The End of the Year

A year ago, I was desperately sad. I’d graduated; I didn’t have a job offer; my relationship was going south; my appointment for antidepressants had been postponed; I’d been rejected from the one MFA program I applied to; and I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself.

I still don’t, really. It’s been a year of kicking things around, trying them out. I moved, took up a job I thought I’d hate. I adopted a cat and spent a month frantically figuring out how to care for it. I took karate classes and painting classes and Pilates classes and didn’t continue any of them. I gained weight. I lost weight. I made friends and lost them. I spent too much money on frivolous things and not enough on important things. I cut my hair. I drove to Maine. I drove to Chicago. I bought furniture and sold furniture and bought it again. I had a break-up.

Despite all that, 2025 was one of the happiest years of my recent life. I like my job. I live alone in an apartment to myself. I spent rent money on a couch that my cat tears up with his claws, and I let him, because I adore him with all my heart. I got into another relationship. I got off the antidepressants. I saw friends I hadn’t seen in years. I ate at restaurants that changed my life, by myself, and loved it. I bought a diamond necklace. I joined a run club. I applied for graduate school.

All of a sudden, the world was open to me. It was wonderful and terrifying to figure out living with myself: getting pulled over for the first time, servicing my car, changing my license, comparing credit cards, hosting a dinner party, navigating health insurance, taking my cat to the vet, investing. I made so many mistakes and so many frantic calls to my parents, who were always patiently on the other end of the line to answer my silliest questions. I cobbled together a life over the last year that is, for the first time, becoming my own.

My writing practice slowed, and at the same time, my Substack grew. I was published in The Yale Review and Meridian, two dream journals, and nominated for a Pushcart for fiction for the first time. I participated in a reading for the first time in two years. I was shortlisted for a fellowship with the first poet who ever inspired me.

My job has become most of my life, but I’m getting good at it. I had truthfully never thought I’d find work outside of writing worth doing. Now, however, I enjoy it so much it scares me.

A year ago, I had entered the year dragging myself across the line. I had no goals, no aspirations, no hopes except to be a little happier, or at least less sad. Now, I have ridiculous and grandiose dreams the likes of which I haven’t had since middle school. I have Plans, capital P. Some of them may not happen this year; some may not happen at all. The thing is to try.

I’m not sad to be older. I’m glad for however the time passes. I used to impose personal timelines for my achievements, impossible ones, and tear myself apart for missing them: novel by 16, marathon by 18, PhD by 25, etc. Of course, none of it happened. But no more of that. I want only to make use of my time this year, however I can—to wake up with something to do, and go to sleep with something done. Even if it’s almost nothing to anyone else. All that matters is what it is to me.