Isolation. Without the splendor.

The first lines of this article were written at the beginning of the year. Then the year and life happened and they have in unison pulled all my resources and my creative mind went silent. Or rather, it became quiet. In contemplation. I still wanted to share the thoughts from January here:

Dear soul, as we near the end of the first month of 2026 and slowly can feel the light of the sun becoming more present in the world, it truly feels like a new cycle is starting now. Soon, what in many Asian countries will be celebrated as Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, or any variation of the above, will be well underway, and people will return to their families to celebrate, feast, and spend time together.

In my last article of January, I observed this idea of becoming more permeable to life and why January is such an ambivalent moment for many of us. For many years, January was a month of confusion. In my youth and teen years, I had no energy left in these weeks, and they went in a whirlwind of too many things that often I would wake up in February from a dreamlike state into the first rays of a returning sun and spring flowers, not knowing precisely where the time had gone and how things had accelerated so fast. Then, when I became an freelancer and entrepreneuse, I remember a precious mentoring session with a senior mentor who had helped me organise my worklife as an independent writer and webpage designer, and she openly asked me why I would not take the month off to see how that worked. And I did. But that January became a fuller month than when I had planned it. This left me even more confused and unsure on how to deal with the start of the year. And so it went and each year, each time I tried to make it a better January, a better start to the year. And I never managed, no matter what I tried.