Regeneration

What Doctor Who, Semisonic and a shiny new bullet journal taught me about change without erasure

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life - from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

There is a pristine lilac Leuchtturm1917 in front of me as I write this. It sits on my desk beside the current turquoise one, slightly scuffed from six months of being acarried everywhere.

I’m excited to start my new journal, honestly one of my favourite things to do and I’m so happy I get to do it twice a year! It is shiny and full of possibility with pages untouched by badly drawn diagrams, abandoned trackers or notes written in a hurry that later turn out to be completely indecipherable.

I have already stroked the cover several times.

Henry, self-appointed supervisor of all activities that involve me (even for tasks with zero dogs required), has flopped across my feet with the contented sigh of a hound who knows we are not going anywhere for a while.

So I start to migrate journals, copying across the things that still matter and setting up the new spreads for the second half of the year. It’s a ritual, because to move into a new journal you first have to sit with the old one… and reading six months of your own handwriting can be a very tender thing indeed.

Moving in halfway through the year feels very different from doing it in January, which arrives full of declarations, new year, new habits, new goals, new you. July arrives carrying evidence. By now I know what this year has actually asked of me, which plans survived contact with reality and which stopped mattering. January lets us imagine, July lets us adjust… and that’s why one particular idea has started to make me feel a little uneasy.

A clean slate undermines acceptance

There is something undeniably seductive about a clean slate. No clutter, no mistakes, no awkward earlier attempts,.. just a spotless surface on which we will apparently become calm and organised and mysteriously able to drink two litres of water a day (seriously, why out of all habits is this the one I struggle with the most?!?).

The trouble is that a completely clean slate asks us to leave too much behind. It turns renewal into rejection. It hints that the woman who struggled and changed her mind and lost momentum and never did colour in that habit tracker properly is somebody to be wiped away before she is allowed to proceed. There is a violence in that, in treating your own recent self as a draft to be deleted.

I want to learn from the first half of my year rather than delete it. There are things I hoped to do and have not done. There are ideas that worked beautifully right up until they did not. There are tasks that migrated from page to page with the determination of a bureaucratic ghost. There are also conversations I want to keep, ideas that arrived out of nowhere, things I never planned that turned out to matter, tiny moments of joy that would have vanished completely if I had not stopped to write them down. The crossed out tasks are part of the story. So are the blank pages. So are the plans I outgrew. A new journal can simply say that the story is ready to change form.

I do not need a new me

I started this essay with the thought that moving to a new notebook was like a regeneration, but that means becoming somebody new, and the more I think about where I am now… well, somebody new is not what I am after.

The Doctor really does change with regeneration, not just the face. Their whole way of being in the world changes too, the tastes and the temper, a different personality emerging from the golden light each time. What doesn’t change is the entity underneath with all of the memories. The same deeper self stepping through every door, a new manner laid over a constant core.

So for me the cover changes, and some spreads change. The way I show up on these pages will be slightly different, my core values worn smoother and a touch clearer than they were. The outside can go on evolving to fit the self underneath who has been here the whole time, finally legible and perhaps able to stop performing.

David Tennant’s tenth Doctor, at the very end of his time, says that he does not want to go. He knows the core of him will carry on into whoever comes next, and still he grieves the particular man he has been, loving exactly who he is and wishing he could stay a while longer. I think about that now because somehow I have arrived at my own version of it. I like this one. I do not want to go.

I am still cross with myself often enough, mind. I wince at the weirdnesses and the creativity with which I can get in my own way. But they came in the same box as everything I love about being this person, and I guess they’ve survived every version of me so far, which is how I know they are core. They are mine. Perhaps perimenopause is dialling up traits that were quieter or less impactful before, but that is a topic for another day.

The joy and play live in that same box. There will be stickers in the new book, and colour and at least one doodle that bears little resemblance to the thing it was meant to be. Some spreads will turn out to be the journalling equivalent of celery worn on a lapel, beloved of the Fifth Doctor and nobody else. A journal that records only duty is little more than a manager issuing a disappointing performance review every Sunday night. The colours are my proof that I am savouring my life rather than only trying to manage it.

What the journal became

When I started bullet journalling I thought it was a system for getting organised, somewhere to park the work and the appointments and the great churning mass of stuff I was trying to hold in my head. Over the years it became so much more. I let the rest of my life onto the page, the learning and the questions and the books I meant to read and the difficult things I needed to understand… it stopped being a planner and became a laboratory for ikigai.

There was an earlier incarnation though, one I do not much care to count. For years my notebooks were all about work. Beautifully colour-coded to-do lists, but very little mind mapping and not one honest feeling anywhere on the page, as though work was the only part of me worth recording. Every Doctor keeps one face out of the official line-up, the incarnation who does not quite get to wear the name. That all-business woman is mine, the War Doctor of my stationery drawer, and I left her out of the story for the longest time.

But I remember her now. I remember all of them. If you have followed along for a while you have watched the later versions arrive in real time. The practice found its feet as wellbeing and organisation in Bullet Journal and Take Control of Your Life. It learned to sit with the hard and empty stretches in Navigating Emptiness. It turned into a life manual full of quests and small wins in Achievement Unlocked. It argued for keeping a whole life together in one thinking space in One Journal to Rule Them All. In all my essays I think of at least one bullet journal prompt or practice that relates to the topic I am exploring, it is an integral part of my life.

Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor says a line as he goes that he will always remember when the Doctor was him. You keep every previous you, even the all-business one you would rather forget, and you carry them with you, and I reckon that’s how you come to like the one you are now. Most days I do not feel like the commander of some sleek venture anyway. I feel much more like someone travelling through time in a blue box that doesn’t quite work as expected but has the most amazing time… the journal is my companion for the journey.

Closing time is not failure

This current one has been a good companion. It has supported me through the first half of the year, holding work plans and essay fragments and worries and doodles and handwriting that grew wilder some days. I can close it with thanks.

There is a song that puts this better than I can. We have all been swept out of a pub at last orders by Semisonic’s Closing Time, and the line that follows us into the night is said to have been inspired by some of the writings of Seneca the Stoic…

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

Closing time is a threshold. Something reaches its natural stopping point, having done the very thing it came to do, the lights come up, and we gather what matters and carry it out through the door. A goal can reach its closing time. So can a routine, or a worry, or a version of you that you no longer need to be.

So before I move on, I am going to spend proper time with this worn journal. Not to run a productivity tribunal over the first half of the year, I want to read it looking for what is still alive. Then I will lay out a simple regeneration spread across two pages, a handful of questions, and let the answers decide what travels with me and what I can thank and release. The actual questions are waiting for you down in the PS if you would like to borrow them, rainbow coloured pens and wonky handwriting very much encouraged.

Same woman, new notebook

When I am full moved over to my new Leuchtturm1917 I will feel the familiar thrill of all that empty space and the promise of what awaits for the second half of 2026. I will try not to read it as a demand. The blank pages owe me nothing and ask nothing of me. They are simply offering somewhere for the next part of the story to happen. I will carry some things forward. I will let some things change shape. I will allow a few to reach their natural closing time, with gratitude rather than guilt. I will make plans and draw diagrams and write reflections and almost certainly start a tracker I abandon before the end of the year.

The new journal will hold this same life, still unfolding. So I am opening a door and the same woman is walking through it. Same memories. Same values. Same slightly chaotic me, weirdnesses and all.

The cover is changing. The handwriting might even behave itself for a week or two, and the way I show up on the page will shift again, the way it does every year or so. Underneath all of it the core of me is staying, a little more worn in and a little surer of itself, more mine than it has ever quite managed before.

What are you carrying forward, and what are you ready to let reach its closing time?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet Journal spread - “The Mid-Year Regeneration Report”

1. What deserves to survive this regeneration? Some things need protecting more than improving.

2. What is asking to change form? Something that still matters but needs a kinder scale, a gentler method or a more playful shape.

3. What has reached its natural closing time? A goal, a commitment or a version of yourself you no longer need to perform. Release it without filing it under failure.

4. Who and what are my companions through the change? The people, places and practices that help you stay grounded.

5. Where did I feel most alive in the first half of the year?

6. What tiny adventure would make the next six months more exciting? One experiment, one trip, one interesting door more than new goals.

PPS - An AI prompt if you’d like to join me in a mid-year reflection, turn on thinking mode;

Based on what you have noticed across our conversations over the last 6 months, what part of me seems to be becoming clearer, what have I quietly outgrown, and what do I keep returning to that may matter more than I realise? Show me the patterns you see, then give me one question to reflect on in my journal.

Oh and I created an AI artifact for you to play with, take my What Doctor Are You? quiz and share your results *grin*

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack is of course Closing Time. Dan Wilson set out to write a song to close the band’s set each night and realised partway through that he had also written something about being born… the bright lights are the world waiting outside. Last orders and first breath at the very same time. So when you put it on to set up your new journal, you are listening to a song about beginnings dressed up as a song about endings.