The Spiral Up: What 2026 Taught Me About Perseverance
If you’ve ever watched water swirl down a drain, you know how a spiral works. It starts slow and wide, and then everything speeds up as it narrows. Some years feel exactly like that. They don’t hit you with one big disaster. They start with a few small pressures, and before you know it, everything is pulling you down at once.
This year was that kind of year for me. This is the story of how I spiralled, what I learned at the bottom, and how I slowly found my way back up.
How a spiral starts
It began with things that sound manageable on paper. Work was stressing me out. My visa was up for renewal. I was moving to a new city, Toronto, and I needed to find an apartment. Any one of those on its own, I could have handled. But they didn’t come one at a time. They came together, and each one made the others heavier.
Psychologists noticed this pattern a long time ago. In 1967, two psychiatrists, Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe, made a list of common life events and scored each one by how much stress it causes. Moving house is on that list. So are changes at work and changes in your finances. Their big idea was simple: stress adds up. It’s rarely one event that breaks a person. It’s the pile.
Then my pile got heavier. At the very last minute, the apartment I had lined up fell through. I was in a brand new city with nowhere to live, and for a while I was homeless. People call that kind of thing “temporary,” but when you’re inside it, nobody can tell you how long temporary will last. Money was tight, and I had no backup plan, so the only thing left to do was ride it out. There’s no prettier way to say it: it was a shitty year.
Living inside the unknown
What made it so hard wasn’t only what was happening. It was everything I didn’t know. Would my visa come through? Where would I sleep next week? Would my savings last? Every question was open, and none of them came with an answer date.
I’ve always hated uncertainty, and it turns out that’s something psychologists actually study. They call it intolerance of uncertainty. For some of us, simply not knowing what’s coming feels like a threat in itself, and it’s closely tied to anxiety. That explained a lot, because I had the worst anxiety of my life this year. My mind kept trying to solve a future that hadn’t happened yet.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I think about that a lot now. In the middle of this year, nothing made sense, and nothing could, because I was living it forwards. The understanding only came later, looking back. Maybe that’s the truth about being in a spiral: you can’t see its shape while you’re inside it.
Finding out who your people are
Hard times have a way of showing you who’s really there. Some friends I thought I could rely on simply disappeared when I needed them. There was no fight and no falling out. They just weren’t around anymore.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote about exactly this. He said some friendships are built on usefulness, and some on fun, and those tend to fade as soon as circumstances change. The rarest kind is built on genuinely caring about the other person for who they are, and that kind lasts. This year sorted my friendships into those groups faster than I ever wanted it to.
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But the friends who stayed made all the difference, and science backs that up too. In 1985, psychologists found that support from other people matters most when we’re under the most stress. It works like a cushion. My friends couldn’t find me an apartment or speed up my visa, but they made the weight feel lighter because I wasn’t carrying it alone. I’m so grateful to them, and I know I can never repay them.
The Spiral Up
The turn didn’t come with a big dramatic moment. Things just slowly got less bad. I found a place, and the landlord, after hearing what I’d been through, chose to understand instead of seeing a risk. He rented his unit to me when he didn’t have to. A little while later, my visa was approved. For the first time in months, I could breathe.
When people ask how I got through it, the only real answer I have is perseverance. Not the inspiring kind from movies, but the quiet, stubborn kind, where you get up tired and scared and get through the day anyway, then do it again tomorrow. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that the obstacle in front of us can become the path itself. I didn’t feel very philosophical at the time, but looking back, he was right. The only way out was through.
A spiral that climbs
So, did I grow this year? Maybe. Am I optimistic about the future? Maybe. Does anxiety still cripple me? Absolutely. But I’m learning how to cope with it in healthier ways.
I used to think that answer meant I hadn’t really recovered. Then I came across the work of Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, who coined the term post-traumatic growth. They found that growth and pain often live side by side. You can come out of something changed for the better and still be hurting from it. Growth doesn’t erase the hard parts. It gets built out of the struggle with them.
This is where the spiral comes back in. A snail shell grows in a spiral, adding a new, bigger chamber each time it outgrows the last one. It never moves back into the old room, but every new chamber is built around the ones before it. I think healing works the same way. We keep circling back to the same fears and wounds, but each time from a slightly different place. It feels like going in circles, but we’re actually climbing.
And what makes the climb possible, at least for me, is love. You heal around love and trust. You heal in the presence of love. Unconditional acceptance changes lives. Because I know how lonely it feels to wonder where you stand with someone, I’ve decided to love people the same way. If you’re in my life, you will never have to guess your place in it.
Giving it hell back
Albert Camus wrote about Sisyphus, the man from Greek myth who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it roll back down every time. You’d expect that to be the saddest story ever told, but Camus ended it with a surprise: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” His point was that we don’t get to choose the boulder, but we do get to choose how we push it. Refusing to give up is its own kind of victory.
That’s how I see it now. Life sucks sometimes, and it will knock you flat without warning. When it does, give it hell back. Say hell yes to the things that scare you. Remember that you will bounce back. It’s basic physics: Newton’s third law says every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and a ball only bounces because the ground pushes back when it hits. So take the risk, have faith in yourself, and take it one step at a time. Reach out to people you trust, because either you’ll see their true colours or they’ll become the iron pillars of your life. And never take for granted the people who stick by you.
You only live once. Life is going to knock you down whether you play it safe or not, so you might as well swing back.
It was a shitty year. I’m still here. And I’m giving it hell back.
