Sometimes the headline of a newsletter email comes to me before the email itself. This one presented itself as a little song, of the kind I might sing to my cat while we’re playing before bed. As follows:

The end of the year is a fake idea

Just ask a sheep or a cow or a deer

The devil made it up to propagate fear

So don’t shed a tear for the end of the year

Or something like that. Invent your own jaunty little tune.

I have felt for a while that if there were any sense to the calendar, the end of the year would fall on the winter solstice. The symbolism of that would mean more, I think: shortest day, longest night, now let us crawl up out of the dark as one. Reality as we share it is not as hot on storytelling as me. I have always been prone to clutching at weird little milestones, to the point where the entire month of August still brings me out in latent unwellness almost a decade after the fact of a bad thing that happened – not even to me! – and I have three discrete relationship anniversaries on annual repeat in my calendar.

But I don’t trust the end of the year, largely because everyone else really, really does. The new year’s resolution industrial complex doesn’t, as a rule, yield much meaningful change. Next year it will be different is almost always a beautiful, implausible dream. I understand why people like to imagine better things. It’s just that the opportunity for imagination does not, in itself, create great conditions for action. Ask me, and all the ideas I have choked on writing this year, how I know.

This is a lot of preamble for what I earnestly intended to be a recap post. Here is what I did in 2025, a year so cursed it had its own fascist demolition project:

• Remained married

• Supported a cat

• Remained employed

  • Got pretty good at my job actually, which on one hand is really useful but on the other hand why did it have to be this job that I got good at, I have a whole other one that I am simply incapable of doing these days

• Finally stopped having open wounds in my chest

• Built like three Lego sets in as many days (this is a new development as of this morning)

• Visited England

  • Remembered why I left England

  • Remembered why leaving England broke my heart

• Hung out with my baby niece a whole bunch

  

• Started exercising more regularly

  • Did not get the results I wanted out of this project, really, though I am now physically stronger and that’s not nothing

• Read like a handful of books, in a disappointing comedown from previous years’ reading efforts

• Drank too much

• Sent a lot of money to a lot of people and places that need it

  • Did my best to help other people figure out their own mitzvah

  • \

  • My cat typed that, sorry

• Only had, like, three debilitating crying jags (I am pretty sure this puts me ahead in the Not Crying household rankings, though not by much)

• Crocheted some little guys

• Did not die

I literally don’t know what will happen in 2026, to an extent that frightens me. There are political considerations, professional considerations (mainly for Isaac, everyone please send him good thoughts), and practical necessities that will all dictate how next year plays out for us. Frankly, this sucks. I have not managed to catch one iota of a break since we got married in November 2023, and I dearly wish I were looking forward to a fresh new year that promised time for quiet, and regrowth, and repair.

But I suppose you do not get to choose what happens in your time. (To paraphrase fake internet Gandalf: haha. Hahaha. Fuck.) You just do the best you can with it. So in the spirit of Fuck New Year’s Resolutions, and in the spirit of building better conditions for the actions we will need to take next year, here are my intentions for 2026:

1. Get good

2. Do good

3. Make it to 2027

Enjoy the remnants of Liminal Week, and I will see you all next year.