Tree rings are thinner in drought years, and the tree keeps growing anyway. Hard years still count as years.

Growth is not cancelled by difficulty, only narrowed. A year where you barely held things together still added something, even if what it added was capacity rather than anything visible. The record of a hard stretch does not read as a gap later. It reads as a thin line that is still part of the trunk.

If you are looking back at a stretch you feel you wasted, try counting what it taught you to survive rather than what you produced. Then set the bar for this season honestly. Thin growth in a dry year is what growing looks like when conditions are poor.