My ultimate aspiration—and one that I will pursue endlessly and ruthlessly—is to become a writer who earns enough money from writing to cover a comfortable lifestyle. I’m giving myself as much time as possible, as I know it’s not something I’ll achieve within the next few years.

Following Annie Dillard’s wisdom, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” I had spent the whole year establishing and formalizing a set of non-negotiables that would underpin my daily life. These practices, when I observed them consistently, filled me with contentment and magic, and a feeling of being enough. They were the culmination of all the work I’d done on myself — all the self-awareness and self-knowledge I gathered — in the past five years.