I’ve been releasing in-depth reflections around my birthday in an unintentional recurring way. I think I’d finally like to make this an annual visit on purpose. I tend to not want to gather or do big celebrations around my birthday, so maybe this is a nice way to still connect with folks while waiting for my social capacity to re-emerge in the spring.

I originally wrote the following as an end-of-the year family update and an ask for help; that list is still dozens of people so to say I sent it to ‘just my family members’ feels a little misleading on the scope of folks who have already read this. But they loved it so much I felt encouraged to share, and to (hopefully) make it an annual thing. I kept it in its entirety just for additional context, complete with year-end and NYE asks and references.

(CW: mentions of abusive behavior, abuse enabling, financial precarity, brief mention of miscarriage with no intent/desire to be pregnant)

Hi hi fam,
I haven't sent an update recently for me and Allan, but with the new year around the corner and having just started recovering from a recent medical emergency, I felt like now would be a great time to connect, reach out, and send updates.

Here's our 2025 in a hefty, messy nutshell--complete with wins, challenges, and tea 🍵.

January 2025

• 🔥 Allan and I arrive back in Los Angeles from visiting my sibling in Rhode Island--just in time for the fires.

• 📦 We start selling and giving away our belongings, packing up what's left in preparation to move to San Diego, where we will be temporarily staying with my Mama before our big move to the Netherlands.

• 🍰 I turn 33!

February 2025

• 🚚 We move to San Diego! (for a month)

• 🌴 We each get our first tattoos--a Joshua Tree; they match with our best friends back in Los Angeles. I am hooked, and have so many more tattoo ideas over the coming months.

• 🛬 We hop on our one-way flight to the Netherlands! We land and plan to stay with friends of my best friend's partner—other practicing COVID-cautious folks.

March 2025

• 🚲 We get our first Dutch bikes! (through a bike subscription!)

• 🌼 We acclimate to our first european spring--complete with allergies, long walks, and bike rides.

April 2025

• 🏊🏽‍♀️ We do our first dip in the canals!

• 📝 We submit my application for a residence visa via the DAFT (Dutch-American Friendship Treaty).

• 🔶 We experience our first Dutch holiday--Kings Day! Full of outdoor eating, drinking, and people selling their second-hand belongings on their front door steps (with the holiday selling permit granted country-wide as part of the holiday).

May 2025

• 📝 We submit Allan's application for a residence visa.

• 👩🏽‍💼 Despite much of our funding being cut, the nonprofit I work for, We Still Move (WSM) continues to provide culturally-affirming healing arts and movement to queer BIPOC folks in Los Angeles--with May being our busiest month.

• 🐕🪽🪦 Our family dog, Blue, passes away at home, surrounded by loved ones.

• 🪩 We go to a masked silent disco and have a great time!

June 2025

• 🛣️ We walk on the freeway! Amsterdam celebrates its 750th anniversary and throws a city-wide, week-long line-up of celebratory events--which includes shutting down the freeway to hold concerts, 5k runs, and other programming.

• ✅ Our applications for residence visas are accepted! We still have paperwork to submit, but as long as we do, our visas will remain valid! As part of maintaining my visa, I must start a business of my own here in the Netherlands.

July 2025

• 🪪 I pick up my visa card! 

• 🤬 My best friend and her partner back in Los Angeles split up. That partner becomes abusive and begins trying to isolate my friend from her community, steal her resources, and surveil her. I try to bring this up with our roommates, who are friends with this abuser. They accuse us of being ungrateful for "everything they've done for us." 

• 🖕🏽The living situation becomes untenable. We start looking for our own apartment. This cuts our financial runway in half, savings-wise. The roommates show our room when we're not there, they repeatedly violate the 24-hour notice and agreed-upon COVID precautions they offered for showing our room, they move our stuff around with out asking or notifying us.

• 📉 At work: due to new policies in the states around DEI, many of our funding sources dry up; we all take a 25% pay cut while we figure out more funding. 

• 🙌🏽 Through a mutual friend back in the states, we get introduced to a new friend—another Black woman who recently moved to the Netherlands. We hit it off immediately.

August 2025

• 💇🏽‍♂️ Allan finds a great hair stylist, who becomes a great friend.

• 🗂️ We officially get Dutch BSNs (like SSNs in the states).

• 📱 We officially get Dutch phones and phone numbers.

• 🏠 We sign a lease for our first Dutch apartment! 

September 2025

• 📉 At work: many of the funding sources we've relied on for years are now declining our applications; we all take a further 15% pay cut while continuing to pivot on programming and build relationships with new donors/funders.

• 🪪 Allan picks up his visa card!

• 🗣️ We start Dutch lessons! (after months on language-learning apps)

• 👯‍♀️ One of our good friends from our dance community back in the states comes and visits us!

• 🛥️ We go on our first boat ride in the canals! (with our visiting friend!)

• 🎶 We go to our first art show in the Netherlands! Invited by one of our new friends who’s also one of the organizers, we enjoyed all sorts of art from fantastic queer and trans dancers, musicians, and poets.

October 2025

• 🎉 Allan turns 36!

• 🏘️ We help one of our new friends move to a new apartment--and fortunately their new place is near us!

• 🪩 We go to another masked silent disco and meet a wonderful group of new COVID-cautious friends! Other couples who moved to the Netherlands from other countries--along with one of the DJs and a few other folks.

• 🙄 After seeing me and Allan thoroughly enjoying ourselves at the silent disco, the ex-roommates we went no-contact with in September after fully moving out start to tell people I'm an "unsafe" person for no longer wanting to be associated with them or the abuser (who has now moved here to the NL). This gets us removed from a few community spaces that we've been in since Feburary, with no question or discussion despite calling themselves a social justice care collective. It turns out to be a good riddance.

• 📮 Allan starts his first Dutch job--as a part-time postman for PostNL!

• 👻 We go to our first house party--a COVID-cautious Halloween party hosted by some of our new friends, who also happen to live closeby! We have a great time and form good bonds with friends we met at the silent disco earlier this month--very much a glow-up from where we started.

November 2025

•  🎃 We and another friend go to a haunted maze attraction called ScareMe in the nearby town of Almere--spooky and fun! 

• 🚆 We take a train to Utrecht to visit some of the new friends we met at the silent disco!

• 🪡 I do some visible mending some of mine and Allan's clothes. It looks great.

• 🎶 We go to our another art show! (hosted by another one of our friends!)

• 🧥 I finally get a proper winter coat--from one of our friends! She had, in her words, a "shameful amount of coats" and was literally giving them away. With this free coat, I am unjustly rewarded in my extreme procrastination on this task 🤣

December 2025

• 🌐 I secure a virtual business address for my new Dutch business called Ritual As; I will be doing the same kind of work that I've been doing for WSM, but for smaller businesses here and abroad. Still many more steps to go to get it up and running, but very straightforward. 

• 🏥 I go to the emergency room after prolonged abdominal pain and am diagnosed with kidney stones.

• ❤️‍🩹 I return to the hospital a week later after the pain spikes again. While Allan and I were not trying to get pregnant (I had a copper IUD in at the time), I am correctly re-diagnosed with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. At the time of reaching the hospital, I had lost 2 liters of blood to internal bleeding. I undergo emergency surgery; It goes well and I am discharged the following day to start my 6-week recovery.

• 💞 There is an outpouring of support from friends old and new--pastries delivered, goods baked, game night distractions, messages galore offering help while I'm recovering.

• 📉 At work: we dip in to our last month of runway; paychecks for January are dependent on whatever funds we raise in end-of-year donations. We host our last event for 2025--a virtual care clinic for a collective of queer BIPOC therapists, featuring yoga, sound bath, self-guided acupressure, and a gentle dance/movement session. One therapist mentions how much of a difference it makes to be led in a meditation by someone who is Brown like her, and how she's never experienced that before. 

• 🎄 Allan and I go to a holiday potluck gathering of other COVID-cautious friends; the hosts offer to pick me up and cart me there in the bakfiets (like a bike-cart) that they use for their elderly pups so I don't have to call a rideshare. It's super fun and I'm thrilled.

• ℹ️ In passing conversation, some of our new friends clear up some misinformation we'd received about the visa process from our previous roommates--shaving 2 years off our timeline to full citizenship!

• 💸 Allan and I finally secure health insurance.

It's been a wild, difficult, celebratory, transitional, packed year--personally and in the world. I'm proud of us, our courage, our integrity, our character, our vulnerability, and our resilience. And, none of it would have been possible without the support of friends and family, near and far, throughout all of 2025 and before. Getting to share about y'all with our new friends has been inspiring--one of my co-workers started putting together a yearly reunion amongst her own family after I shared about ours! The way I witness and experience community and family with y'all as the years go by definitely inform the ways in which I gather, facilitate, and host spaces in other areas of my life--and so many people tell me that it shows 💖

Thanks for reading about the year we've had--I hope to catch up with folks soon! I'm on Signal, Discord, and you can always reach me by email. I'll be putting together a version of this recap that has way more pictures for each month, so I'll send that when I have it! (I haven't had the capacity to gather all the pics before the end of the year while recovering, but I still wanted to send updates).

If you (or any funders you know) are looking to make any last-minute tax-deductible year-end donations, I offer the LA nonprofit I work for--it will figuratively help keep our lights on, and will literally help keep my own lights on, along with providing spaces for Black and Brown folk to (re)connect with ancestral healing arts and movement practices.

The work I've been able to do with them over the past 5 years has been some of the most fulfilling, healing, and hopeful work I've ever had the privilege to be involved in. We're a very small team of 3 co-directors, and they have been supportive in whatever I've needed over the years--including enthusiastically supporting my move to the Netherlands while wanting to continue working with me through my Dutch business. 

And if there are any other connections you'd like to share about any friends, family, or resources you know of on this side of the pond, feel free to send those over too! 

I hope y'all have fun, festive, restful NYE plans; here in the Netherlands, folks are lighting fireworks directly on our street and we can see them all from our window.

I hope y'all can visit us someday, and I hope to be able to make it over for Davis Unity 2026!

Love love love you!

Misha & Allan

mini-epilogue for back here in the present:

The new year’s fireworks continued well past 2am. I heard some occasional ones as late/early as 6am on January 1st.

WSM made enough in our year-end fundraiser to continue payroll at the reduced rate through February.

My recovery has gone well — more on that later.

As much for myself as anyone else, it’s been important for me to remind myself that the only things guaranteed are change. The hard parts are as much of the whole as the fun parts, and as much as I get to feel however I want about this, it will be true no matter how I feel about it. I don’t take enough time to appreciate the efforts and labor I and my loved ones took to get each other through Things.

I hope to post a monthly update in a similar style, as a ritual to remember to do this more—starting with January and reflections about my actual birthday during my recovery and set-up of my business.

I hope you have some gentle restful moments lined up for today.

Thanks for reading ☺️
misha
ritual as: | website

p.s. You can now read about January here!