Mid Year Vibe Check: How’s Your Year Going?
I have never been a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions. From a young age, I understood the reality that there are the plans we make, and then there the events that life sends us that derail those plans. My approach to building a direction for my life has been more about picking a “vibe” or a “theme” for a year and focusing in on that as the filter for my decisions and choices for that year. The theme has varied a lot, but it has also been a reliable and adjustable tool for setting my intensions and following them or even changing them when I have to adjust on the fly because “life happened”. About halfway through one year, I usually begin thinking about the theme for the next year, deciding where I want to put my focus and my energy as life evolves. The theme of one year often feeds the theme of the next. Sometimes, life just hands me the next theme from out of nowhere.
I started this practice of setting a vibe in 2010, when the Great Recession had torn through my life and upended most of it. My main theme for that year became “survival”. 2011 was the year of “reinvention”. 2012 became all about “stability”. 2013 was meant to be the year of “rest” but instead became the year of “connection”, as people from my past started to drift back in and new people showed up to challenge and support me. My planned vibe for 2020 was “adventure”. Instead, a devastating loss barely two weeks into the year pushed the theme into “grief”, and that theme just kept building as more and more of life went off a cliff.
The vibe is not about a specific set of goals or plans. It is just the filter that I put on my time and my decisions for the next 12 months. It gives me a focus, a target to always keep in mind as I am making choices, both big and small. My theme for 2024 was “finances”, which is broad and vague, but it put the spotlight on how I spent, saved, invested, and prioritized. When I made a choice, it was always with the focus of using my money to take care of my current and future self to the best of my ability. Part of that plan was saving for a bucket-list trip that was meant to support the theme for 2025, which was supposed to be “adventure”, again. Instead, halfway through 2024, life brought me an injury, an unexpected diagnosis, and the news that two people I love have cancer. I adjusted the theme of 2025 to be all about “healing”, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
At the mid-way point of 2025, I am looking ahead to 2026, assessing where my energy and focus want to be as the rest of this year plays out. Some interesting patterns have started to emerge as my friends, and I sink deeper into Middle Age and all that comes with this phase of life. A lot of healing has happened in 2025, but I have also learned that some things cannot heal. We just have to accept them as part of our new normal and get on with living with them. Some healing is temporary and just puts you in a holding pattern that you make your peace with until you are forced to decide whether you want to do the work to heal again.
The word that comes to mind for 2026 is “adaptation”. Economies change. People get sick. Politicians get elected. Hurricanes come. Student loan repayment plans disappear. Conflicts become wars. Art gets made. Babies are born. Cats arrive through the distribution system. Lotteries are won. Flowers bloom. Medicine cures. Friends become family. Ice cream gets more expensive. 2026 may be a feast year or a famine year. I may be alive at the end of it, or not. I may lose someone else that I love, or I may meet the next truly great friend. That bucket list trip may finally happen, or I may spend the entire year within a 40-mile radius of my front door. I may finally get my bathroom remodeled, or I may still be staring at the same ugly 1970s tile on January 31st.
Wherever your vibe is on the spectrum of optimism to pessimism, cynicism to idealism, denial to acceptance, health to illness, or turmoil to peace, I would encourage you to stop and check in with yourself. The past six months can often be a good gauge of what isn’t right in life and the issues that will drive the next six months. Sometimes, we need to look at the very recent past to figure out the very near future. The long lens has its place. But a short lens is sometimes more enlightening.
Written by Deanna Diamond, LPC
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