18 Dec 2025
I’m showing up for this annual blog post and for the first time ever, I did zero other posts for this entire year. I guess that sums up the year itself, right? I don’t feel like I’m alone in this, but 2025 was rough and any potential goals or optimizations or improvements or achievements all went out the window pretty much immediately. I’m not even gonna try to reflect and recap. This whole year was a wash.
I feel like the primary feeling I’ve been grappling with all year is fear? A low-lying but omnipresent fear, possibly fear of communicating? I have been extremely overwhelmed by everything, especially online anythings, in a way that feels a bit new/different than any generalized anxiety I’ve had about you-name-it. The feeling of being scared (and also, sometimes, the resentment of that feeling) has been a primary emotion. I think it’s rooted in exhaustion, like a new deep fear of “if I say/do anything it means I might have to say/do something else.” This has been especially tough re: my ability to maintain social relationships in a normal fashion. Everything is just “too much.” Everything is yet another thing on the endless todo list instead of curiosity and joy. Everything is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The smallest things are completely overwhelming. I’ve also just been very paranoid about everything public in a way I haven’t been in the past. During some of the thus-far peak Not Great Times in my life that coincided with the peak era of Twitter, I used to sort of joke to myself like “If I’m not tweeting, check on me because I must be dead.” So I think of that and how much I’ve relatively gone dark in terms of communication (public or private). And this year, I am feeling like… I’m not dead and please don’t check on me because I’ll just get overwhelmed and kinda totally freak the fuck out internally. It feels like a lot of this is performance anxiety in every aspect of my life just taking over, maybe? And grief, lots and lots of it?
On the upside, I always manage to cultivate a bit of optimism right at the end of the year. I did have a very restful year. I went to the southwest US, the middle-ish of Japan (including a long-anticipated return to the Seto Inland Sea), Montreal (the east-ish but not too far east of Canada?), and a few trips to local Amtrak-adjacent cities. Movie nights, baseball games, Puzzled Pints. I’m doing fine. This was a necessary year of self-regulation and learning how to manage myself, my health, my feelings, my capacity, my obligations, my hopes. And I’ve grown a ton from it. Growing kinda sucks when it’s happening. I’m trying not to think of “well, I learned a lot this year” as a sort of consolation prize because things didn’t go the way I planned and accept it as it is, but this doesn’t come naturally to me. I am impatient about many things, but I am impatient towards myself most of all.
I can’t reflect on last year’s goals versus this year’s, because it’ll bum me out. I try to find acceptance over knowing that nothing is gone, everything just takes 10x longer, feels 10x harder, is 10x more frustrating.
Oh, I did learn to knit! Like, really knit. I knew how to knit a little bit, but now I’m knitting cardigans and socks like it’s no biggie. It has been so therapeutic. I’ve learned a lot about yarn, ideally enough to be quite snobby if it behooves me, but not so snobby all the time that I’m insufferable. Like, learning enough about wool provenance and types to help me navigate what kind of yarn to buy, but not too much that I am just a useless jerk.
During this whole burnout saga I’ve been trying to low-key just have one full time job, and I’ve been mostly successful at that but I did do one small contracting project, have signed onto another, and taught a 4-week academic course. But I did say no to like, at least four projects, which is huge for me (did I still feel endless guilt and shame and horror and stress and fear about all of them? yes, the fear of turning down work and somehow that ruining my life is still painfully strong force within me). And that workshop I taught twice has now, through a series of planned and unplanned events, turned into me teaching audiovisual preservation next semester, shortly after I had avowed to never take on any extra work and to stop overwhelming myself. Something snapped in a bad way and then in a good way, and now I’m really excited for the opportunity to teach this full class and hopefully continue every semester into the future. I think I managed to journal out all my anxiety spiraling I was doing and get to the core of who I am and what I want, and now I’m feeling jazzed about it. (Again, performance anxiety? Preparedness anxiety?) Cue two months from now, mid-semester, where I’m utterly freaked out again. But for now, that’s where I am.
So I guess, all this to say, 2025 has been okay but everything is so unbelievably fragile right now.
And 2026? It’s not possible for me to muster up a lot of enthusiasm or despair, it’s just the next thing. There are some good plans falling into place among the uncertainty, some of which are old and some of which are new. That being said, I’m not sure how to wrap this blog post up in a bow! But I will use this as an opportunity to continue to get used to even more uncertainty!