

Ian and I are also building up our media server! I’m hoping to move away from Spotify eventually, and manage all of my music locally. It’s been fun downloading music and sorting + tagging to make my library work for me, but it’s a lot of work, and time consuming at that. I used to do this for fun in middle and high school, and had all the time to make it IMMACULATE. I aspire to have the determination of that girl and leech some of her dedication to a craft to make my library, as an adult, just as perfect. We’re currently hosting all of our music on Lil Nas (our NAS), storing and sorting it through Navidrome, and using Feishun to listen to music – it’s most like Spotify, so it feels right at home to use (though I did, briefly, dip my toes back into Winamp for nostalgia’s sake. TTwTT)

And I’m also trying to go back to doing creative and thoughtful things that bring me joy! Bec got me a subscription to the Paris Review for Christmas, and I’m SO excited for that to start coming in. A part of me, entrenched in digital reading as I am, still gets a gentle thrill from holding a magazine and turning a page, smelling the binding glue, running my hands over the smooth, laminated pages, curling the corners with an idle thumb. It’s these physical processes that are quite grounding, and that I’ve come to really enjoy in other places too, like with my record player. I’m hoping to find some more fun records to add to my collection, but as it stands, I already like where it’s going – maybe I’ll do a vinyl tour sometime soon!

And while it seems contradictory, I do want to update this blog more. Even though it’s digital, it’s a good way for me to be forced to write, to think, to explore, and to have a reason to do fun new things.

I’m also going to be… and you might want to sit down before you’re bowled over from the shock… financially responsible???

I KNOW. WHO AM I.

But Ian and I want to buy a house, so I’m really hoping to pay down credit cards and restore my savings, because I’ve been the world’s biggest asshole when it comes to spending over the past few months. I’m restricting myself from buying stupid shit I don’t need (like clothing, especially NEW clothing) and trying to be more mindful about what I do spend my money on.

Though it breaks my heart, I did cancel my Doordash subscription, and I think it’s, sadly, for the better. This will hopefully help to force me to eat at home more, and make the most out of the times where we do choose to eat out. We’re limiting the times we can eat out to 2-3 times per week, which will be a pretty good jump from what we’ve been doing. I’ve also cancelled some Patreon and entertainment subscriptions in favor of just using the media server to get by.

As a final note, while downloading and moving around music, I found out that a song from one of my favorite games growing up (Bust a Groove for the PS1) was done by Crystal Kay, an artist who I also really liked as a teenager, and just started listening to again as an adult! I had no idea that she did the English versions of the songs in that game, and it made me so happy to think that this one artist was unknowingly a huge inspiration for me since I was a kid.

Lots of good things incoming for 2026! Just gotta keep moving forward with my goals in mind. 😊

-C