Happy belated New Year! We’re nearly two weeks into 2026 and I’m only just getting around to picking up my blog again.
Over the past few weeks, people, myself included, have been reflecting on what 2025 was for them, and on what may lie ahead for 2026. I figured why not be publicly reflective, insofar as this blog is public. (I daresay that the volume of readership of my blog posts barely counts as public, but I digress.)
Let’s begin with the title of said blog post. This comes following a discussion I had with my wife over the course of the past few weeks. I can’t recall exactly when we had this discussion, but I think it may have in fact been on New Year’s Day. The common turn of phrase that people bandy about is “new year, new me”. This presupposes that the old you wasn’t good enough, wasn’t worthy of better, was broken or defective in some way. I disagree wholeheartedly. I used to have the same mentality. It’s taken me a long time to get here, but I’ve broken away from it. I now see that the me I am today is the same me I was yesterday, the same me I was last year, the same me I was 5 years ago. Yes, I’ve grown. I’ve evolved. I’ve learned. I’ve matured. But it’s still the same old me.
It’s okay to be evolving. Anyone who is expecting themselves (or others) to be perfect is fooling themselves into thinking that is something achievable. Unless we’ve reached the Singularity and AI has become sentient and is reading this blog (if so, I welcome you my AI Overlords!), we are all human – we grow, we learn, we make mistakes, we continue to grow and learn. The biggest challenge is that last step where, often, we forget to continue to learn from our mistakes and grow. And then we just stay a bit stagnant and accept that this is our reality, our life.
Rather than trying to reinvent myself and creating a “New Chris”, I prefer to look at my life as a series of system updates. I went through Chris 1.0 to 8.0; I was stuck on Chris ME for a good while – seemed to keep getting stuck when I would try to upgrade and but would always need to return to the previous version; I survived through Chris XP (thankfully that iteration was short-lived). Now I’m running on Chris 10.7. I’m going with small, phased upgrades instead of rewriting the entire system from scratch.
Through each of the events that I experience, I learn. I am trying to be more mindful and cognizant of what happens in my life so that I can better understand how this machine that is Chris operates. Why did I respond or react the way I did when X happened? What triggered me to take a particular action? What did I think when I was faced with that specific scenario? The more introspective I become, the better I can understand how I react. I am trying to learn, to adapt, to grow. But I also know that I’m not broken. I am perfect, exactly how I am now, because how I am now is me.
Would I react the same way today, say the same things, or do the same actions if I was presented a situation that I encountered in my past? Probably not. It’s not to say that I didn’t act properly back then, it just means that I did the best I could, in that moment, with the knowledge, information and abilities I had. I can’t criticize myself for not doing something the same way then as I would today.
Let’s use a concrete example. Back in the late 90’s, Isabelle and I were coworkers, but there were inklings of maybe something more than friendship could come of it. To make a long story short, when confronted with the situation of having a coworker that I liked, and who liked me, and could lead to a relationship, I ran away. Whatever little flicker of flames were starting to take root were blown out. Poof. While we reconnected a decade or so later and (obviously) things went differently that time as we’ve been married for coming up on 15 years, how things went were the best thing that could have happened.
If I were to be put in that same scenario today would I act the same way? Hell no! I was a stupid, stupid young man who was afraid that things might not work out and it would make work awkward. (yes, that was legitimately my thought process at the time.) But I can’t fault myself for thinking and acting that way then. I didn’t have the emotional or intellectual maturity to see the possibility of it not go horribly wrong. And neither Isabelle nor myself were the same people when we reconnected in 2008. We had both experienced more things, we had grown, we had learned. Fate kept us on the same path, we just had to find the right time. Had I not lived through my diabetic odyssey, I probably would still not have had the courage to take the leap of faith and ask her out.
This wasn’t where I was intending to go with today’s blog post. I had anticipated it being more of a “how did 2025 go?” kind of reflection, but apparently this is what needed to emerge. I’ll just take the opportunity to write another blog post as a sort of catch-up since the last time we spoke.
Getting off of my soapbox, I hope that you’ll all take time to reflect on your journeys and your own growth and progress through the years. Are you still the same person that you were 5 years ago? 10 years ago? I daresay you’re not, even if you don’t necessarily see the changes yourself. Sometimes we’re just too close to it. It’s like the saying goes – you can’t see the forest for the trees. But if you take some time to step back, and be a bit more introspective, I am sure that you’ll find glimmers of growth and development as well.
Musings of A Boxhead 