2026 Goals

It's that time of year again.

 

Usually I'm really excited for these goal-setting posts, but this year I feel I've lost quite a bit of momentum. That's crazy to say... I added six shows to my résumé this year alone, including a 15-minute solo tap dance set for a fairly well-known theatre company and two theatre-musical choreography gigs. I made enough crocheted shawls to place them in a brick-and-mortar shop for sale. I learned how to draw half-decent human eyes (in colour).

 

But I feel like I'm stuck in quicksand.

 

This is probably understandable. We just made a fairly major out of town move less than two months ago. Work has been absolute madness for the past two months and I'm thisclose to burning out. My body feels weary. My brain feels like a car that won't start. I have $3 to my name, winter tires balder than Peter Furler, and less than a quarter tank of gas with which to get to work for an entire week before my next paycheque. I am so tired of worrying about finances, of asking for help, of having to put off legitimate needs (like safe tires for my vehicle) with more pressing legitimate needs (like gas for said vehicle). I think this year's goals may be more about getting my immediate 'boring' surroundings in order than creative projects that will probably never be seen by human eyes anyway. Maybe the fact that the small boring details of my day-to-day life are in chaos is the reason I'm struggling to work on my choreography and writing projects.

 

I've recently discovered Struthless on YouTube. This channel has been a Godsend, and a lot of what's in the rest of this post is probably going to be adapted (if not directly lifted) from his videos.

 

2026 Goals:

 

FINANCES.

I absolutely need to get some finances in order. I am so freaking done with not being able to go anywhere or do anything because I didn't set aside enough gas money for the van. I'm tired of knowing I'm driving on extremely unsafe tires, and the catastrophic electrical failure that took the van off the road for so long that the registration on it lapsed is still fresh in my mind. If something like that happens again, how are we going to pay for it?

I'm not trying to become a millionaire, I just want an emergency fund. Something we can fall back on if another $3,000 part on the van drops dead or if I get sick and have to miss a week of work. I want to be able to go to the grocery store and not have to prioritize some food needs over others because we don't have enough money for the whole list.

I'm guessing that the financial chaos we have lived in for so long is a big part of why I can't get my act together enough to work on anything creative. 

 

So how am I going to do that?

First, any and all Christmas gift money is going to open up an investment. It's something I have been talking about doing since I was 18 years old and never did. Not doing it is one of the biggest regrets of my life, and the longer I wait to open one, the bigger that regret will be. I don't even know what I'm saving for, I just want that money out of my easy-to-access chequing account where it WILL get spent on fancy snacks because that's exactly where it has been going for at least five years.

Second, I want to set up autotransfer so that every time a paycheque comes in, a certain dollar amount will immediately get siphoned off to a savings account of some kind. This may honestly just go toward buying Christmas gifts next year or something, as that has been a huge sticking point for me every year since we got married. Clearly I'm not doing this manually, so I need to automate it or it just is not going to happen.

 

Third (and we've already started to do this a bit since we moved), I want to meal plan at least a week in advance so we can buy groceries accordingly and cut back on eating out (last time we went on a dinner date it was over $80... just for the two of us! This wasn't even a high-end, fine dining restaurant, this was the culinary equivalent of a decent sports bar).

 

 

DANCE.

This is a tricky one. My confidence in my abilities took a huge hit on the second-most-recent show I choreographed, and now I feel like I need to prove something. Again. I was only just getting out from the 'I have to prove myself' mindset from college and then this. I've been asked to be a choreography consultant (not even the actual choreographer) for a local show and even that feels like I'll mess it up somehow.

I'm also fairly out of shape. Our new place has two levels, and even climbing the stairs twice in a row knocks the wind out of me.

 

I've been offered a really great teaching opportunity, and while I really want to take it, I'm also VERY aware of how easy it is for a teacher to absolutely destroy a student. My biggest fear is that in my inexperience, I will do the same to all my students and they will come away hating dance and hating themselves, the same way I often have. 

 

How am I going to do this?

First, I am NOT starting by posting on Instagram, where all the people who have tried to break me will see them. Instead, I have drafted an email to those who have supported me over the years asking if they would like daily video clips of me performing choreography for the month of January. I have learned that if I don't have any specific people waiting for a video, I will not make one... so I need to get people invested and waiting.

Over Nachmo, I would like to do an Alphabet superset -- 26 dance clips to songs starting with each letter of the alphabet. After 26 days, I'll run a poll and see which piece my accountability group thinks I should develop further and run out the run of the month working on that. I want to start putting those clips on my Ko-fi account and after January will start actually promoting that (because then it will have actual dance content on there -- wild, right?).

 

Second, I want to make a Project Board with a clear timeline of the dance thing I'm working on and focus only on that ONE dance project. The thing that has always hamstrung me with making dance films is trying to have eight of them on burners at once. This is impossible to do, and I absolutely know this. But I keep freaking doing it. I need to start with one (1) film, and not even think about any others until that one is legitimately done.

Also on this project board, I want to lay out a memorization schedule. The other MASSIVE difficulty I have with making dance films is simply not learning the choreography and then trying to cram it all in the week (or even the day) before. I want to schedule one section of memorization per week, so that by the time I want to film these upcoming projects, I will already know them well enough to feel comfortable performing them.

 

 

WRITING.

Kyrie has stalled out. The older I get, the less confident I feel writing about interpersonal relationships, and unfortunately that's exactly what Act I of this novel is. I've been stuck on/avoiding this one dinner date scene for probably almost a year at this point. I love this story, and even if I don't bring any of my other novels to fruition, I want to see this one published. I have had a handful of friends publish their own books, so I know it can be done by people like me. I just need to do it.

 

How am I going to do this?

Small, daily goals. One sentence a day. On good days, maybe shoot for 100 words per day. Just get something, anything, on the page. I'm going to set myself a goal to get this draft done and out to beta readers by the end of April. Most of that period is my layoff time from work, so I have PLENTY of time to write 100 words a day (especially since I'm pretty experienced at cranking out 3k+ words an hour from my NaNoWriMo days). Plus, Act II is already is pretty decent shape and really just needs some light editing before it's beta-reader ready.

Or, if 'one sentence' is too much, I might try for half an hour per day (setting a timer). 

I may also need to implement some kind of reward system until I can get Act I to be more fun. 

 

 

WIP CLEARING.

I have a pile of (mostly crochet) works-in-progress that I need to either finish or officially abandon and rip out. I think these are taking up a lot of brain space and slowing me down from doing other things because I keep thinking 'I really should work on this...' Two weeks ago I knocked out two crochet projects that literally took less than two hours each and already I'm starting to feel a little more like I can breathe again. I wrote a list of all the WIPs that exist so I can think about which one to tackle next (and which ones I need to seriously consider ripping out so I can use that yarn for other things).

 

How am I going to do this?

I used to crochet while watching YouTube videos, no I need to get back into the habit of doing things while watching YouTube again. Adrian's Digital Basement is a great channel for this, as Adrian is really good at explaining what he's doing as he's going along so you don't actually need to look at what's happening every single second. Plus, if you're watching one of his repair videos, you can tap into the body-doubling effect, as he's working on a project too. I also learn a lot about patience, troubleshooting, and computers in general from his videos.

 

 

 

SLEEP.

My mother often tells of when I was a two-month old baby and she would have to sit up with me at night because I was awake and wanted to play. (She's still bitter about this, by the way.) I wasn't crying or upset, I was just ready to explore and hang out and had zero interest in going to sleep.

That has set the tone of my entire life. I can sleep just fine. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm down for the count. The actual sleep is not the problem. The getting-to-bed part is. There's just too much to work on, and learn, and do, and explore. Life is short, and to spend a third of it sleeping, a third of it working, and half of it dealing with feeding myself seems absolutely ludicrous. When exactly am I supposed to, you know, live?

But my husband has given me an ultimatum: be consistently in bed by midnight before May 2026 or he'll leave me. And if it means that much to him, I do really want to try. But I've never done this before.

 

How am I going to do this?

I've come up with a physical tracker idea and I know I want to implement a reward system (which, of course, will require me to stay on track with the financial goals). A reward system helped me a LOT with getting my wake-up times solid (still going strong after six months!), so I'm hoping it will help with this too.

Being on ADHD meds has already helped a lot because now I can actually get the chores done before midnight (most of the time), which was definitely a big part of what kept me from going to bed. But now I'm using that time to putz around on other projects. I have a feeling clearing out the 'should do projects' (the WIPs, see above), might help a lot here.

 

 

COMMUNITY.

Part of why we moved was for a community. We had some friends in this town already, and for YEARS my husband and I have dreamed of hosting people for dinner... which is tricky when all your friends live(d) 90 minutes away or more.

I'd like to set a goal of hosting two dinners per month. That feels manageable, and that will be a great day to strengthen the connections we have (which is turn will hopefully help our mental health).

 

How are we going to do this?

Meal plan. Schedule. Text people until somebody's available for that date.

 

So what are my first steps?

 

- Buy a corkboard and some brad fasteners (to make the project board, as at least three of these goals will be tracked on these).

- Make a list of people to send the accountability email to.

 

- Keep referencing the WIP list and work off the momentum I've already built.

 

- Write one sentence in Kyrie.

 

- Wear the tap shoes.