One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back

Looking ahead to my writing plans for 2025, and reflecting on a significant anniversary coming this year.

The mountains of Eryri (Snowdonia) on a much needed visit to my childhood home over the festive period

It’s New Year’s Day, 1 January 2025. I’m generally a bit of a Scrooge about New Year’s. There’s so much external pressure to have an amazing time, to be doing something exciting as the old year ends, when mostly all I feel like doing is curling up on the sofa with a film or a book. I like the idea of making New Year’s resolutions, but the depths of midwinter feels like the wrong season to do so. Surely Candlemas (2 February) or the Spring Equinox (20/21 March) would be a better time to start the new year?

I felt particularly Scrooge-like this year. I’m not ready for it to be 2025, but now it has arrived it doesn’t feel so bad. Like the nerves before an exam or a job interview, once the event you’ve been anxiously waiting for finally starts it almost feels like relief. You can start dealing with whatever it is, rather than just worrying about it.

In July, it will be ten years since my mum died. It feels like a big one, although there’s no real reason why the tenth anniversary should feel any different from the ninth anniversary, or the eleventh. No real reason, except the extra significance we place on those anniversaries or ages that end with a zero. In the same way that turning 40 feels more significant than turning 39 or 41, ten years feels like a big deal.

Last night, New Year’s Eve, I wanted to pause time, to somehow delay the start of 2025. I remember feeling very similar on New Year’s Eve 2015. Then, it was five months since Mum’s death and I was five months pregnant with my younger son. I didn’t want 2015 to end because it was the last year in which Mum had been alive. As soon as we stepped into 2016, we would be moving into a world that she would never see and leaving her behind in the past.

I wanted to do the same last night, to somehow keep living in 2024 so that I would not have to live through the tenth anniversary of Mum’s death, and all that came before and after it. I’m scared that the extra weight of the tenth anniversary will mean that I relive what happened in 2015, all my thoughts and emotions from that year, in sharper focus, in more detail.

It feels unbelievable, unacceptable that in the summer she will have been gone for ten years. Ten years feels like a lifetime - for my younger son it is a lifetime, more than his lifetime. Ten years means I can’t avoid acknowledging how much has changed, how much I’ve changed, since Mum died.

I can’t pause time. We’re in 2025 now and I’ll move through each of the tenth anniversaries in turn: the day the doctors told us Mum’s condition was terminal, the day she moved into a hospital bed in the front room, the day she went into the hospice, the day she died, the day of the funeral. But there are happier anniversaries to mark as well: the day I found out I was pregnant, the day my eldest son started nursery, the day I felt the first flutters of movement in my womb.

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Yesterday and Today

Yesterday I started writing some reflections on 2024, the highs and the lows, the lessons I wanted to carry forward into the New Year. Today, I don’t want to look back. The New Year is here now and I want to look forward, to focus on my plans and hopes for 2025.

I’m going to keep writing. One of the best things that happened last year was that I started writing properly again, and (re)acknowledged my long buried desire to be a writer. This is probably directly linked to also acknowledging that I’ve entered midlife. I feel hyper aware that time isn’t infinite. If I want something, I need to actively take steps to make it happen, rather than passively waiting for the “right” time to arrive (when work isn’t so busy, when the children are older, when I’m different or better in some way).

I’m going to keep reading. 2024 was also the year when I started reading regularly again for the first time since the chronological chaos of the Covid-19 lockdowns. My attention span shrank to almost nothing during in 2020 and 2021 and it’s only just recovering. I feel like I’m nurturing it like a house plant and it’s finally starting to put out new leaves. I’m planning to participate in two of

Simon Haisell

’s Slow Reads this year: The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G.Farrell (running January-March 2025) and A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel (running May-September 2025).

Instead of New Year’s resolutions, which so often become lists of things not to do, this year I'm making a list of things I want to do or places I want to visit. It’s still a work in progress - so far there are four items on my list (visit a Turkish Bath, get another tattoo, swim in the sea, see a maned wolf) - but I’m excited to add to it.

This year I want to try to focus on what I have and what I can do, rather than making any unrealistic resolutions to somehow miraculously become a different person. I’ve sometimes picked a word for the year (using

Susannah Conway

’s name free Find Your Word ebook, and if I do so again this year, I think my word might be ENOUGH. I am enough, I am doing enough, there is enough time, there is enough space.

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Writing Plans for 2025

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how I want to use this Substack in 2025. So far, its main purpose has been to keep me accountable and enable me to write for an audience (imagined or otherwise). It’s helped me to be more focussed in my writing, to craft completed thoughts, arguments or essays instead of half formed thoughts and scraps of ideas scribbled in notebooks and then forgotten when life gets too busy. I used it as place to publish my daily words during my self-imposed challenge to write 30,000 words of my big writing project in November.

I also really value the community aspect of Substack and being able to connect with other lovely humans and writers through the platform, whether that’s via a brief exchange of comments on Notes, or more deeply by subscribing to a publication and engaging with someone’s posts and offerings on a regular basis. Some of my favourite writers here are

Lindsay Johnstone

,

Layla O'Mara

,

Wendy Pratt

,

Ruth Allen

,

Sasha Neal

and

Clover Stroud

). Since becoming more active on Substack last spring, I’ve participated in a whole host of courses, workshops and live events, through which I’ve stretched my writing muscles, learned to look at the world in a different way and massively expanded my list of books I want to read.

But…this year I want to focus on my big writing project: a still evolving memoir that started out with the intention of exploring my maternal family history over four generations of eldest daughters but is increasingly focussed on mothering and grief through the lens of my experience of becoming pregnant in the same week that my mother died. I think I need to knuckle down and write it, to build on the jumpstart my November writing challenge gave me and just keep going.

I’m slowly rereading each of my daily pieces from November and identifying key themes, with the aim of mapping out a potential structure for the whole project¹. My plan is to set myself a target word count for each month of 2025, similar to my November challenge but a marathon rather than a 10k run.

There are SO many courses and workshops that sound amazing and that I would love to do (

Dr Lily Dunn

’s Memoir Bootcamp,

Caro Clarke

’s recent Submission-Ready Course). But my gut is telling me I need to do the writing first, to focus on putting that “shitty first draft” together, before I start working on polishing and editing the text, or how to write a book proposal for submission to a publisher.

I’m not sure what this will mean for this Substack. Focussing on my big writing project will inevitably mean I have less time and space to write here. I’m considering a monthly post looking back at the month that’s ending and ahead at the month to come. This feels like it will fit with how my mind is likely to run in this tenth anniversary year of Mum’s death, constantly circling back to the past and forward to the future. It could also tie in with my planned monthly word count targets for my big writing project, keeping me accountable and giving me a space to reflect on my progress, or expand on any broader themes coming out of it.

I’m also wondering whether to start a series about tarot, maybe doing a short reading for each month (or week?). I’ve been fascinated by tarot since my early teens². I am very much self-taught and would make no claims to be an expert, but I think I’ve got a good understanding of at least the top level meanings of the 78 cards and I’m confident in my ability to interpret a simple two or three card spread.

I see tarot less as a way to foretell the future and more as a storytelling tool. It offers a different lens through which to think about a specific situation or dilemma, one which can reveal new insights that you might not otherwise have considered. There are layers of symbolic meanings for each card that you can weave together to craft a story from the cards you’ve drawn. The same card or cards might mean something very different to me than they might mean to you. It’s about recognising the story that the cards can tell that makes sense or holds true for you in that particular moment in relation to the specific question you’ve asked.

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Tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that…

This post has been a bit of a brain dump of some of the thoughts and feelings swirling round my mind as we barrel forward into the new year. I’ll close by saying thank you if you’ve made it this far! I look forward to more writing and reading and nourishing conversations here in 2025.

1. I could say book or manuscript here, instead of project, but those words feel too big and grand. The imposter syndrome is strong and I don’t feel fully able to claim the title of writer yet - I’m writing yes, but am I a writer?

2. Shout out to any fellow witchcraft-curious 90s teens and the films and TV shows that sustained us (The Craft, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer et al).