January is for surviving (and that might be enough)

January is marketed as a fresh start. A reset. A thrive moment.

New planners. New routines. New you.

As much as I love a new planner and a vision board, for me, January is never about thriving. It’s about surviving.

Christmas has barely finished doing its thing - the logistics, the emotions, the family dynamics, the juggling, the everything, and suddenly we’re expected to bounce straight back into life like none of it happened.

Work clothes are tighter. Tempers are shorter. Energy is thin.

If you’re a working parent, you’re likely already exhausted and a little frayed around the edges. And yet January arrives with this unspoken expectation that you should be firing on all cylinders again. No grace period. No decompression. Just… go.

January is also hard for me for reasons that don’t fit neatly into a productivity narrative.

The 6th of January would have been my mum’s 70th birthday.

She died at 56. Far too young. No time. She passed away at the end of January, fourteen years ago, after moving into hospice care just weeks earlier.

On the day she was transferred to the hospice, the ambulance arrived, and so did the solicitor.

When you’re under medical supervision, you can’t sign legal documents. So the paperwork for the sale of our family home and the purchase of the ‘retirement-bliss-home' my parents were buying had to be signed right then.

She insisted on wearing a nice cardigan over her nightdress. Tube in her nose. Morphine driver in her arm. Pen in hand. Papers resting on a cushion as she lay in bed.

The night she died the sale completed. My dad left the hospice alone and returned to our family home for the very last time without her. He moved into the new place alone, just hours after she died.

The timing was cutting. Heartbreaking. A brutal invitation to leave everything behind.

The day after she died, I went to see friends.

We sat in their house. We talked. We drank tea. We chatted s**t.

And I didn’t tell them.

Not once did I say that my mum had died just hours earlier.

I don’t know why.

Maybe I needed the world not to collapse around me. Maybe I needed to talk about anything else. Maybe I was hiding. Maybe I wasn’t ready to make it real by saying it out loud.

I just know that I sat there, holding something enormous, and carried on as if nothing had happened.

And in many ways, that’s how January still feels.

I don’t know if it was ‘meant to be’ that way. I don’t know if any version of that transition would have hurt less. What I do know is that it carved something deep. A wound that still exists, fourteen years on.

I don’t talk about this much. But many of you will know this terrain. And if you know, you know.

End-of-life care is bleak. Grief doesn’t follow calendars. And January has a way of reopening things we’ve learned to carry quietly.

This year, that heaviness was sharpened again. On Christmas Eve, the sister of one of my closest friends died. She was the same age as me.

Another reminder that life is short. That time isn’t guaranteed. That control is mostly an illusion.

Sometimes I catch myself spiralling into thoughts about dying young. About why I’m not making better choices to hedge my bets. About anger - at myself, at randomness, at the unfairness of it all.

And yet, January isn’t when I break down over the big stuff.

It’s the small things.

The tea that burns. The internet dropping mid-call. A flat tyre. Reading with your child that somehow turns into a full-blown rage moment (yes, that happened this week - totally unnecessary, totally pointless, and entirely January-fuelled).

It’s the mundane things that undo you, because you already know there’s no controlling the big ones. And when the small systems you rely on stop working like the well-oiled machine you’ve built… It's unbearable.

Control freak? Maybe. Human? Definitely.

I’ve realised I plaster on a mask every January. I muddle through. I perform competence. I push down the grief, the fatigue, the fear, the edge.

But what if January doesn’t need fixing?

What if January is allowed to be a different kind of beginning?

Not about momentum. Not about optimisation. Not about becoming something new.

But about honouring where you already are.

So this is your permission slip (if you need one) to let January be slow, quiet, messy, heavy, or simply survivable.

Thriving can wait. Stability is enough. Showing up imperfectly still counts.

If January feels hard for you, for reasons you can name or ones you can’t, I see you. I see you in the trenches, trying your best to ‘life’.

And sometimes, that’s the bravest leadership there is. A gentler way to approach January:

• Lower the bar - on goals, routines, and expectations

• Focus on stabilising, not transforming

• Choose one thing that makes life slightly easier (not better, just easier)

• Notice where you’re forcing momentum instead of allowing recovery

What would change if you stopped asking yourself ‘How do I make January productive?’ and started asking ‘What do I need to get through it?’

Claire