Next year my knees will be well-rested

As the 2025 season comes to a close, I have found myself reflecting on what I had recently learned was the year of the Wood Snake in the Chinese Calendar. I will not attempt to explain what this truly means, as at the end of the day it is not a topic with which I am well acquainted. However, I will say this: being a 2001 baby means that I was the year of the Metal Snake. And, yep, you guessed it, the animal of the year often impacts people who were born under the same creature significantly more than those who were not. The 2025 Wood Snake is said to have beckoned in transformative change, rebirth, and removal of stagnant energies from one's life. Needless to say, hearing this in January would have been beneficial had I known that single life was waiting patiently in the shadows to gag, blindfold, and chuck me in the boot of a car. It has been a delicate balancing act of both self-love and constructive deconstruction to get myself into a position worthy of reflection before the curtains close on this year. I have redecorated my flat to be exactly that, mine. I have attempted dating to varying degrees of success, and thus accepted my fate for the forseeable as a girl not looking for companionship in the way I once used to, a thought which is both terrifying and freeing. Yet, the one thing that I have learned as an invaluable insight into my year so far is this: my knees need to be allowed to rest.

Heading into 2026 I will be accompanied by some of the strongest friendships I have ever had, and the mobility to choose my own path at my own pace. Not to mention that i'll be graduating for the second time in my life, although I am praying my knees will not fail me once I get up on that stage. These weary caps that have carried me through my academic career need a rest before they can even consider one more thought, a fact which was made all the more evident while trying to write the dissertation for my Master's. Anyone else remember when I was dumped three weeks before the biggest piece of academic work I had ever done in my life was due? Anyone? Just me? Yeah, well, considering I had already been struggling with it more than anything else I had written up until that point, I think it's fair to say that throwing a breakup into the mix was just downright cruel.

I tapped out for a week, meaning that, by the time my mum had given me the advice of 'why would you let a man ruin your future as well as your present', I only had two weeks left to pull my shit together and write. And hell, did I write. These knobbly knees carried me further than I ever could have hoped in that dire excuse of a fortnight. Because, you see, the one thing my ex had not considered (despite having known me for almost 4 years), is the following set of equations: extreme emotional distress = lack of ability to eat, lack of ability to eat = non existent brain power, non existent brain power + worrying about where I would live + already massively struggling with writing dissertation = total cognitive shut down. And that's how I lived until it was submitted. Getting the grade back for that dissertation was one of the scariest things I had ever experienced, as I genuinely assumed that it would have been an outright fail considering I essentially blacked out for three weeks before pressing the submit button. Yet, as I sat being trained on how income tax impacts your pension at my job, I received the news that I had achieved a First in my Master's dissertation. I had never been so proud of myself as I was in that moment, and it only further solidified in my brain how I could never forgive my ex for putting me through such an emotionally harrowing experience in that respect alone. Not only did this result prove to myself that I am in fact far stronger than originally anticipated, but it also allowed some kind of resonance with my past self. It was like a window had opened, just a crack, to let in a gentle breeze from August, and I could almost hug the girl that sat staring blankly at her laptop screen; eyes burned all the way through from the constant tears. I think i looked down at my knees when I got that grade and thanked them for carrying me as far as they had, and vowed to let them be as well-rested as possible in the coming months.

Now, knowing that 2026 is the year of the Fire Horse, I am hoping to be let off the fucking hook a little bit and regain a bit of respite time. For my, you guessed it, weary knees. I had struggled until now to understand how I could use such a devastating event in my life for potential good, and knowing that anything I could possibly ever want to write is literally at my fingertips brings me comfort beyond belief. A lady who read my tarot in early October informed me that the coming months would see immense personal growth and a reconnection with any innate creativity, which i'm pleased to report is already in full-swing. It is still such early doors of me navigating life on my own as an adult, and undoubtedly there will be moments of wavering faith, but I imagine there will also be unbelievably empowering and engaging moments that will refuse to pass me by. Let's hope that '26 is the year my knees can finally do what they've been dying to do since I began education: rest.