Change your life; or, how to set realistic end-of-year goals

Page from a notebook titled 'top priorities'. 1) rest, eat well, move. 2) learn :) 3) don't abandon creativity. There's a tick next to 'learn :)' but wiggly lines next to the other two points, showing they were only partially achieved.
~ emilyholyoake

I keep trying to write something to wrap up this year. I went into 2025 with a lot of plans – I did a few goal-setting sessions and just kept writing the phrase ‘change your life’. Which, as was kindly pointed out by people wiser than me, was a ridiculous goal.

I didn’t know who I’d be by the end of this year, but I intended to be different.

I like change, and fresh starts, and learning. I need to see myself advancing; I need to prove to myself (and anyone watching) that I can succeed. I’d started to feel a dull despair at where I was as a playwright, as a theatre-maker. I wrote some of my best scripts in the last couple of years, but I’m terrible at the work of pushing a play into existence, and I’d built up a huge resentment that it couldn’t just happen. Didn’t people say my writing was good? If that was true, why wasn’t that enough?

And did I even love theatre anymore, if it didn’t love me? I’d struggle to tell you the last play I went to see that I wasn’t creatively involved with. If you’re an emerging theatre-maker, everyone will tell you that you must see plays, you must read plays, you cannot make theatre if you don’t experience theatre, and it’s fucking annoying because it’s completely true, and also the last thing you want to do when you feel like you’re failing.

And of course, theatre loves no one; you have to love it unrequitedly and unconditionally, and it’s worth it because it’s magic. Until it isn’t magic.

You know what’s magic? Learning that your brain can do something else, and that your heart can love it. The magic of my year has been learning to code, getting good enough at it to properly enjoy it, and finding a job doing it. I’ve got a long way to go and so much to learn, and it’s scary to be starting fresh all over again, but I much prefer a beginning to an ending.

I keep trying to convince everyone that I haven’t stopped being a playwright, mostly because it makes my throat hurt and my eyes burn to think about stopping. (And anyway, it might not even possible to not be a playwright when I have written plays, staged plays, shared plays – I’m part of the ephemera of theatre forever; I’m immortal now, babydolls, etc etc.) I am paused, not stopped. I think.

Theatre is magic. I want it to be magical for me again, and I think the only way to get that back is to loosen my grip on what I thought it owed me.

I ended 2024 as a playwright and theatre-maker, an arts-admin-comms-multi-hyphenate. I’m ending 2025 as a web developer. (I assumed I would now have a job that I wouldn’t have to explain to people, but turns out no one knows what a web developer does any more than they knew what a playwright does, which is sort of hilarious.)  

Except that I’ve spent the last few weeks of the year writing – something? A story. A game? I’m excited about it! But yeah. No. No, it’s not a play.

Anyway, the goal for 2026 is ‘change your life’, because I’m not bloody finished and I never will be, and I’ve done it once so I’ll damn well do it again. Change your life!! Try and stop me!!