Annual Review 2025

2025 was a good one. We got married, and I did enjoy the wedding! I don’t think I have ever smiled so much (I even got comments to that effect!). We got the bathroom done, we bought a new car, and we’ve made some moves towards redecorating the living room next year (including replacing the cat-shredded and lumpy sofa). Work has been generally good, and I think I made some big achievements, but it was at times stressful since I took on the responsibility for mentoring two new people at the same time, and I didn’t plan out my leave very well. I got a little bit burned out in the last couple of months.

We only had three trips away this year, and they were all short: Venice for 4 days (which was with my friends), 2 nights near Stratford-upon-Avon, and 4 days in Scotland following the wedding. I am very much feeling a need for a proper break away for at least a week, and preferably somewhere sunny with a pool. Hopefully, in 2026, we’ll book a proper honeymoon!

Walking to Modor

This has been one of the biggest successes of the year! It came out of my signing up for some of the Conqueror Virtual Challenges to motivate me to get moving more in 2025. My Husband was inspired by their Lord of The Rings challenges, but didn’t want to pay for it, so he set up his own version using Google Sheets and recruited his friends to join in. I was pleasantly surprised by how everybody took to it! Two of the friends went crazy and started doing 20,000 steps a day and got to the Crack of Doom (approximately 1,800 miles) in August, one of them then mysteriously gave up (he likes to be mysterious), and the other carried on, aiming to get back to The Shire in the year. Another more sensible person did 10,000 steps a day and just managed to make it to the Crack of Doom, and the rest of us have followed at a slower but still (mostly) consistent pace.

As of the end of the year, I’ve done about 1,414 miles. My personal goal was to raise my average daily steps from 3,661 in 2024 to over 8,000… and I did it, a year-long average of 8,108!

Most of that is just walking, a lot of that using the under-desk treadmill. It would be a lot harder to achieve without that, given that I work from home and most things I need are within a short walking distance! Some of it was running though!

I won’t claim to have built a consistent running routine, but I have, for the first time ever kept up running for an entire year! It might not be 3 times a week every week, but it’s at least 6 times in a month (I still need to push through my low energy/bad sleep weeks in my cycle somehow)… and that is more than nothing I was doing in 2024!

More than that… I don’t mind doing it! Sometimes I actively enjoy it, especially if I have a good audiobook. There are some days I actively want to and look forward to going out for a run. It is no longer something that feels intimidating, and that’s a big deal for me. I am confident that I will keep it up in 2026, and my goal for that is going to be able to run for 5km without stopping to walk.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Less successful was my attempt to build a strength training routine. I did well for January, but as soon as the spare room/my training room was overtaken with bathroom supplies in February, everything went to a stop, and I never picked it back up.

I am going to make that my main focus for 2026. I’ve managed to build up running into a familiar activity that doesn’t intimidate me, so I am hopeful I can apply the same ‘do what I can’ approach.

I’m planning to buy a workout bench as well to make it easier to do the exercises I find online. I found it very frustrating that so many “all you need is dumbbells” workouts actually require a bench to do properly!

Looking good, feeling good

I might be currently bloated from Christmas and exhausted from a week of bad sleep… But I definitely do feel better about my body than I did last year.

I don’t think I actually lost much weight (I’m not in the habit of weighing myself), but I feel healthier from the increased movement, the cardio of using my body for running, and more comfortable thanks to better-fitting clothes.

I have also been regularly moisturising my face, which I believe has improved my skin somewhat, but also has just been a nice little moment each day where it feels like I’m taking care of myself.

That habit grew out of (re)learning how to do my make-up for the wedding. I bought nice Bare Minerals foundation products, and I had fun improving my skills. If I’m going out anywhere now, I’ll do it face because I enjoy it, and I now have all this stuff to use!.

Learning how to do more hairstyles was also a nice thing that came out of the wedding. My hair is really long now (should probably get it trimmed soon!), which has given me more opportunities to play with different styles and finally learning how to do French plaits, pigtail braids and a nice full high ponytail. I enjoy experimenting with it, and it has felt good to put a bit more effort in and not always just shove it up in a claw clip (though I definitely still do that a lot!).

Social, Anxiety

Anxiety is always there for me, she’s just a fact of life. I’ve gone through ups and downs, as I always do. I am trying to be smarter about recognising the right times to push myself, and how to give myself the best chance to progress through it.

I have been to a few knitting group meet-ups at the end of this year. That has been semi-successful, but the biggest barrier I’m finding with it is that they meet in a very busy and loud pub, and that makes it extra difficult for me to engage in conversation, even with my Loops earplugs. I will persevere with it for a bit longer, as I’ve found half the time I feel good after it and the other half the time I might get one of my anxiety hangovers because I was too tired and I didn’t push myself into conversation enough.

I still want to find an embroidery group. I’ve got feelers in a few Facebook groups, and I joined a big Whatsapp for crafty girls in my area, but I’m finding almost all the active participants of that are knitters or crocheters. Nothing against those people, but I would love to have some friends to talk about embroidery techniques and ideas with, like I see they do. I will try a few more times to see if I can get some bites to create a local group… even if I can find one other person who will meet, that could be the start of something!

If that doesn’t work out, I may revisit the idea of joining a book club… my hesitation on that is I already have so many books I want and plan to read in 2026, and I want to get more intentional about it, so I’m not as keen to have to factor in books I might not want to read for the sake of being social.

Aside from the wedding, there were a few other social achievements I try to remind myself to be proud of this year, instead of thinking critically about how they could/should have gone better! My hen do was perfect, and I was very touched by feeling understood by my friends; they planned exactly what I wanted (even down to surprise Star Trek t-shirts). It is very easy for me to get stuck in negative feelings and believe that my friends don’t really care, but this showed me that not everything my anxiety tells me is true! I also hosted a dinner for my friends in Oxford. Booking the private dining room was the right call; it was absolutely lovely because we could all hear each other! It was a relaxed night, and I loved getting to spend time with everyone like that. I felt a lot of love after both of those experiences.

I hosted Christmas dinner this year for my family and my in-laws, a total of 11 people. I’d never done this before, and also started off on Hard Mode because I ended up having to basically cook two Christmas dinners simultaneously due to some late change of plans and the in-law’s pre-ordered M&S dinner package for 6! This included cooking 2 turkey crowns with different instructions, with two roast potatoes and two brussels sprout dishes (animal fats vs veggie fats!). It was a lot, and our oven is small… but I pulled it off! I actually didn’t mind doing all the cooking (and I wasn’t even stressed until the guests arrived). Next time we host, I will only cook one Christmas dinner, and it should be a lot easier! Everyone was very complimentary about it, and I personally felt my from-scratch brined turkey crown held up well against the fancy pre-prepared M&S one.

Learn how to learn

I have a new type of goal for 2026 – I want to learn how I can learn. How to explore my own ideas, take on new ideas, and better understand where I feel I fit in the world, and what my opinions are.

I was on a slow path to this through 2025 – particularly as I have massively improved how I use Obsidian and how I track reading – thinking more about what I put into my brain, and this idea of building personal curricula.

My main goal is going to be just to learn how I can make self-directed learning work for me. I haven’t consciously worked on any learning like this since I was working on my Master’s as a 22-year-old, when I was a full-time student and not working 40 hours a week with an adult life as I am now.

What I want to do is first focus on philosophy topics (complete n00b) and see how that resonates, and then I may explore basic politics because we are in a mess in the UK, and I find it all too confusing to even try to form an opinion. There are also definitely areas of history that I feel are drawing me more. I can’t do everything all at the time, so I need to not get ahead of myself and plan a sensible and achievable, course.

I also plan to work from scratch on my drawing skills alongside my embroidery, with the hope that this will help me better draw my own patterns in the future, and of course, do more close literary reading.

Blogging

I did a full year of Top Ten Tuesday, which has generally been fun and a good way to keep things ticking over during busier times. However, in 2026, I might not be as consistent with it because something has got to give somewhere for me to make more time for learning. I think I will probably dip in and out of it if I find the prompt inspiring, and skip the ones that don’t interest me. That will allow more bandwidth for different types of writing, I hope. I may try to do #100DaysToOffLoad this year. I do generally post more than 100 times in a year, so I might see if I can get to 100 non-book-review posts, or maybe only count the ones I put a bit more effort into!

I also had an interview for People & Blogs this year, which was very exciting and honestly felt like an achievement, because I have been a reader and a fan of that series for a couple of years!

I thought it might be fun to compare my blogging activity this year against the last. According to the Writing Statistics plugin, I posted 154 times in 2025, which was less than the 183 from 2024, but I wrote more. I wrote 176,571 words in 2025, which is more than 167,528 in 2024! For 2025, that is an average postlength of 1,147 words. I have been putting more effort into my book reviews, and I suspect that is why I’ve written more on average.

I noticed this plugin has Frequency features, which generate a word blog for my entire blog. This is based on all time, unfortunately, I can’t find a year filter, but my most frequently used word on the blog is “read” with “book” coming second! Hilariously, “time” is third, because I never have enough of it. “Love” is fourth, so that is nice!

Loose goals

1. Build a consistent strength routine.
2. Work up to running 5km without needing a break.
3. Maintain at least an average of 8,000 steps a day.
4. Keep trying to find a social group!
5. Learn how to learn.
6. Use my brain more – more puzzles and ideas, less social media scrolling.
7. Make things.
8. Keep blogging!