cassie ink

As I wrote last week, I’m switching up how I number my week notes: I’m now using the year and week numbers, so this is week-notes/2026/W1. It will cover the last few days of 2025 and the first week of 2026. I’m late posting this (I backdated it), but I’m planning to get these up Sunday nights or Mondays.

Doing

I had some kind of stomach bug or food poisoning on New Year’s Eve, so nothing too eventful to mention there. I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have the goal of taking up journaling as regular practice, ideally before bed, for two reasons: it will hopefully replace my doomscrolling and help me process my day so I can sleep with a clear head. I’ve bought a Rhodia Webnotebook¹ and Pilot Kakuno in service of this. I was previously journaling in a Moleskine,² but I have just about filled that up, and a new year felt like a good opportunity to start fresh.

As a matter of business, I’m going to tweak how these week notes work starting with the next one (the first of 2026). Instead of incrementing numbers (this is week-notes/043/), I’m going to number them based on the week of the year (so next week will be week-notes/2026/W1/). This will affect no one but me. It does mean I need to be more regimented in doing these every week, but I’ve been consistent for the last few months and I enjoy the habit.

Doing

I don’t have a ton to say this week — it was mostly a slog to get to Friday. The last week before break is always brutal as a teacher, but now we have two weeks off that I sorely need. On Saturday, I went to see a local production of The Nutcracker; I don’t think ballet is my thing, but my friend’s daughter was in it and I think it meant a lot that I showed up. I also previously had only seen Barbie in the Nutcracker so perhaps I helped myself grow culturally, too.

Doing

I think I’m in the midst of a depression different from any I’ve experienced before. I have known for a while now that I experience seasonal depression, but it’s always been low-level and manageable; I’ve had depressive episodes in my life, but I’ve insisted that they have always been situational (i.e. I was in high school and depressed; I graduated and was no longer depressed). This one is a combination of the depression I know and something new: I’m steady in my moods and able to function on a day-to-day basis, but there’s this enduring ennui that I can’t shake. It’s all job-related — disappointment about not transferring has left me disengaged from the work I’m left with. My heart was ready for a change and, now that it’s off the table, my heart just isn’t in anything. I’m hoping our upcoming holiday break will let me recenter and recover, but the thing about depression is that it makes it hard to be optimistic that things will get better.