Does your bread expire?

My bread has an expiry date. Isn’t it reassuring knowing that food has a very clear deadline? You know when it stops being fresh. Nobody looks at a loaf six months later and asks why it isn't performing like it used to and tells it that last year it was softer, or that it should really be doing more by now. We accept that bread changes. For some reason, I find that much easier to accept about bread than I do about myself.

2025 and 2026 feel like two completely different years to me. 2025 was probably the closest I've felt to being at my peak. I kept surprising myself. I wrote a lot, started things and actually finished them. There always seemed to be something happening, something I could point at and think, I DID THAT. I don't think I realised how quickly those things would stop feeling like achievements and start feeling like expectations.

Then 2026 happened.

I moved to a different state for college, which sounds much more exciting when you say it in one sentence. In reality, it was new everything. New place, new people, new routines, new ways of doing ordinary things. For the first month and a half, I was mostly trying to adjust and make a completely unfamiliar life feel normal. Then, around the seventh week, I had a huge breakdown, and what made it worse was realising how little I had done this year.

I wasn't writing much. I wasn't creating much. Months were passing, and I couldn't point to anything that gave me that familiar feeling of having done something. Suddenly I was thinking about 2025, about everything I had managed to do then, and wondering why I couldn't seem to do any of it now. It wasn't really the lack of achievement that bothered me. It was knowing that I had already seen myself do more.

Writing was probably the clearest example out of all. It used to be something I did because I wanted to. Then it became something I was proud of. Along the way, it became something I expected from myself. I'd sit down to write, hate what I'd written, leave it unfinished, and then feel guilty because I remembered a version of myself who could write for hours.

The things I used to do for satisfaction slowly became things I used to measure myself. I think that's a strange thing we do. We accomplish something once, and instead of allowing it to remain an achievement, we turn it into a requirement. A personal best becomes a personal minimum. The thing that once made you think, I can't believe I did that, eventually becomes, why haven't I done that again?

Could be why 2026 felt so empty to me, even though it wasn't. I moved away. I started an entirely different life. I spent weeks trying to adjust to a place that wasn't familiar. I was changing in ways that weren't anything particularly impressive to put on a shelf. There was no certificate for learning how to feel at home somewhere new, so I didn't really count it.

And maybe that's when I started thinking about races. Someone once told me that life isn't a marathon. I remember thinking, but it really is, isn't it? Because there is always something moving. Someone doing more. Someone achieving something. Some version of yourself that seems to be a little further ahead.

The strange thing is that sometimes the person you're racing isn't even someone else. It's you from last year.

And I think that's a particularly unfair competitor because you already know exactly what she's capable of. You have the evidence. You remember what she did, how much she wrote, how much she managed, how easily she seemed to keep moving. So when you slow down, it doesn't feel like you're resting. It feels like you're falling behind.

I still wonder if I could have worked harder in 2026. I probably could have. I still wonder if doing more would have made me happier. I genuinely don't know. Perhaps I would have felt better or I would have simply moved the finish line further away and found something new to feel behind about.

Because once you've had a year where you surprise yourself, it's very easy to believe every year should look like that.

But bread doesn't work that way. Yesterday's loaf isn't sitting on the counter wondering why today's loaf isn't as good. It just expires, and makes room for another one.

I still want to write. I still want to make things. I still want to have years where I surprise myself. I just don't want every year to have to prove that it deserves to exist.

That might be what I'm still trying to understand about 2026. It wasn't necessarily a worse version of 2025 but a year I didn’t know how to measure. And perhaps that's the real problem. We get so used to asking how far we've gone that we forget to ask whether we even want to keep running. 

I spent so long looking for something to show for the year that I missed what the year was showing me.