Not sure if you noticed but this past week we entered the year of the Horse. Big stallion energy. Power. Forward motion. Shedding 2025 and galloping into something better. Braver. Something that feels like an upgrade.

That’s how i explained it when someone asked why it suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Last year was the slithering Snake, venom, shedding old skin, and whatever else we decided it meant. This year is the Horse. Fire Horse, to be exact. Strength. Movement. Action.

Anyone who had even a slightly rubbish 2025 is gripping onto this new energy like it’s a rope being thrown across a flooded river, as if their lives depend on it.

If it makes any sense at all, we want this year to carry us forward. To cut us some slack and hold a little of the weight.

And maaaaan, i loved this idea. i really did. i want 2026 to feel like this so bad. Safer, maybe. More certain. Less apologetic.

It isn’t just me either. Even my mum was talking about it. My parents were discussing angel numbers over FaceTime like it was a completely normal conversation. That’s when i realised this wasn’t just a TikTok trend or mystical woo-woo. Something about this year had reached people who would usually roll their eyes.

Which tells you something about the mood we’re all in.

i saw someone say that if it’d been the year of the Sheep, we’d all be far less bothered. And that made me snigger because it’s true. No one is pinning their hopes on gentle grazing energy. We want the horse. We want impact. We want some kind of sign that things are about to turn.

And maybe that hunger is exactly why it spread so fast.

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My teenager was pretty irritated by it though. They pointed out how quickly everyone had become fluent in the Chinese zodiac the moment it suited us. How easily we borrow symbolism when it promises a good year, and how little we think about where it comes from.

And they’re not wrong.

When i sat with that, i realised there is something slightly uncomfortable about the way we dip into another culture’s calendar when it suits our need for reinvention. Not because we’ve taken the time to understand it properly, but because it offers us a story we can use.

Which, in its own way, says something about how desperate we are for reassurance.

And maybe that’s why the come-down felt sharper this week. Because Tuesday arrived looking suspiciously like bin day.

Same February light. Same workload. Same slightly fuddled brain. No sudden transformation. Just life continuing in its usual, ever so slightly unremarkable way.

And, to be totally honest, i felt oddly agitated. Not devastated. Just annoyed. Like i’d been promised an overnight revolution and handed a sore throat and domestic admin instead.

It wasn’t that i believed a horse made of flames was going to fix my life. But i did notice how ready i was to feel different, simply because the calendar suggested i might.

And that’s when the pattern clicked.

Life will be better when January arrives.
Life will be better after Chinese New Year.
Life will be better after my birthday.
Life will be better when i’ve lost ten pounds.
Life will be better when my income levels up.
Life will be better when the world calms the **** down.
Life will be better when…

Coincidentally, perhaps, but i’ve been reading a book by Oliver Burkeman this past week too, and the opening line just won’t leave me alone:

“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.”

He works it out at around four thousand weeks, if we’re lucky.

Not endless resets. Not a constant supply of fresh starts. Just a finite number of ordinary Tuesdays.

What stuck with me wasn’t just our endless search for productivity hacks. It was the waiting. The way we live as though real life will begin later, once everything is sorted. Once we feel sorted.

But the sorting never stops.

Which perhaps explains why this week felt heavier than i expected.

There was a massive funeral in the village this week too, the kind where you can feel the collective sadness even if you didn’t know the person all too well. And then Eric Dane died at 53.

Fifty-three.

Which is both young and not so young, depending on how honest you’re being with yourself.

Death has a way of making everything feel less theoretical.

i found myself thinking about Mark Sloan’s deathbed monologue in Grey’s Anatomy, the one where he says that when you love someone, you tell them. Even if it burns your life to the ground. You don’t wait.

Years ago, it felt romantic. Dramatic. Very television.

This week, it felt much less cinematic and much more practical. Not in a confess-your-feelings-at-the-airport kind of way (though, that too). More in the everyday sense of not storing things up for later.

If you’re going to write the thing, write it. If you’re going to make the call, make it. If you’re going to say it, say it.

Because “later” is theoretical. And theoretical time doesn’t count towards the four thousand.

Which brings me back to the resets.

My birthday is on the 28th, the very last day of February. i’ll probably still treat it like a reset. i always do.

But it comes after January’s big reset, after the low-key second chance of February 1st, after Chinese New Year on the 17th. All these neat little chances to start over.

And at some point you realise your life — this one week of it, anyway — hasn’t been on pause, lazily hanging around waiting for you to get your shit together.

If we’re lucky, we get around four thousand of them, and this slightly damp, ordinary one has been shuffling along anyway.