I remember battling with this question of hope a year ago, in much the same situation: isolated at winter with a broken heart. It has re-emerged, now and again, over the last twelve months, this question of whether having hope actually makes things a lot worse.

There are times when we are the victims of our own assumptions. We assume someone is going to behave in a certain way, we assume things will go the way they did last time, we assume that our plans will “work” and go exactly as we imagine. And then they don’t and we are left with two problems: reacting to things not going as we’d planned, and grieving our assumptions.

In 2019, my Word of the Year was Fulfilment. That didn’t work out so well for me. I had set it with the expectation that that was all I needed to do; speak and it would be so. The Word, along with a Pinterest vision board, would be enough, and then something would happen and I would become fulfilled. It would be three more Januarys until I would be.

In previous years I have written great long lists of intentions for the impending 12 months, swathes of minutely specific targets to reach and broader ways in which my thinking is going to be transformed. I decided precisely how the year would pan out, colour coding projects into each month in a spreadsheet that maps onto my financial projections for the year.

As I have been collecting my thoughts ahead of writing this review of 2021, that well-worn, never-quite-attributed quote keeps coming to mind: you overestimate what you can do in a day, and underestimate what you can do in a year. That really feels like the story of my 2021 – not much happened, but so much happened.

I feel that I open most of these letters with an observation about how quickly the month has gone - even if it doesn’t make the final edit they mostly start out that way. November, however, is the slowest month I have ever experienced.

I don’t know whether I can locate self-love anymore. Influencers with privileged identities say self-love! between peace fingers; pink stationary for sale provides a self-love! checklist for you to turn the personal into the productive; a magazine article lists five things to start today to have more self-love! with product placement from a bath bomb company.

It started with a meme. This meme, which reads “I don’t want a career, I want to wear a fancy robe covered in stars and dispense confusing and ambiguous advice to passing travellers from a large stone cottage on the edge of the woods where I live with a parliament of owls”.

Lately I’ve found myself drawn to stories of people with a distinct before and after. My attention is irrevocably held by a “but then” in the telling of a life.