2025 into 2026

Another year has come to an end, and I’m back with my lengthy annual reflections. This was a more challenging year in many ways, and whilst I’d never have chosen the low points, I do have optimism for where I’ve got to for 2026.

ℹ️ Note that this is (intentionally) being posted incredibly late and reads as a bit disjointed after being sat at 90% since the end of the year, and finally posted in February. For more about that please see the health section below!

Usually an important part of my process of writing this is to look back through my calendar to work out what I’ve done across the year. Unfortunately though, I don’t have access to my work calendar any more (more on that later) and I realised lots was missing from my records because of that. I’m especially grateful for my physical home calendar and photos as prompts, and this was a good reminder of how fragile records can be, and why I write these posts for myself. As always, this essay is part of a yearly series dating back to 2011(!). Last year’s post can be found here.

My closing paragraph at the end of last year said: “I’m going to try to find a better balance with energy, work, studying, exercise, and health generally. Hopefully I’ll feel a bit better about the result at this end of this year!”. Did I feel better about it at the end of the year? Yes. Was it consistent throughout the year, or as the result of some controlled and sensible changes? Absolutely not 😆

Parenting

However, I also wrote last year that “I’m talking about it (parenting) to shine a light for people who may not be so aware, and also hopefully to look back on next year and see things have got easier”, and on the whole I’d say this year has definitely been easier.

There’s been a lot more sleep, including a routine where the kid knows if they wake up in the morning they’re meant to play in their room until the “daytime” sign comes up. Definitely not always adhered to, but overall mornings are a lot more enjoyable nowadays and one of my stints writing this was after a post-8am start! Similarly I’ve also enjoyed the continued evolution into an actual little person who’s fun to spend time with, talk to, and share interests with. We’ve done a lot of new things this year, everything from ice skating and rollerskating to climbing walls, through to camping for the first time.

We have a family member with a 1 year old, and when I compare that kind of age (Everything endlessly in the mouth, on the move and needing constant supervision for every waking minute) vs where we are (a child who can be reasoned with, who mostly is very sensible, activities are more fun for me too, and you can have proper conversations), I feel glad for where we’ve got to. There are a lot of grumps and moaning too, but overall this age is a good stage.

That said, some of the notable stress points included chicken pox (an unplanned two weeks of the child imprisoned at home whilst my husband and I tried to carry on with life), and toilet training (actually we came out of this pretty well, but in the transition it was a difficult couple of weeks for very different reasons!). We’ve also had continued knee issues after last year’s cancer scare which has meant trips to Great Ormond Street, but everything is currently under control on that front.

Throughout 2025 I continued to be very grateful to have a supportive team around me at work, which made it all the more sad when that came to an end.

Work – Jan to September (employment)

After a full C-suite overhaul in 2024, 2025 similarly started with a lot of instability at work. In January it was announced that we were getting a new CPO, and our CEO would be changing again. In May a new Austin, TX-based CTO was announced, hiring freezes in the UK started, and unsurprisingly in June 30% layoffs were announced as part of an overall geographic realignment.

Despite all of the instability and time spent onboarding leadership again, I’m very proud of what I achieved at work this year. I’d recieved a “critical leader award” and another performance-related award early in the year, the Q1 performance check in had given me an “exceeds expectations”, and my team had delivered on some huge projects including integrations and data pipeline work for an acquisition, shifting from in-house to third party tooling for key systems, advocating for and rolling out member-facing safety features, building a transparency centre, overhauling ID and photo verification, and loads of ML-centric projects. I also led on a company-wide engineering internship program, which got some fantastic feedback from the exec team.

Overall my C-level boss had been seemingly getting some positive signals about the company strategy and investment my area would get. Unfortunately that all changed with the new leadership and decision to centralise more of tech in Austin. In under two weeks of the new CTO starting my boss was swapped out for two new US-based people, one of whom had a VP version of my job title. From that point I knew the writing was on the wall, and was unsurprised when my name subsequently came up as “at risk of redundancy”.

I had a slightly extended exit, and was able to leave feeling like I’d done all I could to set the new leadership and what was left of my team up well, but it was still really gutting to have to leave and mourn a job that I loved; a role that all things considered had been my favourite to date, but which I knew wasn’t going to be nearly the same moving forwards.

During this period I didn’t do a huge amount externally, part of which was to do with a company-wide lockdown on external public appearances. Despite that though, I enjoyed attending CTO Craft Conference, LDX3 (where I again ran a CRG), I hosted an online LeadDev panel around how to prioritize when modernizing legacy systems, and enjoyed two wonderful conversations on Lena Reinhard’s podcast Leadership Confidential.

Health

⚠️ trigger warning: infertility, miscarriage references, pregnancy challenges

This biggest personal theme of 2025 was working through fertility challenges and all of the uncertainty that has come with that whilst juggling everything else going on in life. Getting to 40, your fertility drops off an absolute cliff, and that combined with some other health factors has meant that a second child just wasn’t happening.

In the first half of 2025 I started looking seriously at IVF via the support offered by my former employer. Over the months I’d had a ton of tests, and after a lot of soul searching we were ready to get on with it when… I lost access to the healthcare benefit. This was a real blow, and added more uncertanity into the mix, but we subsequently decided to carry on regardless.

In hindsight the slight delays that came with this period actually worked in our favour. On the week that I was due to kick off medication and start in earnest, I found out that I’d finally fallen pregnant naturally. It was a huge surprise; we’d only been given a 13% chance of IVF working and that’s very controlled, so it felt somewhat unreal!

Unfortunately things weren’t straightforward, and after having some bleeding I was referred into the care of the EPU (early pregnancy unit). I was put on medication, told to rest as much as possible, was banned from swimming and baths, but outside of that it was “wait and see”.

Having had a previous loss and all of the existential crisis that had come with that, plus given our journey to conceive again, I was terrified. Terminology such as “inconclusive pregnancy” and “threatened miscarriage” were thrown around, and I described it to my husband as being like a horrible Schrödinger’s cat scenario. Having to rest and wait in between scans, hoping for the best but fearing the worst was awful. The first trimester, in my experiences, has been mental torture and nothing like the joyous experience it’s often portrayed as.

I had to rewrite from here on, as I’d orginally stated that we’d finally made it into the second trimester and been discharged back into the ‘standard process’ which was a huge relief. Unfortunately very shortly after we had more bad news – firstly an extremely high chance of chromosomal abnormalities and potential for genetic issues/congenital disorders, which thankfully appear to not be playing out up to this point. Then additionally two other separate problems were identified, which also put us at high risk of developmental issues, preeclampsia, premature birth, or stillbirth, which is terrifying. It’s all been a lot, and even more so coupled with starting a new business and racing the clock to plan very seriously for a self-employed maternity leave.

Work-post employment

As I moved beyond my second year anniversary at my previous job, I’d been honest with my boss that I was considering working for myself again as and when I left the business. Having done it previously I knew it wasn’t all grass is greener and would come with some challenges, but I wanted to see how it could work for me now I had parenting to roll with too. I wasn’t planning on starting quite so soon, but on leaving work I didn’t even consider new employment opportunities; I wanted to work for myself again for a while.

After a positive start – getting to the final for a Trustee position and receiving some excellent feedback, being selected to join a research commission, being asked to join a conference team as chair, having a number of unprompted inbound enquiries of a range of types of work – the health issues above really threw chaos into the mix. Handling mental health, physical health, and practicalities around a lot of hospital appointments meant that I just couldn’t prioritise new commitments. Financially I was grateful to past me for being very sensible and having a decent reserve for the immediate time. But mentally I was stressing out about appearing flakey at a period where I didn’t want to be telling everyone what was going on, and losing important earning time.

Coming back to writing this in February, things are in a much better place. I’m working as a fractional Chief Platform Integrity Officer for a startup, I’m still getting some interesting enquiries, and I’m also in another process for a Trustee position. I am needing to keep a fair bit of capacity for medical things, and have fast learnt that the challenges of child illness etc aren’t too different from when you’re employed, but overall I’m very much enjoying doing my own thing.

As above, I do have a time limit on working and will be stopping likely at the end of May outside of a couple of pre-existing commitments, so if you do want to book me for any work, get in touch!

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Home & family life

Back at home, there was plenty of highs, but with a couple of notable emotional points.

Garden progress

On the positive side, it felt like the garden came on a long way this year. I revamped a challenging (dry, shade) area under a big tree using logs and chippings, which tidied it up a lot.

When chickenpox hit us, on a complete whim I attacked the back of xta way too deep and poorly planted bed, which was historically just full of weeds. After clearing the floor the space made an excellent secret den, which got a lot of play time over the warmer months, and we’re looking forward to improving even further when spring rolls around.

Buoyed by those successes, I decided to tackle a much larger and arguably more foolhardy project in the form of converting the old shed site to a pond. Since the ancient shed had half crumbled, half been smashed down, the site sat doing nothing aside from gathering weeds. Starting with clearing the space, pulling endless rubble and nettle roots out of the ground, I then moved on to plotting out the pond itself. It turns out that digging a large pond by hand is pretty exhausting, especially when you have chronic fatigue! Undeterred, between fatigue and the weather it took longer than I’d hoped, but eventually I had a good void with a shelf around the edge and a more shallow entry/exit poit for wildlife.

Mum came over to help me wrangle the underlay and liner, we emptied what we could from the water butts, and then it was a case of waiting… and waiting… for the rain to come. Sadly by the time it was finally fuller, temperatures were cooling and pond plants were no longer in season. I managed to get some oxygenators in to start making it more hospitable, but the next big step will be to plant everything up properly in the spring. Given the amount of frogs we already have in the garden I’m really hoping for frogs, or even newts.

Losing Kasumi

Someone that would have loved the pond was our cat, Kasumi. In 2024 she was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition and we were told she likely wouldn’t last more than a month or two. In true stubborn Kasumi style she lived a whole extra year, but after she started going very downhill we had to make the call to let her go in September. There had been many flashbacks to the bad old days where her and her sister had tuberculosis, and similarly because of the medication she was on 3 times a day we were again quite limited with being able to stay away from home this year.

Sumi, named after Kasumi Goto from Mass Effect, was a cat of contradictions. She was equally the most intelligent, loving, gentle, and beautiful cat I’ve ever met. She was also an evil genius, manipulative, spiteful, and utterly shouty. As a few examples:

• She would often immediately pull a disgusted face and lick herself clean of “urgh, human touch” immediately if you happened to stroke her whilst walking past, but yet when having cuddles she let herself be fully vulnerable and you could touch or brush her absolutely anywhere with full trust.
• Right up to her death, she would never sit on my lap post-kitten age, but would drag you around the house to where she wanted to have a cuddle, frequently shouting from incredibly awkward positions.
• She never, ever bit or scratched anyone (outside of accidentally when playing), but at the vets would make herself sound like she was possessed by demons to the point where they were all scared of her and she had a real rep.
• She (utterly unprovoked by us) taught herself to wee on toilets and would happily do this. But she would also come into my office and wee up a wall for attention if I was in meetings for too long.
• Her relationship with her sister was difficult and she was often a mean bully, but in contrast and surprisingly so to us, her patience and affection for my kid was incredibly sweet.

We went through a lot together, and we invested a lot in her which she absolutely repaid in the trust and affection she had for us (despite what it may sound like above!). Whether it was trying to coax food and water into her during the early TB days, taking out her stitches myself after the vets couldn’t do it due to risk of TB exposure from her wound, scratching away her discomfort from the lumps in her neck, through to all of the heart medication, I think she knew how good she had it.

It’s been a while but I still haven’t fully processed her not being around any more. I miss her a lot, particularly when I’m out and about in the garden.

Saying goodbye to my (UK) family home

Readers who know a bit about me will maybe know that I was born in the UK and lived here for a few years, then moved to live in Indonesia for 8 years. When my mum, brother, and I moved back for me to start secondary school, we returned to the same house in Kent that we’d left all that time before. I was there for school, I moved away for university, dropped out of university and moved back in with mum, and then she stayed there as my brother and I eventually moved into our own proper places.

I love the house and the garden, but I’ve always known they’re not practical for a single woman getting older, with access issues and a lot of ancient elements that would eventually need an expensive overhaul. The garden, possibly my favourite thing there, similarly was way too big and a ton of work as time would have gone on.

Mum had talked for a while about selling and moving somewhere nearer my brother and I, but this year it all finalised. I did have a last minute panic about whether I should buy it, but thankfully realised that this was the ultimate hoarding issue and I really needed to let go.

We went to say our goodbyes, I took a million photos, cried a lot, did some light vandalism to make my mark (I’d already defaced a different external wall with glow paint when I was about 13), planted some daffodils, as well as leaving a hidden note to future people in a hole in the ceiling. Mum’s happily settled elsewhere now and it’s great having her closer, but I do still miss the house a lot and think I always will.

Joining a gym for the first time… and enjoying it(?!)

After leaving work and wanting to invest a bit more of my new-found free time into my health, I found myself looking at gyms. As someone who suffers with post-exertional malaise (PEM) from ME/CFS, gyms, and exercise in general, were not my natural friends. However after a solo trip and making a lot of use of the gorgeous hotel swimming pool in Copenhagen (more below), I realised that I really wanted to get back to swimming properly. The public pools around here are offputtingly disgustingly dirty, so I thought I’d go for a visit to an actual gym and see how that compared.

The only time I’d ever stepped foot in one before was when I’d done tours as part of a project for building websites for David Lloyd and Chelsea FC’s gym offering much earlier in my career, so I was a total noob. On signing up I was adamant I’d just be there doing laps in the pool, but a couple of personal trainer inductions later I found myself really enjoying strength training, as well as some of the classes. Surprisingly, I allegedly have the core strength of a 20 year old, which was a nice boost to find out!

One of the other unexpected benefits was that it also gave me a change of scenery to work/study from; something that I’m trying to build into my schedule regularly to avoid some of the cabin fever that I had when working for myself before.

At the time of writing I had to abruptly stop going for a period because of miscarriage risk, and I did find I missed it. Since then I’ve gone back but haven’t returned to the gym or weights, focusing only on the pool at the moment, which I’m continuing to enjoy.

Japanese

It was interesting to see the patterns as things changed in my life this year. In last year’s review I described my year as “decidedly mediocre”, just about maintaining rather than making any gains. I said that “Since the start of the new year I’ve been more deliberate in trying to find even a small amount of time every day again”, and this lasted until the end of February 2025 before everything slipped back to a similar state again. Work pressures and everything else outside of it just meant that I didn’t have the energy or focus for the routines that work for me. I did the odd bit of reading, I had sessions with my teacher/friend most weekends (but not all), and did sporadic online reviews without any strong frequency.

On leaving work, this changed again. For the first time in literally years I was able to spend some good chunks of hours studying, wrapping myself up in physical textbooks, having flexibility to book chats with my teacher during the week, and being able to actually dedicate mental and physical energy to it. My textbook was in my bag most days, and it felt good.

The JLPT exams are sat twice a year and I toyed with the idea of booking in for the December one, but given we were facing down unknowns around IVF I decided against it. Given that I’ll now (hopefully) be unable to take the summer 26 one either, I’m getting twitchy about finally sitting N2. Similarly to how I felt before N3 it’s been years now without any external validation/confidence/time pressure motivation, but I’m trying to convince myself that doesn’t matter 😅

Because of a combination of work pressures, IVF planning, and Kasumi, I didn’t manage to get back to Japan this year, and sadly given pregnancy and hopefully a subsequent small person that will continue for most of if not all of 2026. I miss it a lot, but I’m already tentatively gathering plans for a point where I’ll be able to do my next trip.

Games & books

As usual everything is documented over on my Small Reviews site, even if it sometimes took me a while to update it. At the end of 2025 I added a new box to call out my yearly highlights, and in 2026 mine were:

• 🎮 Blue Prince - an absolutely incredible puzzle game that I’m so glad I finally picked up
• 📖 My full Murderbot series re-read after needing to cleanse my brain of the TV show, of which Network Effect was again my favourite.
• 📖 The Radiant Emperor Duology (non-sci-fi shocker)
• 📖 The Sun Chronicles

I spent a lot of time on kiddy games, with a notable shoutout to “Robot Game” (Astro Bot, PS5) which was also fantastic and inspired the kid’s birthday cake. There was sadly also a lot of dross (Rush, Paw Patrol, My Little Pony…), many of which I didn’t consider ‘finished’ enough to include in my full rating documentation.

Music

Music-wise the big highlight was making the call to book a weekend family camping ticket for Latitude. We’d tested the waters with a day trip in 2024 and found Latitude to be hugely family friendly and as easy as it probably gets, and with the kid growing more and more interested in music we thought we’d give it a shot.

The weekend was more rainy and a lot more muddy than I would have chosen, which did cause some logistical issues with getting into the campsite (Individually, thick mud, trailer + heavy load, and kids are fine. Together they are a bloody nightmare). But once in and having the tent set up we had a great time, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easily we fell into a routine of a daytime nap (for me too!) and staying up late for bands. I also very much enjoyed how far camping gear has come on since I last owned a tent and equipment – wow is everything a lot more comfy, lighter, and effective! Shout out to my Vango self-inflating sleeping mat, and the blackout tech on the inflatable tent in particular.

If it wasn’t for terrible pregnancy timing this year, I’d definitely have booked again for this year, and I know the kid will be sad not to go.

Another highlight for my soul but less for my old body was the Common Thread tour; a day-long multi-venue celebration of punk rock, emo, post-hardcore, and a lot of people over 40 saying “oof my knees/back/everything” after standing up all day. Outside of wishing I’d been sensible and got seated tickets it was brilliant, I got to see some old and new favourites, and coupled it with a rare night away.

Travel

Outside of Latitude for various reasons we did less travel this year. In between cat medication challenges, work issues for my husband making it harder to take time off, my work commitments, IVF and pregnancy uncertainty and more, it felt tricky to get away much. I do regret not doing more, but equally even in hindsight there’s not a lot I could have changed.

Outside of the below there was a lot of domestic stuff and trips into the bright lights of the big city, including popular visits to Frameless, the Battersea Childrens’ Zoo, and the usual Christmas trip.

40th birthday fun – London & Oslo

I made the most of using my 40th birthday as an excuse for fun, with both a night out in London with my friends, and a family trip to Oslo. London was fun, involving getting my friend Darren to voluntarily eat sushi for the first time ever, filthy Italian Bear hot chocolates, video game bars with terrible cocktails, and a trip to my favourite spa the next day. Oslo was a bit more refined but involved a lovely hotel, more sushi, kid’s first trip on a proper boat, and a day of skiing on my birthday.

TSPA EMEA Summit – Dublin

May brought my first ever trip to Ireland, visiting Dublin for a Trust and Safety conference. Although not on the same scale as the sister event in San Francisco it was great, and I also made the most of the small amount of free time I had around the event by seeing the Book of Kells, and eating excellent food (inc. incredible cheeseburger spring rolls) in Hang Dai.

A second try at Copenhagen

After my trip at the end of 2024 got cut very short with our cancer scare, I decided to make the most of not being employed by repeating my solo short break. Staying again in the amazing Manon Les Suites Guldsmeden and enjoying their pool as much as possible, I redid some of my previous plans (Studio Arhoj, actually made it to the Aire Spa this time), but jammed in a lot more. Highlights were the Soft Robots exhibition at the Copenhagen Contemporary, eating at Vaekst, Goldfinch, and Saji. The latter turned into a very fun night with my solo dining neighbour, and we went for some very cool cocktails together after a recommendation from one of the chef team.

Legoland!

I’m not sure who was more excited about this one, my kid or me. I’d been to Legoland as a teenager (thanks Mum), but getting to stay at one of the hotels was on my bucket list. The kid picked a pirate room (hotel carpets were all round excellent), we had a brilliant couple of days, and I went on my first non-kiddy rollercoaster for a very, very long time. It also reminded me that yes I do still get very motion sick, but totally worth it. We still talk about this trip, and I’d again very much go back at some point.

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In numbers

Inspired by Paul, here is a summary of various different things; 2025 in numbers.

• Blog posts – 3 – complete fail, but taking it as a small win on being +1 on 2024 😆
• Photos and videos – 9448 – this is the number of photos saved personally, rather than being published as my instagram has continued to be very locked down and sporadic.
• Countries travelled to – 3
• Gym visits – 12 – a decent start considering I joined end of October and then was forced to stop any exercise for a large chunk of the end of the year.
• Swarm check ins – 117 – a habit that I should probably break from a data perspective, but I still do this mostly for keeping track of things like restaurants and places I’ve been on holiday, for my own future reference (and blog post writing!)

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What does 2026 hold?

Writing this missing section at the beginning of February feels like a bit of a cheat, as the year is already running away. If the last couple of months have taught me anything, it’s to try to balance making the most of now, whilst also keeping a hold on hopes and fears for what comes next.

• I really hope that in the middle of the year another healthy small human will join us without further incident.
• I hope that beyond that I manage to find some novelty and variety, maintain some sanity, and appreciate and make memories going through all the topsy turvy stages that are newborn life (for the absolute last time).
• Until then, I hope that I can continue to find some enjoyable and meaningful work, and make enough to not have to stress about self-employed maternity and statutory allowances.
• Putting no pressure on myself, but I hope I’m in a place where I can manage to take the JLPT N2 in December if baby life allows for it.
• The end of the year will be too soon for me to run off on another solo aventure abroad, but I hope we can pluck up the courage to go somewhere as a 4.