For most people, January is the pinnacle of ease: long days at the beach, lazy lunches, candlelit evenings, families gathered, boats launched, laughter echoing across campsites and verandas. The cultural script dictates the vision. This is what we strive for: images of light, love and gratitude; the month we exhale, marvel at what we’ve created and bask in its glory.
But for many, January brings something else entirely – a deep ache – part longing for what was, part dread of the year ahead.
Sadly, I know this terrain all too well. For three years, the month everyone else looked forward to with gusto filled me with dread. I’m a resilience researcher, so I’m well equipped to handle tough times, but I’m also a mother who lost her daughter and friends in a senseless car accident – and none of my work prepared me for how brutal the summers following their deaths would be. While people played happy families around me, my only ambition was to get through the days, sitting alone on the beach, willing the blasted holidays to end.
The contrast between the brightness and lightness of my old world, and this new darkness, was almost unbearable.
Maybe you can relate. Maybe you’re living through your own kind of holiday hell, wondering how life ended up here, never imagining it could look or feel like this.
Why January hurts
There are good reasons for this. In January, the routines that keep us upright – school drop-offs, commutes, meetings, even the minor irritations of daily life – fall away. Without them, we lose the busyness we use to hide from our grief. The distractions that can hold us together dissolve, and what’s left can be raw and confronting.
Add to that the contrast effect: when everyone else seems to be thriving, your loss feels sharper. When social media feeds are a blur of golden hours and gratitude posts, and it’s supposed to be the season of abundance, for those who’ve lost someone, something or simply the life they once knew, it can feel like we’ve been exiled. The gap between their joy and your sorrow yawns wide; the pressure to be cheerful is relentless. And, when you can’t meet it, shame creeps in.
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I often describe grief as the gap between where we find ourselves and where we thought we’d be, between our lived reality and our former hopes and plans. And my work has taught me that it’s not only death that creates that chasm; grief isn’t always accompanied by a coffin. Instead, over the years I’ve come to see how many “living losses” – divorce, infertility, illness of all kinds, redundancy, fractured families, empty nesting, ageing – burn just as deeply in the sun. When the world insists that you be carefree, these invisible losses feel even harder to bear.
The third summer
As the third summer after our daughter Abi’s death loomed, I remember thinking: I wish there was a topical antidepressant, something I could rub on along with my sunscreen to shield me from different harmful rays.
By then, I’d learnt to stay away from Instagram, knowing the images of everyone else’s summers would cut deep. I didn’t need to see their children leaping from wharves, the wide smiles gathered around long lunch tables, the enviable togetherness of families intact. Even the weather seemed to mock me – bright, loud, optimistic, insistent – making me crave the quiet, grey corners of the year.
Other kinds of Januarys
Through my work, I’ve been privy to countless confessions of January struggles. There was the woman – let’s call her Jenni – who, recently divorced, described how “spare” she felt in the weeks when her ex had the kids, out of place among what she called “whole families” at the beach, forcing herself to stay at barbecues when all she wanted to do was flee back to the city. “But who spends summer in the city? That just smacked of failure,” she admitted. Some of the mums she’d spent summers with at the beach now seemed to give her a wide-berth. “As if separation might somehow be contagious,” she scoffed.
Then there was a man who’d been made redundant in September, making the new year ahead loom as large as the open sea. He told me he’d underestimated how much purpose and identity he’d gleaned from work, the small talk in the office, the structure of the day, even the commute. It wasn’t just the salary he missed, but the sense of belonging, of being useful, of mattering to someone beyond the prison of his own four walls. Without that, the days blurred into one another. Everyone else seemed to be planning holidays and making constructive plans, while he was quietly panicking about how to pay the mortgage and the slow jobs market.
The truth is, grief wears many faces in January. It’s not only death that hollows out the month. It hits us in so many ways: couples staring down another year of childlessness when everyone else’s children seem to be sprouting like weeds; those trying to muster hope for the next round of IVF; worry about the absence of a partner in your mid-thirties; the quiet dread of returning to chemo; the first summer of an empty nest or the first since a separation, redundancy, diagnosis or move that’s left you feeling untethered. These are the lived realities missing from our feeds but abundantly present in our beach houses, suburbs, tennis courts and golf courses, at family gatherings and barbecues. For every “perfect summer”, there’s someone just trying to make it through – longing for the comfort of routine, then hating themselves for wishing time away.
What helped me
One particularly bleak January, I found myself staring at a wall calendar, terrified by the blank months ahead. So I made myself fill it with one good thing per month. A weekend walk somewhere wild, dinner with friends, the writers’ festival I love, a couple of live music events, some coveted catch-ups with our boys. Seeing those plans written down helped more than I’d expected; the year no longer looked endless and grey but gently speckled with hope.
That’s how my Things to Look Forward To calendar began. Last year, when I shared the idea online, people told me they loved it too. Apparently, we’d all been craving a way to begin the year that didn’t rely on impossible resolutions, but rather on small, achievable glimmers of hope.
Now, every January, I have two wall calendars: one for work and another for life. Using coloured pens, I plot the things that sustain me. This isn’t about ignoring or diminishing the hard stuff; it’s about deliberately creating moments that shore you up. The calendar becomes a quiet promise that there will be things to look forward to, however small.
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Hope is a powerful thing. It helps us imagine a future that’s worth moving towards, even when the present feels unbearably difficult. One of the simplest ways to nurture it is to plan for it – to create small stepping stones of connection and comfort: sharing food with people you love, celebrating milestones, heading outdoors, or returning to places that nurture you.
A different kind of January
Maybe the real work of January isn’t chasing perfection but acknowledging imperfection. I’ve found it helpful to name what’s hard to myself and, because I’m a writer, on paper. Naming loss brings it into the light, transforming that vague, inexplicable, unacknowledged heaviness into something you can own. Instead of thinking “I hate summer”, I’d tell myself, “January is tough because it magnifies what’s missing”. Somehow, that softens the sting.
For those whose lives have been upended by loss, change or uncertainty, the challenge isn’t to make this month joyful, but to make it bearable.
If we can acknowledge what is, stop comparing our lives to the curated versions around us, and replace the pursuit of happiness with the act of putting concrete plans in place, the year starts to feel more hopeful, the grief we carry becomes that bit more bearable. It might not sound much, but there’s something liberating about accepting the painful, envious truth, lowering the punishing bar of ambition and perfection, and remembering that everyone struggles and suffers at times. This, sadly, is our time, but we are not alone.
Dr Lucy Hone’s new book, How Will I Ever Get Through This? (Allen & Unwin), is available in February.
