Content Note: Mental illness, disability

For the last week, almost every email going to or from my inbox has started with, “Happy New Year!” It feels more half-hearted than usual, at least from my end. Feeling hopeful is hard in the wake of fascism and multiple genocides. Climate change is quite literally ravaging the planet, and we’re responsible. I keep seeing videos and posts about how it makes sense to not feel okay right now, and I’ve done my best to internalize that.

Within the global horror, I’m also fighting internal battles that have made compartmentalization and general functioning especially difficult. Recurrent Depressive Order rears its ugly head every few years, often teaming up with Anxiety and SAD to knock me on my ass. I struggle with intrusive, cyclical thoughts, recurring nightmares, fatigue, and physical symptoms of stress including insomnia, disordered eating, and inflammation, all of which aggravate each other and cause flares for my chronic pain and CVS. I hate existing in this state, especially because my communication skills suffer so much; not only do I have a hard time stating what I need, but I also struggle to parse tone and understand what’s being asked of me. Asks for reassurance increase tenfold and even the simplest interactions with the people I love most become tenuous at best.

Although I take medication to help manage my illnesses, I’ve recently begun to question if there’s Something Else going on in my brain. To that end, I’ve taken dozens of online assessments (which I know are hardly scientific, and I am not taking to heart), spoken to my primary care physician, and been referred to multiple psychiatrists and therapists. Unfortunately, these offices either didn’t take Medicaid or didn’t offer the assessment I’m looking for. For months, I gave up, feeling as if my previous efforts had gotten me nowhere—and then I crashed, and now I’m desperately clawing at any semblance of care that I can find.

Earlier this week, I reached out to a local therapist who takes Medicaid and specializes in the areas I’m concerned about. We have a consultation call coming up and I really hope we connect and that I can work with them moving forward.

I haven’t seen a therapist in four years and it’s clearly catching up with me. It’s scary to reach out to someone new, especially after I hit so many dead ends. I’ve also struggled to find a therapist I connect with as much as the first one I saw in my mid-20s; the three I met with following her retirement didn’t quite fit my care needs, and the psychiatrist I was assigned to via my insurance in New York upped the dosage on one of my meds and created a lasting physical problem that I’m still dealing with three years after my PCP ended that prescription.

Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack regarding my health—I’ve had three major surgeries in less than two years and my medical complexity has landed me in the offices of nearly a dozen specialists. There’s also a lot to unpack regarding trauma and its lasting impacts. I recognize that much of what I’ve said here is quite vague, which is intentional. I hope to chronicle this part of my mental health journey, but I want to get my ducks in a row before I start throwing out terms and diagnoses.

Rather than a “new year, new me” mindset, I'd like to sort what’s happening with current me and how I can set future me up for success. I want to show up for the people and causes I care about. I want to do the work. To do that safely, I have to show up in my life and do the personal work. I’m scared, but hopeful.

Thanks for reading.

In solidarity,
Samantha

• On Instagram, I shared some year-in-review scrapbooks and my favorite reads of 2024.

• For The Mary Sue, I ranked the 15 best comics and graphic novels of 2024!

• For The Beat, I reviewed Bree Paulsen’s new graphic novel, The Firelight Apprentice.

I put together Bookshop lists of my favorite 2024 reads and the year’s best comics and graphic novels!

Currently, I’m reading Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. Next on my list is Flamboyants by George M. Johnson for The Nonbinarian Book Club and The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso for my thesis.

I won’t be tracking what I read on Goodreads this year, but I will be tracking books on Bookworm Reads and The StoryGraph! If you haven’t checked out these apps, I highly recommend them. You can even read an interview I did with Bookworm Reads founder Amelia Goodman for The Mary Sue.

• For Rolling Stone, sex worker Jessie Sage wrote about the documentary chronicling OnlyFans star Lily Phillips’s project of sleeping with 100 men in 24 hours, the harassment she faced as a result, and the complexity of navigating the public eye as a sex worker who chooses to be vulnerable about how her labor impacts her.

• For Propublica, J. David McSwane reported on a Montana oncologist whose cult-like following hid years of malpractice, in many cases leading to preventable patient deaths (or allegedly causing them). One of the best investigative pieces I’ve read in a while.

• Josh Dzieza wrote about AI companions and the rollercoaster of emotions humans who rely on them might go through when platforms are shuttered or sold without warning for The Verge. Bizarre, unsettling, strangely empathetic, and a very interesting read.

• Jennifer Wilson wrote about heartbreak as full-body event and how various people process it—as well as the industry that’s cropped up around it—for The New Yorker.

• For People, Allen Zadoff interviewed multiple young adult authors about centering body diversity in their books and why it matters not just for their readers, but for them.

• One Amazon influencer is suing another for stealing her content, and Mia Sato’s reporting on it for The Verge encapsulates the strange layers of this moment really well.

• For Rolling Stone, Abigail Covington reported on the complexities of the sapphic pop uprising in 2024, parasocial relationships, and how artists are managing their mental health as they ostensibly achieve their dreams.

• John Paul Brammer wrote perhaps the most on-point commentary on the so-called Xodus migration of users leaving X for seemingly any other rival platform at the end of 2024.

• For LitHub, Gabrielle Bellot wrote about how it feels to be trans in Trump’s America and where power exists within a collective.

• Savannah Walsh interviewed Yellowjackets star Sophie Thatcher for Vanity Fair and if you’re interested in character creation or world-building, it’s a great read.

• Last year, Autumn Fourkiller wrote a personal essay on PCOS and queerness for Autostraddle that recently returned to my timeline and hit me in new, unexpected ways.

EVERGREEN

• 2025 is a great time to start masking again if you’ve stopped, even if you cannot do it everywhere due to restrictions. This guide to COVID mitigation written by a UK-based sex worker for those who cannot mask at work lays out the real risks of infection and how layered mitigation efforts make the biggest difference for you and those around you. Remember: No one is immune from disability!

• If you have the means to donate e-SIMs to Gazans and want art from the Cartoonist Cooperative for your support, click here.

• Disabled activist and writer Tinu Abayomi-Paul passed away in September and the campaign to support her family in the wake of her passing is sitting at approximately 83% completion. If you have the means, please consider donating.

• Jezebel’s Susan Rinkunas published a comprehensive guide for where to donate to support abortion access, which includes helping people pay for healthcare and not get arrested for seeking it.

Shrimp has been on a slow quest to make Tommen his bestie through careful proximity, and although it’s taken months, his efforts are working.

Publish Her Anthology: Dear Body

My essay “Fat Is a Descriptive Word” is published in Publish Her Anthology: Dear Body! 🎉

Dear Body features work from 30 authors exploring what it means to them to live in their bodies. Publish Her Press is putting 100 percent of the proceeds from anthology sales toward program grants and publishing services for underrepresented women authors.

The Cyclista Zine Collection

My 2019 essay “Becoming a Cyclist As a Fat, Queer Woman Radicalized Me” from Cyclista Zine #1: Our Bikes, Our Spaces is included in The Cyclista Zine Collection! 🎉

The Cyclista Zine Collection anthologizes the first 10 issues of zinester Christina Torres’s collaborative zine project, with each issue comprising one chapter of the book.