Jan 20, 2026 6 min read

january update

Hello 2026!

I'll be honest, my year has not started brilliantly. But I'm hoping this just means 2026 will be a rags to riches plotline!

Here are my blog goals for 2026

make as much as I consume
make things that make me cringe (I firmly believe that cringe people move the world, which sucks for the average cringe-averse joe)
love things loudly (and be okay if they are imperfect and my opinion changes!)
own and use this space more regularly (is the blog equivalent of 'dance like nobody's watching' to 'write like everyone's reading'?)
read 52 books (i'll let this one go if I can also write two chapters of my thesis)
come up with a better title format than 'monthly update'

2025 Highlights

Wait - what happened to Inktober 2024?

So my last post was in October 2024 - setting out on a month of daily illustration as part of the Inktober challenge. But a few days after I published it, I found out I was pregnant! Flash forward 14 months later and I now have a 7 month old in tow. I did not finish Inktober, and took an unintended hiatus from anything here for the whole of 2025. But I think she's a pretty great reason for it all.

IndyIndigo Graphic Scribe 😎

Another thing I grew in 2025 was my freelance graphic scribing work. For various maternity leave reasons, I needed to work hours on my business and so the push of having a baby to push out got me motivated to spend more time doing this thing I love doing. I did a bunch of gigs in the first half of 2025, and one in the second half of 2025. I am hoping to line up some more this year as well and continue to grow my skills and practice in this space! Here's the most recent scribe I did in December, for the Australian Academy of Science.

Some thoughts

Addicted to delight?

I’ve been toying with the idea of deleting Instagram for this year. I say toying because actually I said I was going to and then January first came around and I really really really didn’t want to and chickened out.

So these first weeks of the year I've been grappling with - why is that? Why don’t I want to give up this thing that is relatively inconsequential to my world? What exactly about this extremely addicting app is my crack?

I’d thought about how to cover the big things that I’ll miss - news updates I can get from newspapers and my friends I connect with through messages more these days anyway. I also tried to compromise with myself as well, saying "Well I'll delete it for a year, but I'll just log in once a month to see how these people I follow are!"

But what I think what I’m actually afraid of losing are these small moments of delight that I get from social media. Nestled amongst breaking news and friends' announcements, there are just these insightful, novel and usually funny little anecdotes from people you would have never come across or never known otherwise. It’s those little stories about someone's school teacher's odd life or a hack about how to get blueberry stains out of baby clothes. I love them. I looooveee them. They bring me such little moments of joy and whimsy and a sense of connection to the wider humanity.

The thing is, while I love them in the moment I can barely remember them now. And cumulatively, they are wrecking the attention and focus I need if I am going to achieve the goals I've set out for 2026 with Little Miss Chief in tow. So the past few weeks I've been screenshotting the things I'm going to miss when I do (do I? really?) finally (I think, at least temporarily) say goodbye (for now! More like see ya later!) to Instagram. Here they are:

Little internet delights this month: A dozen croissants, vaccuum sealed; a homemade bookshelf; a wife's case for her husband to sit-to-pee, presented as a zine; chess meets tic tac toe; a tofu simile that made me smile; woo house cleaning hacks; a fascinating 9-part thread on synthetic cellulose fibres; a mind-blowing pun revelation; and one for the Swifties.

Of course, I'm not really giving up delight. But I do believe those delightful moments are the hardest thing to face losing - and also the reason the apps have me (and frankly most of us) in their grip. I have to trust that by making the space in my attention, it will fill up with things both delightful and meaningful while not stealing my attentiona and focus capacity. And hopefully I'll find myself starting conversations with "I saw a reel about..."

But watch this space.

Books

In 2025 I managed to read 25 books, a good chunk of them Mum-books. For simplicity sake, these were my favourites from that genre!

A notable dislike in 2025 was 'The Women' by Kristin Hannah. So well reviewed, but I thought it was just terrible. Not that I love starting the year on a negative note, but in honour of my rags-to-riches trajectory - here is my Goodreads review of that book.

I had such high hopes for this book but it was… so bad? An admirable attempt, an important story, but so clumsily done and so poorly written and edited. The dialogue was shocking and the characters underdeveloped — Barb (a black woman from the south in the 1960s) read the same as Frankie (a rich white girl from California) except with the addition of an occasion “girlfriend” tacked on to the end of her sentences. There was so much telling not showing, extremely predictable character arcs, and a weird meandering plot that was poorly paced and didn’t really seem to know what it was trying to achieve.

Overall this book could have been really special, but it was so undergraduate in its execution. It gets two stars for attempting the topic (a gold star for trying) but I think this book could have done with about ten more rounds of revision and a much sharper writer at the helm. So disappointing!

I'm two books down for the year right now and currently reading 'We Are The Stars' by Gina Chick and 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt. Both are wonderful so far.

That's it. Time to go pickup the little one. I'll write again soon, and hopefully I'll be able to report that I've definitely indefinitely deleted Instagram (just for a bit).

Indy