When "New Year, new you" isn't a choice

The start of a new year is always full of New Year, new you energy. Fresh starts. Big intentions. Reinvention.

But what if you’ve already been forced into a new you, one you didn’t ask for and wouldn’t have chosen?

For those of us who have been through a breast cancer diagnosis, active treatment and then ongoing treatment can leave us with a body we don’t recognise, side effects that affect daily life, and a raft of additional medical issues we never expected. Life doesn’t look like how we imagined it would.

New year or not, it’s okay to mourn the life you thought you were going to have. It’s okay to think, feel and say that things aren’t fair.

It can sometimes feel as though we’ve been programmed to be grateful all of the time. Grateful to be alive. Grateful that we haven’t had it as bad as other people. But the fact is, we need to allow our feelings space.

The other night I was struggling to take off my pocketed vest holding my prosthetics. I was staying at my mum’s and she heard me groan in pain thanks to my shoulders.

“It’s really not fair,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to be dealing with any of this.”

It stopped me in my tracks. Not because it made me feel sorry for myself, but because I felt seen and understood.

The truth is, many of us are carrying a huge, unseen physical and mental load.

As we head into this new year, it’s okay to grieve the life you wanted, the life you thought you were going to have. But it’s also important to remember that grief can co-exist with hope.

While we are under no obligation to jump on the New Year, new you bandwagon or make endless resolutions, we can choose to make new and different plans for the future, for the life we have now. We can work out adjustments that allow us to find joy again.

Last January I started the year worried that the cancer was back. I spent the month at scans and medical appointments. There was huge relief when it turned out not to be cancer, but “just” fatigue.

As anyone living with fatigue will tell you, there is nothing just about it.

That scare over Christmas and New Year lit a fire in my belly. I’d sat at a concert in December worried I might not see another Christmas, never mind retirement, and I became determined to live more, not just exist.

Fatigue makes life complicated. I’m never certain how much energy I’m going to have or how quickly it will run out. Some days I’m running on fumes for no discernible reason. Other times I end up in a crash-and-burn cycle, paying the price for choosing to do something I knew would take every bit of energy I had and more.

Even so, I chose to find a way to join the choir I’d been listening to at that concert.

I knew it would mean using precious energy. I knew it would mean asking other people for lifts. I knew it would mean missing out on other things because of what it required.

And yet it has been worth every bit of energy it’s taken.

It felt like coming home to myself again.

I can’t fully describe the joy it has brought me, even on the days when my shoulders hurt so much I couldn’t take my coat off during rehearsal. Even when I lost the entire day after a concert to exhaustion.

On 13th December, I sang Handel’s Messiah with the choir in the very same church where I’d sat the year before and made that quiet resolution. As we sang the Hallelujah Chorus, accompanied by the organ, trumpets and timpani, I realised I was crying.

Crying with joy.
Crying with pride.
Crying because I’d come so far.

It’s a good job I knew that chorus so well as reading notes through tears isn’t easy.

My word for last year was limitless. I chose it because life had felt so constrained by cancer treatment and fatigue. Reminding myself that I am limitless encouraged me to look for different ways of doing the things I wanted to do. It filled me with hope.

So, as we enter this year, I invite you to give your feelings space and to choose a word that encapsulates how you want your year to be. This isn’t about resolutions. It’s about setting the tone. It’s about deciding what really matters and where you want to spend your time, love, enthusiasm and energy.

I’ve been mulling over several words throughout December - hope, courage, bravery, expansion - but in the end my gut told me that my word for 2026 is joy.

Not because I expect to feel happy every day, but because when I consciously seek out joy, I find pockets of it in the most unexpected places.

What are you going to choose to focus on as we begin this new year?