2025 In Review

    This is not going to be a polished essay. It will be messy, spur-of-the-moment, and written with only making it to the next sentence in mind. In other words, it will be exactly the essay 2025 deserves.

    I don't think I've made it unknown to anyone that this year was incredibly difficult for myself, especially since fundamentally that is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, this year has been difficult for everyone, just as 2024 was, 2023 was, 2022 was, 2021 was, 2020 was, and so on, and so on, and so on...

    Most "year in review" type posts tend to focus on numerics. The best and worst albums, movies, events, moments, photos, videos, songs, ideas, all of it blurring into an approximation of the passage of time. 

    I want this to be a kind of "anti-content", to be less about a clean and quantifiable metric for how this year was for myself and more of an argument that can be dissected and even opposed. In a year where the proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence as slop became a fixture of the digital and occasionally the real: it is necessary to embrace a humanity that is raw and unpolished by guidelines and SEO optimization (which to be fair isn't really what I tend to follow anyways). 

    So what happened to me in 2025? I think this year can cleanly be divided in two but not in half. There is my MA degree and there is the period following it. As I've repeated to anyone who's asked when it's come up, my research focused on economic connections between Newfoundland and the British Atlantic Slave Economy. By January, the research process was fundamentally underway with most of the major sources found but to be read. All that was left to do was survive my classes and get the bulk of my research done before May in order to start on my rough draft as soon as possible. In other words, the momentum for 2025 had begun months earlier, for better and for worse. 

    While I read and wintered in the Memorial University MA room, the United States government fell to fascism. 

    All the structures that were intended to stop the exact nature of the infection failed as decades of incremental change was annihilated while the structural oppression of institutions like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the adoption of Silicon Valley technofascists into the fold remained strong and emboldened. I watched as my overly anxious decision to withdraw funding applications for research trips become justified with more and more zealous capture and detainment of people who were guilty of no crime save wanting to exist without fear in a supposed land of freedom and opportunity. 

    How do you tell your campus therapist that you struggle with dealing with anxiety if everything you're anxious about comes to pass? What can I do but try to research the horrors of the slave trade and try to hope for the best? 

    It's hard to compartmentalize when your national neighbours to the south are actively engaging in fascism all the while your provincial neighbours to the west are flirting with its soft first touches in the form of conservatism. But it had to be done. I was living on my own in a house I had spent parts of my childhood in that were now empty save for myself and for the ghosts of who we once were. 

    Beginning in 2024, I was looking after my grandparents home following the passing of my grandfather and my grandmother's move into care. And for well over a year, I have not had an appropriate response to when people ask how it felt to live in that house. For good or ill, every answer felt incomplete.

    In A Christmas Carol, there is a moment when Scrooge returns to his childhood boarding school in a vision of the past, and he experiences this as "a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten."

    Imagine living in that experience. Each night is spent hearing the memories of a stairlift and doors opening and closing only in your memories. Each day is spent keeping the house in a rough order of what it had been before the hospital bed and constant bustle of family and attendants. The house has never been more quiet and yet it is unbearably loud. Each time you walk inside the front door your eyes cast up to the growing black mould on the ceiling as you remind yourself that it will all be gone by summer. Not the mould: the house. The dishwasher is broken but can't be fixed without replacing it, and so the dishwasher is not fixed. Water drips in from a roof built before your parents were ever born. 

    The house is rotting and you can feel the rot entering you. 

    Spring brings renewal and the house is not saved. Essays are written, marked, edited, and eventually I pass from my courses to my writing. I move out. The house does not join me. Within a few months it will be gone and I am glad to be gone from it just as I feel an unbearable loss at the departure. 

    But I am no longer rotting. 

    I guess there is a third division within the year. It doesn't feel that was even if it looks it. To me, it's all one series of damn things overlapping over the other in the process of writing my first ever published work. And what a damnable thing my first draft was. Over two hundred pages of quotations marked with context and citations that needed to be organized within a thesis of arguments that simultaneously engaged with the literature of the subject while pushing it forward in a new direction all while my ability to find primary documentation was limited by fears of an American Gestapo. 

    Despite how proud I am to actually complete this project, I find that I don't particularly enjoy discussing the process of creating it. Was it worth it? Undoubtedly. And researching was wonderful to experience, but truth be told I don't think I can really put that all into words beyond a small paragraph and the 50 pages I ended up with by the end of the summer. To put it in perspective, this year was a year of sacrifice. The reason why my MA defined my year is because I put off and gave up on so much else. I didn't return to Shakespeare by the Sea, I gave up on writing and drawing passion projects, and I allowed this otherwise beautiful thing to consume my entire functionality. 

    And then I was done. 

    Just like that. Months of writing, revising, re-reading, fact checking, critique, and banging my head on the desk culminate in one final draft being submitted and approved. I'm done. And all that was left to do was to rest and find work with my new degree.

    Of course that sort of thing takes a while so it makes sense to wait a couple of weeks.

    And weeks become a month. 

    One month becomes two. 

    Two become a season. 

    And now its December. 

    I have two degrees and rejections from everywhere within my sector and below. 

    I'm rejected by Michaels for seasonal relief work in mid-December. 

    I am rejected by Michaels...in mid December...

    For seasonal. Relief. Work. 

    With two degrees. 

    2025 has felt like being inside of a small inflatable pool filled with molasses that is being accelerated across white water rapids. I am simultaneously unable to move and paralyzed by the exaggerated slowness as the year passes by within an eternity of a few seconds. 

    So this is the year. A rapid fall through never-ending events that I feel will never end until of course they do. 

    I feel as though I have focused too far on the negative because, well, most of this year was negative. Just as the last one was and the year before and this is becoming a pattern isn't it? 

    There was good this year. I know there was because I felt it. I felt it when my partner drew a small cartoon of a crazed mouse and clown demon from a D&D actual-play show wishing me good luck and encouragement. I felt it when I saw the first film in a theatre in over a year with Sinners and it became my all-time favourite film of the year bar-none. I felt it when my Dad took me to find shoes because we're both too tall to find good shoes almost anywhere in the city. I felt it when my Mom replaced my stocking with one that had my new name on it. I felt it when I found a community of trans femmes in town who would stand for each other. 

    There was good in 2025 and I know it was there. I felt it. I had to. But I don't think I felt it as much as I could have. 

    So what will 2026 be? I really don't know. It will be messy. It will be chaotic. It will be uncertain. And I know by the end of the year I will be struggling with what I have struggled with for years. Loneliness, fear, despair, anger. They are always with me. But so is hope that things can be different. 

    So no matter what 2026 will be: I know it will be different. I know this because I will be different. I will become the person who survives 2026 come December next year. And I know no matter what, I will have people who will be there to help me change.