I'm Rooting for You, 29

Hello 29, this is 28. The last hours of 28, these fleeting minutes that I am all but counting down so that this year can finally be over.

Because let’s not beat around the bush here – that was a bad run. It was challenge without reward and the relentless cycle of feeling like nothing I could ever do would be enough to fulfil some arbitrary meter to bring about a true sense of happiness. There were moments of 28 where the ground sank so deep that I wondered how I might ever touch my fingers to the sky again; moments where the world was at once too much and not enough.

But I don’t want to talk about what’s past, I want to think about what’s to come. I can’t change what’s back there – I can’t redo the most difficult summer of my professional career, or stop myself getting detained in Florida during a hurricane. I can’t fix the scar on my knee from when I nearly ended up hospitalised with an infection in Australia or the fact that I spent half of what should have been an idyllic week in paradise in Fiji in tears.

What I can do is look to you, 29. What I can do is not just hope that it will be better, but make it be better. What I can do is decide to not be shrunk into whatever boxes people might like to put me in; what I can do is decide what I’m capable of.

And what I’m capable of is whatever I set my mind to.

I can stretch my fingers and write again, as I do now for the first time in months, and fall back in love with a medium that had begun to feel like a chore. To find my why for writing again – a why that has nothing to do with literary agents or publishers, and certainly nothing to do with Twitter (the best thing you ever left).

I can build my physical strength to a place I didn’t even know I could get to, where the idea of climbing one of the seven summits becomes not just feasible but a reality that I am now striving towards this very year.

I can dream of a future that takes it shape however I might want it to, because to dream in any other way would only be a disservice to myself.

But more than anything, I can choose to remember that all I have is today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. And to do anything but to live each of those moments in pursuit of joy and contentment would be to give up before I have even begun.

So, 29, as the last year of my twenties, the last year before that elusive, looming three-zero, I ask only one thing: let’s make it memorable, yes, but let’s also make it as full of laughter and light as is possible, in the midst of everything that the world has to contend with in this moment.

Let’s do that for myself. Because if I won’t, who will?