My Hopes for 2026

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all! I’m publishing a second post today to share my hopes for the new year. I don’t call them resolutions and I honestly hardly look back at them over the year, but it’s somewhat fulfilling to notice that I did make about half of my hopes for 2025 happen indeed. In fact, when I was talking with my wife about the year 2025, I realized I’d done better than I had expected, contrary to what I said in my yearly review. Anyway, here are the things I hope to achieve in 2026.

1. Get in more and more varied physical exercise. I am pretty sure that this is going to be a hard one, because it looks unlikely that I can go to the gym regularly or go swimming again. However, there are other ways too, like yoga, pilates, etc.

2. Do more meaningful activities, such as cooking, baking and crafting. This was one area in which 2025 has been less successful than I’d hoped but more successful than 2024. I’m still hoping to make that standing unicorn sculpture I mentioned yesterday happen. However, even if that’s not going to happen, I hope to include crafting and kitchen-based activities in my day schedule regularly.

3. Focus on mindfulness and gratitude. I am finding that even a few minutes in the Gratitude app helps lift my mood. I honestly think this is because it’s something new, but I hope that I can keep up the mojo. I already started this habit in 2025 when I wrote the positives and negatives of each day and E-mailed them to my assigned staff. I’ll continue to do so this year.

4. Improve my wake/sleep schedule. Over the past six months or so, I almost always spent most of the morning in bed. I’d really like to change that. Today was good in this respect.

5. Write more regularly. I don’t just mean blogging, although I seriously hope to do more of that too. I mean, my blogging year was better than 2024, but 2024 was about the most disappointing year blog-wise. I hope to write more this year than I did last year. I also started doing Morning Pages again. I however don’t get up early for them, because I know that’s a recipe for disaster. Rather, today, I did mine after breakfast, when I used to hop back into bed.

6. Further taper my medication. I’m having another meeting with the intellectual disability physician, who prescribes my psych meds, next week. So far, I’m pretty sure I’m still able to further decrease my med dosage.

7. Stay relatively mentally stable. This is an almost obligatory item on the list, as I honestly think the above have covered all I can do to help myself along in this respect. Some of the contributing factors to my deep lows have been related to external circumstances. Now I wouldn’t say I have absolutely no influence on those, but it’s not like I’m all-powerful.

8. Stay true to my wishes and needs with respect to my care. This means, for example, that I will continue to assert my right to informed consent for all of my care agreements.

9. Expand my social circle. Like I shared on Monday, I fully intend on going to more meetings in 2026. At least one of those, the brain injury support meeting, is local. I also intend to go to the nationwide cerebral palsy day in April. I intend to go by myself. In previous years, I went with my mother-in-law, but I’m not in contact with her anymore. Besides, I am pretty sure that, now that I know quite a few other participants, being accompanied by her is a hindrance to my social inclusion more than a help.

10. Be more conscious of my food choices and eat more healthily. I stepped onto the scale yesterday evening and the number wasn’t pleasant. Now I do know that part of that is probably holiday weight and part is the fact that I’ve been moving less. Regardless of my weight though, I seriously hope to be making healthier food choices.

Share Your World (December 29, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I have a lot of thoughts floating through my mind, but none that I can easily type down. To get my fingers started on something, I’m taking part in Share Your World. Here are Di’s final questions for 2025.

1. Do you stay up to toast in the New Year?
Whether I’ll stay up until midnight depends on my mood. I’ll however most certainly not be toasting in the New Year. The staff here leave at 10:30PM as usual and I’m pretty sure the night staff are extremely busy by midnight with all the clients who are afraid of fireworks.

2.  Have you ever kept any New Year Resolutions made in the past?
I doubt it. I used to make extensive lists of New Year’s resolutions as a teen but I’m pretty sure that if I ever kept one, it was by chance. Now I call them hopes to keep the pressure off.

3. Do you have any plans for 2026?
I have hopes, like I said, although I haven’t penned them down yet. No definite plans at all. Oh wait, I’ll most likely continue to attend the monthly local brain injury meet-up, which has its first meeting of 2026 on January 19. I’m also intending to go to at least one real-life meeting for adults who spent time in the NICU and will attend the mild cerebral palsy meet-up if I don’t contract COVID again.

4. What was the highlight/s of 2025 for you.
There weren’t any high highs this year, but I did have some good moments, such as my cooking activities.

Gratitude

Di always includes an optional gratitude section at the end of her Share Your World posts. For mine, I’m going to include a favorite affirmation from the Gratitude app.

I like how this affirmation compares human life to nature (or rather, the rest of nature). Indeed, I am allowed to go through seasons and each of the seasons prepares me for what’s ahead.

My Hopes for 2025

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s January 1 and I am absolutely not motivated to set resolutions or goals for the new year. In fact, I think calling them “hopes” like I usually do, isn’t doing the trick either. I’m too scared that voicing my hopes is tempting fate. However, I’m going to push through anyway and write them down.

1. Be more aware of my eating habits and eat more healthily. I am still within the agreed-upon weight range for my dietitian (or was when I last weighed myself, which admittedly was before Christmas), but barely so and I’d really like to lose some weight. More importantly though, I need to make sure I’m making healthier food choices.

2. Find a physical activity other than walking that I will be able to do regularly for a longer period of time. I tried swimming, but it’s rare that a staff who can meet my needs is assigned to me during the time the pool is open for me. I’m thinking of going to a gym.

3. Give movement therapy (Sherborne) a fair chance and make some progress on it. I do think I gave play therapy a good enough chance, especially since my first impression of the therapist was already quite bad and I went nine times or so. However, I really do think I need to step out of my comfort zone in movement therapy if I want to make it work.

4. Further taper my medication. This needs a caveat though, since I need to really be aware of whether decreasing my dosage is a wise decision and, if not, what the alternatives are.

5. Remain relatively stable mental health-wise. I have been doing okay over the past month or so and my staff say that certainly after my last med taper, I’ve been relatively stable. Like I said, I’d really like to taper my medication even further, but it’s a priority for me to stay within an acceptable range with respect to mental stability. Although I feel that meds are for me, not anyone else, I don’t want to become an unmanageable monster.

6. Work on self-improvement in the areas of communication, mindfulness and distress tolerance. This is a biggie, but I feel that I really need to work on better interpersonal skills.

7. Broaden and deepen my creativity. I may want to explore hobbies that I have tried before but thought unsuitable, such as jewelry-making. I also hope to develop my skills further in the hobbies I already pursue, such as polymer clay, smoothie making, etc. I hope to do more baking and cooking too.

8. Blog and write more regularly. I wrote 110 posts over 2024, which is a big disappointment for me. I hope I’ll be able to blog more often. I also hope to write more regularly in general.

9. Stay at this care home. I’m really hoping that I won’t make another stupid mistake and end up moving again, either because the powers-that-be think that I want to or because the staff consider me unmanageable.

What do you hope to achieve in 2025?

My Hopes for 2024

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. As regular readers of my blog know, I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, instead calling them “hopes”. This is just an excuse not to have to take responsibility, I guess, but oh well. I love writing them and looking back at them after a year to see how well I did. Last year, I did participate in #WBOYC, of course, but honestly I never looked at my hopes for 2023 when doing my monthly reflections. Oh well, maybe my first not-quite-resolution has to be to look back at this post when reflecting on the month. Here goes.

1. Get back on track with respect to healthy’ish eating. I did manage to get to a healthy BMI in 2023. That is, I’m pretty sure with all the New Year’s treats, including more “oliebollen” than I told my dietitian I liked, I’m now back across the line to overweight (I was only half a pound below that line last week). I know that with some cutting back on snacking, and it doesn’t even have to be drastic, I can lose the excessive pounds I gained over the holidays. More importantly though, for the remainder of the year, I’d like to maintain a relatively healthy diet. After all, sugary ttreats and high-fat foods are bad for you even if you’re at a healthy BMI.

2. Get back into a regular movement routine. Though I did excellent for the first half of 2023 and pretty well for most of the second half too, like I said yesterday, I wasn’t moving as much over the past month or two as I would’ve wanted to. This year, I obviously hope to meet my movement goal each day, but I’m not sure that will be a realistic goal, as it wasn’t in 2023 and that’s not just because of lack of motivation. I’d also really like to find another way of exercising besides walking, either swimming again or something else. I seem to remember we do have gym equipment somewhere on institution grounds, so maybe that’s an option.

3. Write more regularly. Last year really sucked in the blogging department. I really hope to change that and get back on track with blogging more often.

4. Broaden my horizons in the crafty department. I hardly touched on this yesterday, but the last couple of months were really positive in this respect. For one thing, I started creating figures, such as the gnome and Santa, without consulting YouTube tutorials. For another, on Saturday, I did something really cool: I crafted a unicorn completely independently! I did initially leave black streaks on the head from touching it while trying to attach the eyes, which the staff had to clean up with alcohol. Other than that, I did everything completely without supervision or help.

In 2024, I really hope to be more creative, try out more things on my own (without the expectation that I’ll lose my one-on-one) and generally have more fun claying and maybe doing other crafty things.

5. Explore other day activities. In 2023, I wanted to expand my horizons with respect to my day schedule, moving beyond 60 minutes at a time, beyond my room and beyond one-on-one. The first was a massive success, as I now have a great day schedule (which of course took me moving out of the home I lived in last year, but oh well). The second and third, I’m not 100% sure I want to achieve, actually. Rather, I’d like to explore meaningful activities, whether these can be done in my room or elsewhere, on my own, with my one-on-one or in a group.

6. Get settled into my current care home, generally. I really hope to get more comfortable here and start building up a trust-based relationship with some staff.

7. Improve in the mental health department. This, for me, means stabilizing with respect to my trauma-related symptoms. It also means getting closer to a proper med combo and dosage. In 2023, I didn’t change any of my meds or dosages, which was frustrating as I did notice some increase in possible side effects. I’ll have a meeting with the intellectual disability physician to discuss my meds on the 15th.

8. Continue to work on my relationships and supporting the people I love. Particularly, my marriage evolved in a positive way in 2023 and I would really love to keep it as strong as it is going forward.

What are your hopes for this year?

My Hopes for 2022

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and a very happy 2022 to you all. Today, like each year, I am sharing some things I hope to achieve in the coming year. I don’t usually call them goals, let alone resolutions. I mean, I used to have a ton of New Year’s resolutions when I was a teen, but these went out the window come Blue Monday. Not that I’d ever heard of that date at the time, but it was still what happened. So, hopes. Here are my hopes for 2022.

1. Get to a less stress-filled (I originally typed “less stress-free”), relatively healthy diet. I already eat relatively healthily at least if I look at my hopes for last year, in that I consistently eat two to three servings of fruit each day. I have also ditched the cookie with my morning coffee. My idea of experimenting with eating bread rather than crunchy muesli for breakfast, went out the window pretty soon and I’m not likely going to give it another try.

That being said, I could still improve on my lunches and make healthier snack choices. Besides, I would really like to stress less about food. For this reason, my staff got in touch with the dietitian, who is going to E-mail her a list of tips and recommendations based on my current food list this coming Tuesday.

2. Remain stable mentally. I am pretty stable mental health-wise already. I hope I will remain relatively sane as I adjust to my increased topiramate and later my decreased aripiprazole in particular. Of course, my aripiprazole taper might not be over with by the end of this year.

3. Keep writing consistently. I started a morning writing ritual today. Officially, I decided on Morning Pages, which dictates you have to write three pages. Then again, this is done by hand and I cannot do this anyway. I’ll be content if I can keep up the writing habit each morning even if I don’t make it to 750 words.

I did pretty great on my blogging over 2021, having written 303 posts over the year. I’d really like to write at least as many posts this year.

I would also like to broaden my horizons where it comes to my writing styles, writing more creatively.

4. Expand my creativity. Particularly, keep up with my creative hobbies. I did quite well on those over the past year too, having rediscovered polymer clay. I’d really like to improve my skill, but, like last year, don’t intend on doing the work all by myself.

I would especially like to discover some things to make myself rather than just copying from YouTube. Of course, I already select my own colors and do some things differently than in the tutorials, but I’d really like to expand on my creativity.

I will continue to do my own version of The Artist’s Way. I mean, I can’t take myself on artist’s dates completely solo because I can’t leave the house independently, but so what? My inner artist wants to be released just as much.

In line with the above, I’ll also experiment more with making my own essential oil blends and such rather than just copying recipes I find online.

5. Get back into the reading groove. This was a massive fail in 2021. One of my bookish resolutions for 2021 was to read 20 books. Well, I didn’t even reach half of that. See, I should’ve called them hopes rather than resolutions. Anyway, I’m not setting a number for myself right now, but I do hope to read some more than I did last year this year.

6. Socialize more, be it online or offline. COVID permitting, I’d like to go to the rescheduled Cerebral Palsy Day in April and to a regional Eye Cafe. This is a meeting of the Eye Association, which I joined in late November. I may also want to join the regional CP Cafe, which is held online on January 8. In addition, I’d really like to join online and hopefully at some point offline meetings related to my hobbies.

7. Deepen my faith. My faith really went in deep ebbs and flows over the past year and that’s not good. Thankfully, I didn’t lose my faith altogether. In fact, I signed up for an introductory course on Christian doctrine at BiblicalTraining.org last Thursday to get myself back in tune with what I believe. I really hope to be working on my relationship with God through Jesus Christ more this year.

What are your hopes for 2022?

Mama’s Losin’ It

Also linking up with #LifeThisWeek.

Mid-Year Reflections

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all. How can it be the middle of July already? It’s amazing how time flies. This week, one of Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop writing prompts is to look back at your new year’s resolutions for 2021. As I do each year, this year I called them hopes rather than resolutions as a way of lessening the pressure. As I look back though, I seem to be doing pretty well.

My first hope was to eat a somewhat healthier diet. Indeed, I am making sure to eat enough fruit and veg each day, unlike apparently during the last few months of 2020. I however still struggle to make healthier breakfast and lunch choices.

In the exercise department, I’ve not been as inventive as I’d hoped. I blame COVID, as, even though gyms reopened to the public a while back, I haven’t felt comfortable to go.

With respect to getting stable mentally, this is a work in progress. I’ve only actually noticed some seemingly significant improvement over the past month or so, after first falling deep into crisis in mid-June. I cannot say for sure the one-on-one support is helping me get mentally stable, but I do know for sure that I certainly don’t want to go back to the situation before the extra care hours were approved.

Faith-wise, I am still on my journey with God. I pray everyday, read the Bible everyday and am learning to put Jesus first. I am however still struggling. I really want to get baptized, but have no idea where to start, as I don’t currently even go to a physical church. More importantly though, I am still regularly tempted to think that, since God is in charge, I shouldn’t even bother with wanting to be saved.

On the leisurely side of things, I’m doing pretty amazing if I can say so myself. I have kept up a pretty good blogging routine and actually love jewelry-making and bath and body product making again. I am glad I didn’t resolve to be able to do these activities independently, as that’d be an unrealistic goal.

The only area I’m not that satisfied with myself about, is my reading. I did a separate post on bookish resolutions for 2021. I guess I should have called those hopes too, as to be honest, I haven’t really met a single of my goals as of yet.

How did you do on your new year’s resolutions so far?

Mama’s Losin’ It

My Hopes for 2021

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and a happy new year! Last year was, well, quite eventful for most of us. I really hope this year brings some peace and quiet to all of you. Most of all though, I hope you all stay as healthy as can be.

Like I’ve done for a couple of years now, I’m going to share what I hope to achieve in the new year. I hate the word “resolution” and don’t really want to call them goals either, because that’d be pressuring myself too much. I’ve actually noticed that if I call them hopes, I somehow achieve more of the things I want to achieve. Here are my hopes for 2021.

1. Eat a somewhat healthier diet. I don’t really want to be eating just lettuce and carrots so to speak, but I do really want to make healthier food choices. Like, I want to eat 2-3 servings of fruit each day, like I did in the fall of 2020 too. I also want to choose healthir snacks and maybe I can really get into the habit of eating bread rather than cereal some days. Lastly, I really need to make sure I get in at least two liters of fluid each day. Ideally, these actions combined will lead to some weight loss. I’d like to lose about 5kg, but any weight loss is good.

2. Find other ways of exercising besides walking. COVID permitting, I’d still like to join a gym or go swimming again. I don’t need to get moving more, as I already get in my recommended 10K steps at least half of the time and I don’t think it’s realistic to want to reach the goal more often.

3. Keep up my blogging routine. I did really well over 2020 in writing regularly and really want to keep it this way for 2021.

4. Get stable mentally. In 2020, I experienced crises a lot due to a combination of factors related to my mental health and adjusting to living in a facility. Like I said on Wednesday, the extra care hours got approved for a year. Hopefully by the end of this year, we’ll be able to conclude that they’ve helped me become significantly more stable.

5. Find more enjoyable hobbies and activities. I don’t need to be able to do them independently. Like, I’d really like to explore crafting and beauty product making more, but I know I’ll need help with those. I guess my hope is that I’ll find joy in more activities even if I can’t do them all by myself.

6. Deepen my faith. I didn’t even mention having become a Christian in 2020 when I reviewed the year on Wednesday. I however really hope to strengthen my relationship with Jesus and my faith in God.

What do you hope to achieve this year?