I Want You to Have a "Nice Enough" Year
Hi! Here's what I mean.
I don’t like odd years. Never have. But something about 2025 has a meaningful roundness to it. It fits. It feels good enough.
But the “new year” should not launch on Dec. 31. The human celebration of reset and renewal would better fit spring, no? Even summer. Let our best-self wants rise with the buds and bloom with the pollen. Let it make our eyes water. Let it sprawl and grin alongside the stretch of each sunnier, longer day.
Last new year, 2024 — remember her?? — it seemed everyone gave up booze. I don’t know about your corner of the world, but in mine, this was all the rage. Dry January was the thing.
Welcome 2025 and now the abstinence de jour is social media — giving it up. I’ve seen more announcements about nixing Instagram, flashing the middle finger to Twitter/X/Elon’s personal torture chamber, than I’ve seen in total across a decade+ on these socials. What vogue will 2026 delete?
I don’t see 2025 as a year to strive to say more “yes.” But for someone who pearl clutches such cynicism so near and dear to her heart, more “why nots” will do. Why not, for me, will be braver. And more honest.
In 2024, the wedding invitations slowed but the pregnancy announcements sprouted. Three friends from college now with newborns; a fourth just announced her pregnancy last week. There is a chasm opening I’m only now realizing must be realized. Change begins before you get eyes on it. Then suddenly it surrounds you, a door you don’t remember passing through.
In 2024, I said I would write 300-500 words a day. No excuses, you stupid knob. Perfectionism is supremely dumb, give her up. I stuck to this more than I had in any recent past years, and for this I feel proud. It’s a pride of a candleflame sort, though. Fragile yet alive, dancing. Some weeks I was successful, others…we don’t need to marinate on the others. I’m learning this is okay.
In 2024, I had a full-time job. I enter 2025 with a raggedy but hard-sewn patchwork of contract writing gigs. An intimacy has grown between myself, my online banking, and my Google Sheets budget. Our near-daily check-ins, our fervent calculations, mental maths. Our guilt. How much leftover for the rest of the month after subtracting the weekly groceries and the car payment and health insurance premium which just went up (!!!!) and uh oh, we just ran out of olive oil, from which we will never financially recover. Uh oh, now it’s the holidays. Uh oh, how much left now for $3 mystery beers at ArtBar with friends on Thursdays even though you don’t particularly enjoy beer but it’s the cheapest going-out option on the liquid menu and you want to spend time with friends and you do not want to feel sad and alone.
My budget spreadsheet is titled, “Adulting Gross” because, yes. And because it’s gross who this level of financial finesse turns you into. No matter what the films and the novels and the sweet-tooth cultural fables and the dusty ole’ religious texts say, there isn’t much noble about not having money. Its lack looms larger than the winter clouds. You can’t leave your home without thinking about it. You can’t watch TV without thinking about it. You can’t even group message your friends without thinking about it. It’s an ugly, debasing slap once you realize you must take a beat from texting a dear best friend — a dear best friend you literally text back and forth with daily, stream of consciously, an overflowing Niagara Falls of digital dot-connecting intimacies — because lately she keeps mentioning her Christmas sale shopping hauls, her purchase of a new few-hundred-dollar perfume. Meanwhile all you can think about is how you don’t have any leftover this month for shampoo.
And now it’s last Sunday, at my parents’ for dinner. I joke over the mashed potatoes that hey, at least spuds are still in my budget! At least tater’s can always be relied upon, precious. Mother turns serious. “You’re making me feel bad.” So now I cannot make jokes like this to her face. See, how we all make others’ wallets about ourselves?
As adults, people who grew up poor tend to talk about what they did have when they were young. And those who grew up comfortably like to name name what they lacked. I didn’t have a cellphone until I was 15! Even then, texting wasn’t included in our plan!
It is a tell of shame. Past, present, the tight knot of the two. Having too much, not having enough. The rebalancing of narrative scales. This rule has exceptions but it’s a qualifying thing and it poker reveals a lot, even when you don’t like it to.
On New Years Eve, my partner and I shucked oysters at his place. Three dozen wrist tilts of briny, bracing joy. After, we made carbonara — with the good aged parmesan and pecorino. Drank two bottles of wine. There are bites and sips that feel like miracles. They were worth every not-in-the-budget penny.
It’s 2025 and I’m realizing, lamely, that at 30 I don’t yet know what to say to the fatally sick and the elderly. Both have earned their right toward sour, uncomfortable sentences. Admissions of fatigue, self pity. Anger. I have not yet mastered how to sit beside them in their gray. Someday, I will.
I read recently the worst you can do is give metaphors, platitudes. With this, I agree. So why is it so difficult to just cut through and drop the honest words? To look them in the eye? It’s Christmas Day and Aunt Lisa — glioblastoma, two years, resigned now to comfort care — expressing how hard it is to see people these days because every visit is treated by the visitor as their last. What can I say to this? I, too, was there to visit.
(Maybe) a lighter example: Out to dinner with my partner’s grandma. Her 90th birthday (!!!). She is all bone and story. She needs help sliding off and on her coat, can’t raise her arms to do so anymore herself. I help slip one elbow through one sleeve, fall into dissaray with the next. She starts apologizing. Never say sorry, is all I can shoot back. I am shaking my head. I keep shaking my head as we get her other arm through.
What other offering is there? How gross this world, making her feel she needed to apologize in the first place.
Last year I think I felt young, while this year, already, I feel older — but in a nice way. A morning walk kind of way. A warm cup of coffee handed to you by someone you adore kind of way. There are some years like this. Some years where you’re trying to catch the confetti in the air, palms outstretched, eyes peeled upward. Then others you look around and realize the confetti is already at your feet, settled.
That you have a plan, both spreadsheets and resolutions, you will find your success (as you define it). This piece was lovely. Go Get 'Em!
"My budget spreadsheet is titled Adulting Gross” made me laugh. Mine is called 'Buckets' XD