The other day, I walked 10 km at the Lausanne Marathon in very annoying rain, and I had a blast. My throat has had some complaints since, but I would do it again.
I walked with a friend, and, the way Brazilians do, we had a conversa vai e vem, a back-and-forth conversation about everything. At one point, she said something along the lines of wanting to live in the present instead of worrying about the future.
I get it. There is enough to worry about without borrowing trouble from tomorrow.
But I have never been very good at leaving the future alone. I like imagining what might exist a year from now that does not exist today. Sometimes that turns into a plan, sometimes the plan falls apart, and occasionally something I had not planned for turns out to be the thing worth having.
So I started wondering what I would like to be true by the end of 2027.
Somewhere right now, a parent is awake at two in the morning. She is doing everything right, and she cannot work out why she no longer recognises herself.
She is who I write for. When I think about the work I want to have done by the end of next year, I think about her.
Here are three things I hope will be true.
I hope she finds the words sooner.
I want fewer parents to spend years wondering what is wrong with them before discovering the idea of loss of felt competence. You can know how to care for your child and still feel as though you have lost the ability to trust yourself. When the people, places, and expectations that once helped you understand who you were change, the old ways of measuring yourself can stop making sense.
I want someone to come across my work and think, Oh. There is a name for this. I am not the only one.
I will look for those messages, the ones that say some version of: I finally have a word for this. I cannot count the people who read something and never tell me, but I can pay attention to the ones who do.
I hope the words travel without me.
I have been developing ideas around identity migration and the inherited scorecard, the expectations we carry about what makes us successful, competent, or good enough. I want these ideas to become useful to people beyond the readers who find my website.
I would love to discover someone using one of these concepts in a conversation, an article, a classroom, or a place I have never been. I want the ideas to belong to the people who find them useful, not just to the person who first put them into words.
I will finish the eight glossary entries still waiting to be written. Then I will keep an eye out for the ideas appearing somewhere I did not put them.
I hope Marked stays in public.
My novel is being built in public, including the research, the questions, and the decisions that shape its world. I want to keep sharing that process instead of disappearing until I have a finished book to show for it.
The plan is to publish one chapter a month, with research posts in between, and if the six-chapter buffer I am working toward holds, that means twelve new chapters in 2027.
I also want to credit the people whose knowledge helps shape the book, with their permission. The world of Marked should be better because I let other people teach me things I did not know.
I cannot promise that every part of this plan will work. I can promise to return to these three hopes at the end of December 2027 and tell you what happened: which ones came true, which ones did not, and what I learned along the way.
That is the difference between a prediction and a hope, at least for me. I do not have to know what will happen to decide what is worth working toward.
My friend may be right about living in the present. I can enjoy a walk in the rain without needing it to lead anywhere, and still want something from the future.
What do you hope is true for you by the end of 2027? Not everything you want to accomplish. Just one thing you would love to be able to look back on and say, Yes. That happened.
I would love to hear yours in the comments below. 💛
Jessica Gabrielzyk
