If the first month of the year is meant to set the tone for everything that follows, it’s safe to say that I’m lowkey in fear of what 2025 is going to end up becoming.
January proved to be a barrage of work things, exhaustion, and various other difficulties that left me in a daze more evenings than not, feeling overwhelmed and beaten up by the world. There were a couple of weeks in particular where I legitimately lost track of what day it was, purely because so many things happened on particular days that I honestly thought I was a day or two later in the week, because how else could it all have fit? The worst part of the month was, almost certainly, when I found out that my 16-year-old dog Gus was sick, and I waited a day for test results while assuming the worst.
(Weird time-traveling note; I originally wrote this at the end of January when we didn’t know what Gus’s long term prognosis was; he of course died last week. It was surreal to realize I’d have to come back and edit this.)
Add to all of these things that were directly impacting my life, what was happening nationally as we got the return of a President who seems hellbent on destroying everything good and decent in the world. Those initial days after Trump was sworn back into office felt cartoonish in the degree to which he was issuing orders that were so destructive and selfish; it was at once scary and in some strange way almost funny because what the fuck is happening. (To be clear: I know it’s not actually funny, but the volume and cruelty was so surreal as to provoke the terrified laughter response.)
At some point during the month I was talking to someone about work things and our failure to properly plan out what 2025 was going to look like by the end of the month. “January doesn’t count,” they argued, “it’s like a practice month to get ready for the rest of the year. February is where everything begins.” Maybe we can take that attitude into the real world, and hope that things are going to get better. The alternative is too sobering a concept to consider, right now.