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arysgarden · 7 days ago

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read this if you're nervous about the new year

[Author's Note: I wrote this in December and hoped to adapt it into a video essay in January, but BME life is busy, and I have not gotten the chance to curate it in the way I envisioned. Perhaps this will be made someday, likely with edits and new reflections or revelations. Maybe that video will speak to, and be in conversation with, this transcript.

It would be careless to not acknowledge the hell that the United States, where I reside, is becoming with the recent changes due to the Trump administration. This letter is more pointed towards emotional and interpersonal hardships, rather than political anxiety, though I anticipate you too, reader, are disheartened and anxious about what the next few years hold for our falling empire, now that we've crossed over to 2025.]

I concluded my last exam at noon on the 18th of December, and all that awaited me on my Google Calendar was the event “no work! no thinking about work” in uppercase, lasting a week. I’m bad at being bored. My YouTube watch later is 581 videos. Every break I say I’ll make a dent in it, but the number always rises again. Most of the videos in that playlist yell at me to “make systems, not goals” and “level up [my] life,” “rebrand [my] year,” “reinvent [myself].” Or they’re productivity challenges where the creator films themselves waking up at 6 am, 5 am, 4 am.

I watch the videos, perhaps type a few bullet points into my Notion for “later reference,” and then I remove it from my Watch Later (580 to go) or close the tab and go the next, where a similar video awaits. I set forty-three alarms starting at 4 am and ending at 7 am, spaced unevenly between the three hours, some three minutes apart, some fifteen. I wake up at 10:30 and stay in bed until my mother yells for me from downstairs. I have a Google Calendar event telling me to work out, and I watch the current time creep to the intended start. I get distracted talking to my parents or watching another video (579), and when I check again, the current time is halfway through the event. So, I drag it further down to overlap with my other goals (edit resume, update LinkedIn, look at fellowships), and reshuffle the order of the day, perhaps shorten some of the expected time for “update LinkedIn,” or overestimate my ability to start work again after family movie night inevitably ends at 10:30 in the evening (“Research 10:30 pm – 2:30 am”).

The day passes, maybe I tweak the wording of a few bullet points on my resume, but it’s not enough to tick the task done, so I scrawl in a right-facing arrow into the checkbox of my to do list from a ripped-out page of a random notebook and rewrite the task in the next day’s list. This continues.

I entered Winter break feeling decidedly un-human. My friends consider me to be lively and interesting and involved, so when I say this, the idea is dismissed as preposterous. What do you mean you feel “boring?” You work two jobs; you’re on board for two clubs; you are constantly ping ponging yourself between groups of friends and making promises to squeeze in a catch-up dinner on a Thursday night or study with friends in the library (frequently double-booking, triple-booking yourself). You always have a funny story to recount or a witty joke tying back to Tumblr 2018. These things make your interesting. These things make you human.

I used to think of myself primarily as writer before I entered college. All I had was a melodramatic half-complete collection of free verse love poetry for a high school crush and a few multi-chapter drafts of a novel I had spent most of high school developing in my head or rewriting the beginning of every November for NaNoWriMo. I started a little literary magazine and made a close friend from working closely with her on that project. I watched dozens of videos from authortubers on how to write certain archetypes of characters, the top ten mistakes for newbie writers, and how they formatted their novels on Google Docs because I couldn’t justify spending $50 on Scrivener when God knows when (or if) I would finish a damn draft. Even if I didn’t have the energy to write, the time to write, I was editing others’ pieces or thinking about writing.

Even as my view of a career path fluctuated violently during that period (STEM kid turned to human rights enthusiast and potential immigration or international lawyer), above all, I was a writer. Even in my college interview files, the student who conducted my interview wrote that you could tell I was a writer just from hearing me speak. I’ve been told I talk in poetry.

But I haven’t written anything substantial in years. The closest I got was a creative ethnography piece titled “brown girls are a lot like stars.” But it was for class, and for some reason, that felt illegitimate.

Other than mentioning my abandoned works in progress occasionally in conversation with a friend and adding “plan my book with me” or “how to write [X] characters” videos into my egregiously long watch later playlist (589), I didn’t even lend much mental energy to thinking about writing. I gave up on the literary magazine sometime at the end of my sophomore year, a (frankly) unfair choice because we had all the submissions and promised writers to curate it, but I could barely lend any mental energy to it anymore. I no longer dreamt of potential plot lines and magic systems; any drabble I forced onto the page felt awkward, clunky, and never quite touched the reader in the same way it did its creator. It feels wrong to call myself a writer when writing no longer feels like home.

~ depression ~

What do you do when the few things that consistently give you joy feel like work? Another task on the to-do list to scrawl a right-facing arrow and deter to the next day. And the next.

What do you do when you enter the new year as an unrecognizable person?

2024 was a year of exciting beginnings and messy, webbed endings. It was always moving, pulsing—I didn’t really let myself take a break. I entered junior year, the year of my biomedical engineering requirements, burnt out, and that smoothed over to depression. I had candles and friends, and that kept me afloat…and then life decided it had a few more lessons for me, so the depressive episode got worse, and the ever-present exhaustion morphed to waking up at 6 am, all jittery, and passing time in front of books and computers without absorbing any of it.

My friends checked in on me frequently, provided me avenues to talk and process my emotions. I visited a therapist a few times and found grounding in her words. My grief consumed me. My anxiety consumed me. I would speak to make myself feel better, and immediately regret it, picking apart wordings and sitting in projected shame. Friends, family, my therapist praised me for how I was handling it all, but I didn’t see strength. I didn’t feel quite “there” at all. During lunches or boba catch ups, the conversation would lull after the jarring updates, and silence would uncomfortably settle over us.

And I had nothing to say.

A friend who stayed over for New Years asked me “What was your favorite book you’ve read this year.” I paused and thought hard, embarrassment flooding warmth down my neck. “I don’t think I’ve read a book this year,” I responded. On my 2024 Bucket list, the first item was to have read 50 books. I’ve started a few. I’ve read 0.

I can’t fully blame the tumultuous term I had because, well, there were 8 other months I could have read just one book. In all fairness, I got a fair bit of the way through This is How You Lose the Time War before finals season hit my sophomore spring, and I put down the book, resolving to read it from start to finish (it’s one of those books, I think ought to be read in one sitting). I packed it in bags on train rides and brought it to my summer dorm, but I didn’t pick it back up again. Most of the books on the shelf of my childhood bedroom, I also had not read.

I could give you excuses about how I sought break in every sliver of free time during the weekends or in the afternoon between two commitments in some sorry attempt to make up for the lack of formal break I awarded myself. But ultimately, it was a choice: I sought ephemeral pleasure and left behind my goals. Even more important, I let myself fall into an autopilot; I stopped thinking critically. I just floated, and studied, and took homework quizzes, and reviewed Quizlets. I took walks, and I napped, and I played minesweeper. I was a student, but I had slipped out of my skin and refused to put it on again. I left behind being a person.

There’s not many poetic ways to describe the un-humanness of depression to someone who hasn’t quite experienced it before. And even if you have, I’m not certain our two experiences sing in harmony. But I think Fleabag displays what I mean best. Sat in the confessional with a gin in tonic in hand, the Hot Priest mistakes Fleabag for not knowing what she wants.

[Fleabag confession scene]

I am a free will believer, but damn if no other scene has made me exhale a little. Because that’s why I have an irrational aversion to watching new movies and reading new books or listening to new music, especially when I become like this; why I play songs on repeat to scratch the itch, and switch to a different, familiar tune when the last becomes boring. To consume new media means to consume new information and form new opinions about it.

Like my frustrated sigh before I walk to choir practice, despite the fact I know I’ll be happy once I’m there, or the grimace when I brace myself to start a shift at my job with people I love and in a space I really love, labors of love when exhausted can just feel like labor. And when the hobbies that ground you, that in a sense, define you, no longer feel like things you get to do, but rather things you have to do, then what is left?

And when things you have to do are informed not by what gives you joy, but rather things you decided you have to do, then how are you any better than the mannequin of an existence Fleabag describes? But rather than the invisible hand of God, you’re being pulled by expectations set by influencers who live drastically different lives to you, who push a culture that never treasures the art of boredom or life sat still and is infused with overconsumption. A life that makes every day another hill to push a stone up over, another challenge to overcome in fear that we’ll waste our years of youth and sit in regret.

Regret is not a challenge you can buy yourself out of, or slap a challenge over. Regret, in its simplest form, is a failure. Failure is final. All you can do is push forwards from it and make peace with the fact that beating yourself over it only wastes what little time you have left.

So, I’m entering 2025 as a version of myself that feels radically different than how I entered 2024. That’s the goal, right? To grow. It’s the underlying thesis of the twenty-four goals written underneath “New Years Resolutions:” to maximize productivity, create routines, build systems, eat cleaner, journal, meditate, grow, and grow, and grow oftentimes without a clear direction, but because you must, because that means you’re winning.

To be driven, to grow, and to push for growth is how you ought to live life, and so, I don’t mean to oversimplify my point by demonizing productivity culture and the overwhelming saturation of content providing advice and solutions for people achieving their goals. I have lofty hopes: I’m pursuing an incredibly interdisciplinary research topic, I want to get an MD-PhD, and I juggle quite a few commitments on top of academics (which are a priority for me too).

But towards the end of 2024, every day felt like a new hill. And some of the challenges I faced changed parts of my identity that I didn’t realize were really all that important.

Even if I hole myself in for a break and recharge; backwards walk into and zip up the skin suit; let my creativity thaw, and find my joy in the smallest of beauties, like a December rain or a the smoky scent of a January morning; even if I shook off the sadness from my coat and removed my wet socks, I feel unbalanced at the start of this new year in the same way I’d imagine an onion feels when placed in a pot of water. To set down new roots and allow a stalk to spring up from the center. Not uprooted in the conventional sense, but stepping into a year of change without a full grasp of the girl I’m running away from.

“And I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end. Anyway I’m still scared. Why am I still scared?"

It used to be my fear of stagnancy that primarily drove my insatiable desire to change. I was afraid that if I didn’t remind myself every week that I needed to be better, I would simply never learn, never open the news, never read a book, just continue to sit in my cycle of “I’ve always wanted to” do [X] and…never try.

And so, I wrote twenty-point-long to-do lists that went relatively unmarked or created ornate notion pages that went forgotten for 2/3 of the year, digging my heels in other form of procrastination that whispered promises of growth, but just went forgotten in my notes app. And I hated my exhaustion, adding more things to the to-do list to catch up, to punish myself for failing. In the end, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. I just felt guilty.

But it’s okay, because it has to be, because I cannot change what has already happened, and luckily, I get eighty more of these start-overs to agonize over choices and write down large hopes.

On New Years Eve, I took a walk in the brisk late afternoon with my friend, and the sky was a gorgeous periwinkle. It wasn’t cold enough for our breaths to fog up (unfortunately climate change has robbed me of New England October snowstorms and consistently white winters), but we sat by a pond nearby my house. Spare the occasional car that drove past, the neighborhood was quiet, and save for the few neighbors rushing into their homes from their cars or cleaning out the garage for the new year, we were the only ones outside as the evening of New Years Eve approached. She smoked a cigarette, and I took photos of her by the pond, despite being a mediocre photographer.

It was calm and not weighed down by the normal melancholy that follows a winter walk. I did not know that this would be possibly some of my last moments with this friend, and I almost took it as an omen for healing in the new year. When you’re desperate and tired and counting down days to the next big thing, it’s easy to elevate mundane moments to deeper meanings.

When she called me in line to a plane I had no clue she was taking despite dropping her off at the train station just earlier that day, I refused to make it an omen for the next year. I hope she’s okay. I hope she knows I love her like a sister I never had.

Just as I thought I had swum out of my depressive episode, these past few days I have felt the water lick at my ankles and threaten to pull me back in along with the sand I place my feet on.

It doesn’t matter that endings and beginnings stamp regular, mundane days and happen at inopportune times and sometimes overlap with each other, something about formally written in ends and beginnings in the changing of the years provide a small solace in its reminder that we ourselves can forge these opening and closings of chapters in our life. It’s promising and hopeful, and while I love a laundry list of new year’s resolutions like the next person, this new beginning feels like unstable footing. Parhaps that’s why you’re watching this video too.

I think the New Year scares me because it so starkly reminds me that I have limited control, and at the very least, I knew myself, and that was 60% of the equation. But I do not know the person I am stepping into 2025 as. cannot tell you if she’s better than the one I stepped into 2024, or how she defines the line between forgiveness and self-respect. I do not know what will give her purpose this year, what gives her joy. I do not know if she’ll find herself pulled back into the sea. I do not know if she’ll lose herself again.

Just because I swam to shore once, can I be sure I won’t get trapped in the undercurrents? How can I trust that I’ll get back to the dry sand, when every time it’s easier to fall into the water and it’s harder to keep myself afloat?

Because it is exhausting to be a human. It’s exhausting to show up every day and learn new information and form opinions and to keep up with the news of genocides and killings and presidents who have no respect for most of the country he is set to govern. It is exhausting to constantly have things to say and to show up and be there for other people. It’s exhausting, and liberating, and beautiful, and I am so, so tired.

I’m tired of breaking up my sleep in hopes that I won’t snooze the alarm. I’m tired of picking myself apart and making every day a hill I just have to get to the top of, or at least not buckle under the weight of the boulder I’m too tired to push up. I’m tired of being strong and worrying about whether I’m healing the right way. I’m tired of doing the emotional labor of being a human, even if I know it is a privilege, even if I check the closet doors every night to make sure I’m not robbed of it.

So, on my laundry list of new year’s resolutions to actually learn how to crochet (I’ve had bundles of yarn sitting on my dorm room floor for months), or to adapt habits I’ve been “trying” to incorporate for years, or to write, I think of my friend by the lake with her cigarette. I think of the then-smoky January dusk, and I steal a resolution from her, scrawling at the bottom of my title page in squished print: “Try 5 types of chocolates.”

I think, at the very least, I can manage that.

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