It is only September, but I am already declaring 2026 to be an annus horribilis. As I rang in the new year in January, I predicted it would be a challenging one for me, having started it with no fixed abode, no fulltime employment and a bad case of reverse culture shock after a wonderful year in sunny Greece. I felt as though I were at the bottom of a pit and knew—from experience acquired during my chaotic twenties—that clambering up the sides to stability would require an exacting amount of patience and graft.
So, I was prepared for a few bad months. I was prepared for months in which I would question every life choice I had ever made, months that would be nothing but freelance writing shifts and back-to-back viewings of intolerable flats. I was prepared for the kind of ordinary, soul-destroying pain that comes with taking risks in your personal life and career, for the friction from moving between countries, cities and homes.
But I was not prepared for the things that happened in 2026. I was not prepared to confront the devastating realities of illness and death and deep sorrow affecting the people I love. I was not prepared to see my support system decimated by random and terrible events—friends and relatives seemingly struck one after another by financial crises, health troubles, shock bereavements and job losses. This year, life has grabbed me with both hands around the throat and shaken me until I can no longer see up from down.
The idea of an annus horribilis is a strangely comforting one. Humans have long held superstitious beliefs about terrible events—the idea, for instance, that bad things come in specific frequencies, such as threes, has persisted across religions and cultures since the Ancient Greeks. Logically, I know that I do not believe in this theory, that there is no wheel of fortune turning in the background in my life and that the ebb and flow of good and bad is random and coincidental. I also know that much of what makes a year feel like an annus horribilis is the cognitive distortion caused by the stress of the first bad event, and that human brains (particularly, dare I say, those with OCD) have a strong tendency to look for patterns and meaning in randomness.
But I find these truths difficult to accept. I am an introspective self-improvement addict and hunt for lessons in my negative experiences like a pig snuffling through shit for truffles. So here I am, raging against my inability to find clarity in the mess of the year. Flashes of revelation—for example, that spending time with the people I love should be my number one priority—quickly give way to a fog of confusion. However furiously it tries, even my obsessive brain cannot make sense of events so cruel and unjust that they are nonsensical.
I know that I should stop looking for answers and instead search for glints of joy in the darkness. But I am in no mood for logic or common sense, for keeping a sense of proportion, for pursuing post-traumatic growth. Instead, like centuries’ worth of people before me, I am pinning my desperate hopes on the turn of the annum.
“We’ve just got to get to the end of this year,” one of my dearest friends said to me at the end of a particularly difficult day. “We’ve just got to get to the end of this year,” I repeated back to her, like an incantation. I know that in wishing for 2027 we are being illogical. But we’re also being completely and utterly human.
