I can’t believe it, but after feeling very quiet and inward in 2025, as this Chinese New Year energy is getting going, I can’t stop reflecting on 2025 and what it was all about for me. So, as I’m opening up towards the new energetic chapter of 2026, the year of the Fire Horse, I find myself writing more reflections from the last year and I’ve written, in three parts, posts that explore different ways to inhabit uncertainty and move forward in your creative work.
The last year was, for me, defined by inhabiting doubt, a deep, quiet feeling of doubt that made writing hard.
Doubt can feel unsettling and isolating. It can also be silencing. Communication becomes difficult when you feel like a hermit in a cave, turned inward and isolated. 2025, felt like a year of reflection and stillness. I certainly lived it that way.
There is real use value in pausing.
In a culture that rewards acceleration, it felt necessary to step away from speed. To disentangle myself from being constituted solely by urgency. To not force myself to produce answers before I had sat with the questions.
Our inner conflicts don’t disappear when we pause. They are still there, waiting. But the work isn’t about resolving them quickly, but about understanding what they are made of.
What are our inner conflicts? How are they shaping what we think, what we make, what we reach for?
The extended pause allowed me to see my own blocks more clearly. The painful feelings I noticed recurring, across relationships, systems, situations, were often projections (probably they are always projections). This is how a self-sabotaging idea gets externalised and confirmed, again and again.
In the pause, there is time to ask what sits underneath our concerns. To stay curious with inner conflict rather than trying to eradicate it.
There isn’t a miraculous release that happens when we identify our blocks.
But getting to know them gives us access to better questions. It allows us to see how our inner experience mirrors the outer one, and so we can begin learning how to soothe, rather than fight, what limits us.
When our old foes return, as they always do, how do we meet them? What information are they carrying? Deep inside our blocks and pain, we can find solutions. Not necessarily solutions that eradicate pain, that’s unrealistic, but creative solutions. Depth in what we make comes from familiarity with our own inner depths. Meaning emerges when we stop pretending we are uncomplicated.
I feel as though I truly spent time with myself in 2025. That inner review process is already showing up in how I’m working now, how I’m approaching things even more slowly, and only now, I’m getting a sense of clarity and insight emerging from the pause.
And finally, what I’ve come to understand by staying with the pause: inner authority is something we earn by staying with doubt long enough to learn from it. That kind of validation can’t be taken away.
If what I’m describing resonates with where you are in your creative process: the pausing, re-evaluating, reviewing, redefining, I offer mentoring as a space to think alongside someone else, without pressure to rush to answers. Sometimes clarity comes not from pushing forward, but from being accompanied while you listen more closely to what’s already there.
I’ve written the next post already, and in it, I tell the story of what I’m describing looked like in practice: my messy, boggy, and oddly humorous inner monologue when clarity arrived.
