Contains some abstract suicidal ideation and brief discussion of pregnancy/infertility

The hope I talked about at the beginning of 2025 turned out to be an illusion. Not just an ordinary illusion either, but a will-o-the-wisp, leading me deep into a swamp of mental health crisis where if I had drowned, as I briefly thought I would, it might have been a mercy. As for the two big hopes, I can safely name them now. Scunthorpe United, after many setbacks, finally returned to the elite tier of non-league football, which is perhaps the only thing I would wholeheartedly say went right this year. The other hope was to become pregnant, but a consultation with a fertility specialist suggests it won't happen without expensive interventions, and another piece of medical news suggests it would be irresponsible to keep trying in any case.

Moving on to the smaller hopes, they were very much a mixed bag. I did end up walking the Thames Path, and it was for a little while a great achievement. But somehow it doesn't seem to have sustained me through the rest of the year. I seized every opportunity to return to the river in the autumn, from walking the first mile again when we played in Gloucestershire to exploring the unfamiliar estuary when we played Southend, and I half want to walk it again next summer in case I missed anything.

Taking three weeks away from home to walk 185 miles unfortunately meant neglecting the guerrilla garden. The fact that I had an open site that got a fair amount of rainfall did mitigate that, and possibly the bigger problem was that I didn't want invest too much in seeds and just used some cheap ones from Poundland and a few I had left over from previous years. Despite these drawbacks, I did manage to grow two onions, a couple of sprout plants, and about a dozen radishes. It's not going to make a dent in my food budget, but I'm pleasantly surprised to have any useable harvest. I've even instituted a compost heap, which is chiefly made up of vegetable peelings but which if nothing else gives me a visible reminder at home to go and check on the garden.

Writing was once again the first casualty of my mental health crisis. I migrated away from Substack because they're too happy to platform Nazis, and although it was the right thing to do, I think I lost most of my subscribers in the move. Not that it matters, since I couldn't seem to concentrate enough to finish a post. I'm struggling to convince myself I have anything worth saying any more.

Fiction writing came a little easier. I completed my "Summer Spell" of writing a paragraph or two of my novel in progress every day between the playoff final and the beginning of the new season. Even when I was walking the Thames Path, I found ten minutes each day on jetties and by bridges to move the story forward very slightly. It's discipline of a sort, but when the season began again I laid it aside, exhausted. As for the fanfiction, I hit a technically difficult stage just as things in my personal life started to slide, and I didn't pick it up until the New Year.

It's also understandable that I didn't make any progress on my DIY projects. Early in the year, I identified Nottingham Hackspace as somewhere I might be able to get help or borrow tools, but the next step was a guided tour, and I couldn't get that organised. First I had a series of weeks when football kept me busy, and then the crisis came and I had other things to worry about. I did finally arrange the tour in November, and I set up a standing order for my membership dues on the first of the year as if to promise things will be better in 2026.

Volunteering has ticked over reassuringly without any grand progress. I'm getting more familiar with the systems and sometimes even figure out tasks without having to be told, although I will probably always have a tendency to run things by the paid staff to make sure I'm not doing anything wrong. I've found myself playing old hand to newer volunteers, which feels unsettling when I'm still unsure of myself, and I've been invited to no less than three social occasions with colleagues, so I suppose I'm doing something right.

I'm not going to put any wishes out there for 2026. If I have the energy, I might write something next week about goal setting and why it's horribly difficult, but I'm not going to commit to that and invite failure. It's enough right now to have closed the loop on my hopes for 2025.