This end-of-year reflection was originally going to be titled ‘The Half-finished Year’, a reference not only to my ever-expanding folder of started but unfinished blog posts and the 2500 words of my next book, but also the two sweaters and three quilts that I am currently working on, as well as the unpainted front hallway and bathtub sitting in the living room that await attention when I get home. But, as I sit in a hotel room in Italy with my leg in a brace while the rest of my family is out skiing, I have come to realise that the reason that this year has been shaped so profoundly by the unfinished is because of the time that ill health has taken from me.

The year started with a minor but mortifying facial disfigurement in the form of a failed dental implant. It is ending in a broken ACL, the aforementioned brace, and uncertainty about how long recovery will take and what it will mean for all the activities and projects I have planned so far for the coming year. In between came multiple trips to the dentist, the doctor and the hospital, diagnosis of three conditions, two chronic, one temporary, the consequent prescriptions (including two attempts for the chronic conditions which resulted in distressing and painful side effects) and more blood tests than I would wish on my worst enemy.

Through all of this, I have not taken time off of work. I have continued my roles as wife and monther and have kept reassuring friends and family that I am fine, or at least managing. And in many ways I am lucky. The dental work has provided me with a successful prosthetic for the lost tooth. The three of the four medications I am taking are preventative rather than therapeutic. None of the conditions I suffer are life threatening. And while my current physical impairment is disabling, it is also temporary, even if rehabilitation is going to be counted in months at minimum, not weeks as I might wish. As someone who both works in the fields of disability and medical history, and has lived through the terminal illnesses of both parents, I know how fortunate I am that my various forms of ill health are identifiable, relatively painless and highly treatable, and that I live in a country and society where I have ready access to the care and treatment I need, as well as a support network of family and friends.

But while resilience may be an admirable quality in some ways, not least in providing a sense of continuity which is itself therapeutic, it cannot be a permanent state of being, as any old rubber band will show. Something, somewhere had to give in this year that has done its best to break me, physically and psychologically. It may not have succeeded entirely, but it does seem to have robbed me of significant amounts of time and, with it, my ability to complete projects, particularly those related to writing.

Which is not to say that this hasn’t been a year of progress in some ways. Indeed, I am managing, with this post, to publish more than one post for this blog this year, an improvement on my output for 2022. I now have a very clear idea of both the shape and content of my next book, although the form will require the sort of concentrated writing time that I definitely haven’t had this year and probably won’t in the coming year. I will even have new publications in the new year, in the form of a book chapter which fell victim to Covid delays and at least one book review. And I have managed to steek a cardigan for the first time, a terrifying technique in knitting that involves taking scissors to a piece of work knitted in the round to create an opening.

These achievements, small as they are, remind me that, unlike an old rubber band, I may be damaged but I am not yet broken. But, as I enter the new year in a damaged state, I do so with the knowledge that I cannot simply bounce back to a state of full productivity, as much as I might wish to do so. I need time and space both to heal what has broken this year and, when I am strong enough, to give my many unfinished projects the attention they deserve. So I will start this new year not with resolutions but with the hope that I will be able to find or make the time and space for convalescence and recuperation and with them the ability and courage complete some, if not all, of my half-finished projects.

I wish you all a healthy, contented and hope-fulfilled new year.