When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I hated when people brushed me off because of my age and I resented the fact that people thought I couldn’t possibly know anything because I hadn’t been alive for as long as they have. Now that I’m in my early 30s, I’d like to think I’m still young enough to understand the young adults’ plight but old enough to understand how much I didn’t know back then. Still, even if for only a moment, I’d become the type of older adult that I’d once resented.

As an adolescent, and even as a young adult, it’s almost expected that your thoughts and opinions will be treated like silly little whims by people older than you. “You’ll get it when you’re older,” they’d say. “You’re too young to understand.” I think most of us have felt the frustration of being written off like that, so why do so many of us become that kind of older adult? Is it because we’ve forgotten what that feels like? Is it because those sentiments turned out to be true, despite how much our younger selves didn’t want to believe it?

A few weeks ago, I came across this note on my feed:

Upon reading it, I was simultaneously in agreement with its author and absolutely flabbergasted by the realization that I’m apparently old enough to agree with such a sentiment.

I, too, was one of those young adults once. I started a blog when I was 22 years old. I was 2 years out of college and totally at a loss for what to do with my life. There was nothing else for me to do but write, so that’s what I did. I wrote to figure out what I was feeling. I wrote to make sense of it all. And when I moved across the country later that year, I used my blog to document my experiences and share everything I learned along the way.

That blog fizzled out in my mid-20s, in part thanks to the pandemic, but also because I’d become much more settled by that point of my life. Sure, there were still plenty of things I’d yet to experience for the first time, but by that point, I’d checked quite a few of them off the list. Eventually, you reach a point where the shininess and newness of everything wears off, and life just feels like a thing you do every day.

When I read these essays by 23-year-olds experiencing things for the very first time, I’m reminded of my own fledgling adulthood—when everything was new and confusing and unfamiliar; when even the most seemingly mundane realizations felt wildly profound. Sometimes, I read these essays and I envy them. Not for living through such a defining period of their lives in a post-pandemic world—I sure as hell don’t envy them for that—but because they have all the time in the world to figure their shit out and they don’t even know it!

Despite their lack of lived experience, there’s a lot we can learn from younger adults. What they lack in experience, they make up for in audacity and boldness, qualities that we sometimes forget how to tap into as we grow older. They also tend to see things in ways that we don’t, in part because their brains are still rapidly developing, but also because of the events and the culture that colored their formative years.

That said, as I grow older, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the fact that there truly are things that only time and experience can teach us. Now, I can’t help but marvel at how little I knew when I was 23. I was so certain about things that never came to pass, but simultaneously so uncertain about my own sense of self. I was impulsive and wildly idealistic and made a lot of questionable decisions. I’d look back at my teenage self and laugh about how she didn’t have a clue, and I did so without the knowledge that a future version of myself would one day do the same.

Even so, I wouldn’t change a thing. After all, it’s the job of a fledgling adult to believe they have all the answers while remaining blissfully unaware of how young they still are. They’re supposed to be brash and bold, making decisions without fully considering the consequences and agonize over running out of time despite their having plenty of it. As for the rest of us—the more seasoned adults, if you will—it’s our job to look at those gorgeous young people in awe and wonder as they carve out a place for themselves in the world; to quietly watch over them while they figure it all out.

I hope that as I continue my unceasing march through life, I don’t forget how it all felt—the freedom and the agony of my early 20s, the exploration and the confusion of my mid-to-late 20s, the puzzling in-betweenness of my early 30s. I hope that in my encounters with people younger than me, I consider their age as context rather than a reason for outright dismissal.

I’m only 32 years old, so I have to assume that there’s still a lot that I still don’t know. But I do know this: in the same way that I’m marveling at my 23-year-old self, which is the same way that she marveled at my teenage self, a 45-year-old version of me will be doing the exact same thing to the me of now.

Oh, what a beautiful cycle it is.

TL;DR—

I don’t know about you, but I can’t quite wrap my mind around the fact that it’s 2026. It may have something to do with the fact that I’ve been rotting in my home since Christmas Eve and am only vaguely aware of what day of the week it is.

This is my third year in a row taking the time off between Christmas and the New Year and I still don’t know how I feel about it. On one hand, it’s nice to finish out the year with a break where I don’t have to think about work. However, this is the kind of time off that encourages hedonistic lazing. For the last week and a half, I’ve been entirely fueled by decaf coffee, Christmas sweets, and the occasional breakfast sandwich. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s not a lot going on in the ol’ noggin at the moment, so I figured I’d put together my second annual write-up of media I’ve enjoyed throughout the year.

2025 in books:

Honestly, 2025 wasn’t a stellar reading year for me. I read 24 books, many of which I certainly enjoyed, but there weren’t very many standouts. There were, however, a couple worth mentioning:

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami – This was my favorite book of the year and the only book I’ve rated 5 stars on Storygraph since I started logging books at the beginning of 2024. It was a quick read but it absolutely gutted me. My review of the book immediately after reading it was that it “ripped my heart to shreds for 173 pages and managed to put it back together again in the last 2.” It’s a story of two students who are bullied by their classmates that explores the idea of whether there is meaning to be found in suffering.

“I wasn't crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa – This deeply unsettling dystopian fable follows an unnamed woman on an unnamed island where things regularly disappear. Once those things disappear, they are entirely forgotten by nearly everyone. The few who remember become targets of the Memory Police. It’s not a plot-forward book by any means. It explores memory and loss and the grief of it all, but it’s also so much more than that. It was a truly fascinating read despite it leaving me with more questions than answers by the end. My immediate thought upon finishing the book was that its unsatisfying end was satisfying because of its lack of satisfaction.

“A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much.”

2025 in music:

I genuinely didn’t think 2025 could possibly top 2024 for new releases in a single year, but I think it did. In addition to some killer new releases, I revisited a lot of my old favorites throughout the year. Despite the fact that I’m a certified Playlist Girlie™ (to the extent that people ask me to make playlists for their events), I made it a point to listen to more full albums in 2025. These are the ones that defined the year for me:

• I Love My Computer by Ninajirachi (2025) – The first time I heard this album I knew it was going to be my album of the year. It’s a electronic dance record that’s crunchy, catchy, and cohesive and it sonically tickles my brain in all the right ways. No skips, songs that flow into one another, and a killer closing track? What more could I ask for?

  • Favorite Tracks: All At Once, All I Am, Battery Death, Delete, Fuck My Computer

• LUX by Rosalía (2025) – This might not have been my album of the year but it was definitely the album of the year. This is a very close #2 for the year. Admittedly, I was not familiar with her game until listening to this album. It’s absolutely incredible: she pairs lush orchestral instrumentation with catchy pop vocal melodies, and does it in over a dozen languages.

  • Favorite Tracks: Magnolias, La Yugular, La Rumba del Perdón, Reliquia, Divinize, Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti, Jeanne

• Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party by Hayley Williams (2025) – Miss Williams did it again. Honestly it was kind of diabolical how she originally released this entire album as singles before it officially became an album. I loved that we, the listeners, could arrange the songs however we’d like and essentially build our own album with them. I kind of wish she’d kept it that way, mostly because my only real complaint about this album is that it felt too long and thus some of the tracks on the back half fell flat for me. But there is phenomenal songwriting on this album and plenty of tracks I know I’ll be coming back to again and again.

  • Favorite Tracks: Parachute, Mirtazapine, Ice In My OJ, Hard, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, Good Ol’ Days

• Breakfast in America by Supertramp (1979) – I’ve loved Supertramp since I was little—my parents had their greatest hits album The Very Best of Supertramp and I listened to it a lot growing up. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I actually listened to Breakfast in America in full (I believe my parents gave me their vinyl copy of the record after I got my first turntable). The vibes? Immaculate. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to feel sad while listening to this, and bringing it back into the album rotation has been such a joy for me.

  • Favorite Tracks: Take The Long Way Home, Goodbye Stranger, The Logical Song, Breakfast In America, Child of Vision

• Music From Before The Storm by Daughter (2017) – I think I listened to this for the first time in early 2020. For some reason, it reminds me of this long weekend trip my husband and I took to Lincoln City when we still lived in Oregon. It’s a soundtrack for the video game Life Is Strange: Before The Storm, which I know absolutely nothing about. But this album is beautiful and ethereal and just a wonderful listening experience all around.

  • Favorite Tracks: The Right Way Around, All I Wanted, Voices, Glass, Flaws

• Honorable Mentions: Narrow Stairs by Death Cab for Cutie (2008), K1 by kmoe (2025), Addison by Addison Rae (2025)

• Singles/EPs: Sunshine When It Rains/See The World by Olēka, House feat. John Cale by Charli xcx

2025 in movies & shows:

I’m not a TV or film buff by any stretch. I said it in last year’s recap and I’ll say it again: I tend to favor rewatching the same things over and over again over watching things that are new to me. I’m not entirely sure why I’m like this, given that it’s not the case for me with any other type of media, but I digress. I will say that this year was pretty eventful as far as TV goes. Here were some of my notable watches of 2025:

• The Summer I Turned Pretty (2021-2025) – When I first found out that Jenny Han’s book series of the same name was being adapted into a TV show, I lost my freaking mind because a much younger version of myself absolutely adored these books. So naturally, I was locked in for the much anticipated release of S3. As fun as it was to flame the show’s protagonist, Belly Conklin, for making painfully terrible decisions that led to her getting tangled up in a love triangle between brothers for the first two seasons, I loved watching this last chapter (or so we thought) of her journey unfold. Like Belly, I once was a Messy Girl™ so I really resonated with her character arc and coming of age story (as well as her questionable decision making). This show’s third season also happened to be one of many pieces of media that contributed to what some are coining the year of the yearner. (After all, who among romance enjoyers doesn’t love watching a fictional man pine?)

• Marry My Husband: Japan (2025) – I’d already read the Webtoon and watched the K-Drama adaptation in 2024, so when a Japanese adaptation of the show dropped, I was all over it. This show follows a woman who, after discovering her husband and best friend are having an affair, travels back in time and tries to change her fate. I loved this adaptation and (this might be a hot take) prefer it over its K-Drama counterpart. This version felt grittier and more raw, which I liked. There were some changes to the story that I felt elevated it, which was great because it made a story that was pretty familiar feel new in some ways. What else I found interesting about this adaptation is that it actually acknowledges the pandemic and its impact, which is so rare for media that has been released since then.

• Moneyball (2011) – My husband loves this movie and has been trying to get me to watch it for years. Unfortunately for him, I’m the kind of person who is less inclined to watch something the more people insist on it. I always knew I’d get around to watching it eventually. When that day finally came, all I knew about this film was that it’s about baseball and statistics: two things that I don’t care very much about. I ended up really enjoying it. I love an underdog story, after all. A bonus for me was that the film used my favorite song off a post-rock album I’ve loved for many years—The Mighty Rio Grande by This Will Destroy You—as part of its score. It’s the kind of song that works really well in amplifying emotional moments. All in all, a great movie.

• Heated Rivalry (2025) – I genuinely thought The Summer I Turned Pretty was going to be my big show of the year until Heated Rivalry came crashing through the proverbial wall a la Kool Aid Man. The last month and a half has been such a blur that I genuinely have no idea how I came to be aware of this show, but as someone who has been in and out of the slashfic trenches since 2013, I had a feeling that a show about gay rival hockey players who fall in love would be right up my alley. I went into it with low expectations and was absolutely blown away by how well done it was, considering the show’s low budget and short filming time. The haters will tell you it’s little more than gay porn, and sure, the show does initially lure in viewers with sex scenes that leave little to the imagination. But what hooked me and kept me watching was how lovable and real the characters were, as well as how beautifully the romance between the main characters unfolded throughout the show’s six episodes. (It’s the yearning, y’all.)

One of my favorite things about going into a new year is the possibility of it all. There’s such a feeling of wonder and excitement that comes from knowing that there are so many undiscovered songs that could become my new favorites, films and shows I’ve yet to watch that’ll make me cry, and unread books profound enough to completely alter my brain chemistry.

This year, I’m very much looking forward to finding out what some of those are.

I don’t know what it was about that particular morning, but something clicked for me—I realized that it was entirely within my power to change that narrative by simply doing something.

As soon as I finished my pages, I went onto my laptop, chose a date in early October, and booked a single night at a hotel in Ithaca without a second thought. Did I have any semblance of a plan? Absolutely not. That, I decided, was something for future me to figure out.

When that October day finally rolled around, autumn foliage was nearly at its peak. I figured this would be a great time to explore the gorges in the area and spend some time with myself out in nature. The last time I went on a solo excursion like this must’ve been sometime in 2018, and I’d forgotten how liberating it feels. I have no one to answer to, I don’t spend my entire time worrying about whether everyone around me is having a good time, and I can follow my whims at will.

The day before my departure, I decided I’d stop at Watkins Glen and explore. Having grown up in the Finger Lakes, I’d been there many times before, but rarely have I gone during the autumn months. The gorge is incredible and the waterfalls are abundant on the first mile of the trail. It’s after the one mile point that a lot of visitors turn around, having already seen all the waterfalls and experienced the more dramatic scenery.

It’s a shame, too, because although the landscape transforms into something a bit more understated, it’s still beautiful in its own way. The trail quiets, the foliage becomes more lush, the sound of the waterfalls fades and left in its wake is the soft murmur of the stream that flows through the gorge. It’s my favorite part of the hike, especially during autumn.

Hours later, I’d find myself holed up in my hotel room, cocooned in the blindingly white bedding, my face wet with tears. I was alone, overwhelmed, and frustrated that I couldn’t seem to sleep. It wasn’t that I was unhappy or that I was having a bad time—all in all, it was a great day. It was more that the discomfort of being on my own outside the confines of my safe and comfortable bubble had hit me all at once.

For a moment, I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way. I mean, I once up and moved across the country simply because I felt like it. There was a version of me who had absolutely no qualms about disappearing into the woods alone for days at a time. Yet, I was this rattled by half a day on my own away from home? Had the years transformed me into the type of person I swore I’d never become?

I was in the midst of self-pity when a long-forgotten memory emerged from some dark, dusty corner of my mind: me, the day I left everything I knew behind to move to Oregon, sobbing in a hotel bathroom in Indiana. Being nearly nine years removed from that day, it was easy to forget how terrified I was during that transition; that amidst the excitement and wonder of it all was an undertone of discomfort and uncertainty.

It was in that moment of reminiscence that it occurred to me that there’s nothing wrong with doing something scared. There’s nothing wrong with crying when I’m facing something unfamiliar or uncomfortable. What matters is that I have the courage to do those things despite the fear and the unease.

I woke the next morning feeling much lighter.

The only thing on my agenda for the day was a visit to Robert H. Treman State Park—a park I’ve only ever visited as a small child and have very little memory of.

This place was absolutely incredible. It was as if I’d been transported into a fantasy setting. Shortly into the hike, the gorge opened up into what felt like a canyon and the sheer immensity of it left me awestruck. The rock formations towered above and the rumble of a waterfall echoed off the walls of the gorge.

I sat by the waterfall for a half hour or so, appreciating the beauty of the surrounding landscape. There were a couple of other people nearby, one simply enjoying the view, another drawing the waterfall in her small sketchbook.

Later, I made my way over to Taughannock Falls, an old favorite of mine. The gorge trail is short but beautiful nonetheless. The sun had begun to lower, painting the trees along the rim of the gorge a vibrant orange. One of my favorite things about returning to these nearby marvels is witnessing people experience them for the first time. The wonder and awe is almost palpable. It reminds me how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place.

I returned home renewed. Although short, this trip was everything I needed it to be—a temporary escape from the monotony of everyday life and an opportunity to spend some time with myself.

Pit Stops:

Autumn Leaves Used Books: A charming used bookstore on the commons. They have a wide assortment of both new and used books, and also have vinyl records for sale downstairs.

Thompson and Bleecker: A small Italian restaurant offering Neapolitan style pizza and other delicious fare. I had the Margherita and it was delicious.

Hound and Mare: A cute, quiet café known for its breakfast sandwiches. They also had a variety of baked goods. I had my regular go-to: egg and cheese on an everything bagel.

Odyssey Bookstore: A cozy independent bookstore with a small but impressive selection of books.

The crux of my persistent desire for more is that I also happen to be extremely prone to inertia. Inertia, in a non-physics context, is defined as “lack of activity or interest, or unwillingness to make an effort to do anything.” Newton’s first law of motion tells us that an object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will remain at rest, unless said object is acted upon by an external force.

For quite awhile now I’ve been running in circles. I’ll feel wholly convinced that I’m getting somewhere, but when I take a moment to observe my surroundings I’ll realize that I’ve already been here before. I feel bound to the path I’m on, and sometimes I fear I don’t have it in me to escape it on my own.

The longer things seem to remain unchanged, the more restless I become. Restlessness, I’ve learned, serves a distinct purpose; it’s an invitation for movement. Most of the time, 30 minutes of exercise will scratch the itch well enough. Other times, it’s that I simply need to get out of the house and be around people who aren’t my husband. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t matter what I do—the restlessness becomes demanding to the point that I’m unable to easily placate it. It’s only then that I realize that perhaps it’s time for meaningful change in my life.

The inertia, however, is what gets in the way. It’s a perpetual feeling of stuckness; like I’m walking through waist-deep quicksand. And to my dismay, I am both the quicksand and the person trying to tread through it. For as long as I can remember, making any sort of significant life change has been something that I do excruciatingly slowly—think years, not months.

I used to be a server, and my last serving job before escaping the industry altogether was at a well known Asian chain restaurant (that once was hilariously confused with the host city of the 2018 Winter Olympics). I was somewhere around 7 or 8 months into my tenure there when I first had the overwhelming urge to quit and seek greener pastures. There were multiple instances where I was absolutely certain that I would.

I vividly remember leaving one of my shifts feeling so beaten down that I’d resolved to give my notice the next day. I had no plan, no clue what would happen next, and no qualms about the risk of quitting without something else lined up. That’s how relieving the prospect of quitting that job was. The lightness I felt on the drive home that day was indescribable—all my windows were rolled down as I coasted home, doing 75 on the freeway, “American Girl” by Tom Petty blasting through the shitty speakers of my Honda Accord. It was euphoric.

As you can probably guess, I did not give my notice the next day, and wouldn’t for at least two more years. By the time I finally got around to it, I’d spent that long hating working there—and doing it very loudly. People would sometimes ask me, “Hannah, why do you still work there if you hate it so much? There are plenty of other restaurants you could work at instead.” Every time, I’d tell them that when I weighed my options, I decided I’d rather remain in familiar hell (albeit with amazing coworkers) than face the unknown. Better the devil you know, right?

I’d like to think that most of us have a story like that; one where we find ourselves feeling stagnant, biding our time in a situation that we fervently dislike for far longer than we should. Of course, there are plenty of good enough reasons not to change things. It could be a matter of security and safety, or of practicality. Maybe the time isn’t right, or we’re feeling unstable in other areas of our lives. Sometimes, however, it’s as simple as fearing the unknown and allowing that fear to stand in our way.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve experienced an awakening of sorts. It’s become increasingly clear that I’ve spent the last several years coasting through life, simply allowing it to happen to me. I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the idea of remaining on the path I’m on, but I stay the course because it’s a path I’ve come to intimately know. The running in circles? It’s comfortable. Easy. Safe.

All this time, I think I’ve been waiting for some force outside myself to propel me onto a different path. But the reality is this: I’m not an object on a fixed path—I am a woman with free will, and if I truly want to change my trajectory, it’s up to me to do it.

The images featured in this post are from Geloy Concepcion’s project, “Things you wanted to say but never did.” You can find his work on Instagram.

“The work reveals itself as you go.”
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

The year is 2011. I’m a starry eyed freshman in college, eager to immerse myself in my music education and pursue my dream of becoming a professional musician. I walk into my first master class—my major’s small group lessons for songwriting and composition where we shared our work for critique and workshopping—and my professor, a whimsical sort of guy, had a bunch of random paper paraphernalia taped onto his walls. It was exactly the type of wall clutter you’d expect from a jazz musician whose primary instrument is the vibraphone. The one that stood out to me the most, however, was a quote he’d typed up in Microsoft Word in all caps and printed onto a piece of copy paper:

INSPIRATION IS FOR AMATEURS

Every Wednesday for an entire school year, I walked into his classroom for my master class and my eyes were automatically drawn to that particular quote on his wall. Every time I saw it, I wanted to tear it down and scream, “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!” Those words haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. It’s been nearly 14 years since then, and I still haven’t stopped thinking about them. Ironically, I tend to agree with that sentiment now. That 17-year-old version of myself would be appalled, but frankly, she was too young to know any better. It would be years before I’d learn the full context of that quote, and years after that before I’d truly understand what it meant.

The clever quip that plagued my thoughts for so many years came from an interview with visual artist Chuck Close:1

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

In Inside the Painter's Studio—a series of interviews with 24 artists—the interviewer, artist Joe Fig asks Close, “Do you have a motto or creed that as an artist you live by?”

Close answers by saying again that “Inspiration is for amateurs,” but he then continues on to share that he also lives by “the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.”

This, I’ve gathered, is a fairly common sentiment among artists. In the same book, Eric Fischl expresses something similar: “My discipline is that I try to work on a regular basis rather than in spurts. I certainly don’t wait around for inspiration!” Joe Fig himself says, “Something that’s very important to me is the idea—it was also scared into me at undergraduate school—that you have to keep working. Just get into your studio and always be making something. Even if it’s crap, finish it and then make something else. But always be working. You can’t just sit there staring at the walls waiting for inspiration. Creative thoughts come while you are creating.” Even Picasso (allegedly) had something to say on the topic: “Inspiration exists, but it must find you working.”

During the third and final year of my music undergrad, one of my professors was a pretty eccentric musician who also happened to be the lead singer of the Spin Doctors. He, too, had a similar outlook on the creative process. When I was in his master class, he held up one of his cheap spiral notebooks—the kind you used to be able to get at Walmart for under a dollar—filled with lyrics and told us that he had dozens more where that one came from, and that most of them were filled with shitty songs. His credo was this: in order to create something really good, you have to create a lot of shit too.

Anyone who’s ever gone to any sort of art school knows that these types of programs often force prolificity out of its students, sometimes to the point of overwhelm. If I brought the same song to master class three weeks in a row, I was definitely getting some side eye from my professors (and my classmates) because by that point it was expected that I’d be working on something new. During my three years as a music major, I wrote some really bad songs that never saw the light of day beyond my master classes and the occasional composition seminar. However, I also wrote some of my best songs during that time. Because I had no other choice but to keep writing or fail my classes, waiting around for inspiration was never really an option.

I think much of why I rebuked the notion that “inspiration is for amateurs” is because I’d lived most of my life allowing inspiration to guide my creative process. When I was young, it felt like I found inspiration everywhere I looked because back then, nearly everything was new and unfamiliar to me. There was so much I was experiencing for the very first time. There was a sort of rawness and intensity to adolescence and young-adulthood that required creative expression to even survive it.

Eventually, that intensity would fade. Now that I’m in my early 30s, the novelty and newness of everything has long worn off and that seemingly bottomless well of inspiration has dried up. I finally understand how fleeting and unreliable it is as a means of driving creativity. Despite knowing this, I still tend to fall into the trap of waiting around for inspiration to strike—for the perfect idea or concept to magically materialize inside my brain. This, of course, isn’t exactly conducive to a rich creative life; if anything, it stifles it. As a result, I’ve become quite detached from my own sense of creativity over the past few years.

And so, in mid-June, I decided to dive into The Artist’s Way. I won't go too far into detail, but the TL;DR of it is that it's a 12-week course meant to help people rekindle their creativity. There’s a lot that goes into completing The Artist’s Way, but one of the most important exercises is what author Julia Cameron calls the Morning Pages. Every morning, you wake up and before doing anything else, you write three pages of, well, whatever. It’s essentially stream-of-consciousness journaling, and its purpose is to clear the clutter from your mind in order to make space for creative thinking. The important thing is that you acknowledge and accept that the Morning Pages aren’t at all meant to be perfect (or even good, for that matter) which means you must learn to turn off your inner critic while writing them. It’s difficult at first, but not impossible.

A lot of the time, my pages are little more than unhinged nonsense:

“I’M ALLOWED TO WRITE WHATEVER I WANT ITS MY DAILY PAGES NOBODY IS READING THEM (NOT EVEN ME) AND NO ONE IS HOLDING A GUN TO MY HEAD DEMANDING I BE THE 2025 VERSION OF SYLVIA PLATH!

LETS NOT BE SYLVIA — DIDN’T SHE STICK HER HEAD IN AN OVEN OR SOMETHING?

I DON’T REMEMBER. FIG TREE METAPHOR.”2

But sometimes, coherent thoughts emerge amidst the chaos:

“I want to get writing but I frankly cannot start without getting absorbed. But then again, maybe it’s healthier for me to spend only a little bit of time on something instead of burning myself out by furiously writing for 5-10 hours (depending on the day) and then not touching it again for weeks. I really do everything in extremes, don't I?”

I never would’ve thought it in the realm of possibility, but I’ve somehow managed to do my Morning Pages every single day (albeit not always first thing in the morning and not always three pages worth) and have done so for over seven weeks now. At first, I didn’t think it was doing anything for me; it felt more like a chore than anything. It took a few weeks for me to realize it, but I now understand that the writing itself isn’t the most important part. It’s the showing up—the act of putting my pen to the page every day whether I’m “feeling it” or not—that matters most.

Sometimes, the insights I glean from these pages are merely informational; if there’s something that comes up repeatedly, I figure it’s my subconscious mind trying to tell me something. Other times, ideas that come up while doing my Morning Pages turn out to be ideas that I want to expand on in my writing. Through this practice, I’ve come up with more ideas than I ever thought imaginable, and the thought of transforming those ideas into something tangible doesn’t feel as daunting as it did before. There has been nothing more integral to my reconnecting with my creativity than this simple act of showing up every single day. Hell, I wouldn’t be here writing this very essay without it.

For weeks, I’d been trying to figure out what my next post should be about. It’s been a constant topic in my Morning Pages. Maybe I should write about online identity, I’d write. Maybe I should write about my own journey with The Artist’s Way. Or maybe I should just do what everyone else is doing and write about my gripes with genAI. I’d occasionally elaborate more on my ideas when they came up, but more often than not, I’d simply move onto my next errant thought. I suppose I hoped that if I thought about it enough, I’d eventually come to an epiphany and suddenly know exactly what to write. To my dismay, that didn’t happen.

Soon enough, I would have the epiphany I was waiting for, except it wasn’t the perfect essay idea that struck me. Instead, I realized that I wasn’t going to get anywhere without actually writing something. So, that’s what I did. I settled on the idea I had that appealed to me the most and simply started writing about it. My original intent was to ponder the question, “If I’m not online, do I even exist?” I churned out over 700 words and it ended up being more about the idea of logging off in general than it was about the original question, so I scrapped it. Then, I wrote a few hundred more words that were much more relevant to the topic at hand, but I ended up scrapping that, too. Out of nowhere, I had a visual flashback to that stupid quote on my professor’s wall, and the words started pouring out of me.

In a way, it did feel like lightning struck my brain. However, it only happened that way because I’d created the conditions necessary for it by doing the work; by engaging in the process of creating something without giving too much thought to the end result. In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin writes,

“When inspiration does arrive, it is invariably energizing. But it is not something to rely on. An artistic life cannot be built solely around waiting. Inspiration is out of our control and can prove hard to find. Effort is required and invitations are to be extended.”

More and more, I’m realizing that creativity isn't necessarily about outcomes. Yes, the feeling of accomplishment we get when we complete something we're proud of certainly can propel us forward, but the heart of creativity is the process. It's the two completely unrelated drafts I started and abandoned that somehow led to this one. It’s spending two days writing a dozen mediocre lines before coming up with the one that would make the bridge of my unfinished song punch the listener in the gut. It’s showing up every day to create something. Anything. Even if it’s total garbage. Because eventually, you’ll come up with something that isn’t.

Through the practice of Morning Pages, I’ve come to witness firsthand the magic of creation, the serendipity of how an idea can materialize through the work itself. It’s funny, in a way, that after all this time, I’ve come to truly understand the wisdom of Close’s words by undergoing the very process he was describing. Of course, this is only one essay, and I’m still finding my footing when it comes to cultivating a daily creative practice. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: to do the work is to put yourself in the way of inspiration—to give yourself the opportunity to find it instead of waiting around for it to find you.

I also hate my iPhone. It’s always there, lurking within a four foot radius, begging for my attention. I have more information in my pocket than I could ever possibly need in a lifetime. It gives me the illusion of social connection without the benefits of actual connection. There are ads everywhere. There’s garbage AI content everywhere. Every app has its own TikTok-esque feature for some reason. You can scroll forever and not run out of things to look at. And for every app I’m trying to use less, there’s a team of people actively working to get me to use them more.

My iPhone is practically glued to my person. I can’t even go the bathroom for 32 seconds without compulsively reaching for my phone first. In the last month, I’ve spent an average of 5 hours a day on my phone, and that’s on the lower end for me. Historically, it’s been much higher. If my screen time were to remain as it is now for the rest of my life, I’ll have spent over a decade of that time on my phone. A decade! A few hours of screen time a day doesn’t seem so insidious until you zoom out and view it in the context of your entire life; then, it becomes absolutely terrifying.

For years, I’ve been trying to find the happy medium between chronically online and virtually unknowable, and never had any meaningful success. After the screen time feature became available on Apple devices, I tried using downtime and screen time limits to reduce my phone usage. It worked for a week or so, but then I got into the habit of bypassing the limits thus making the whole endeavor pointless. I tried using those same features with a passcode that only my partner knew. That was a bit more effective, but when I finally resorted to begging him to turn the passcode off, he did it.

I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, only to redownload them again whenever I felt like it. I’ve tried changing my social media passwords to random gibberish before deleting the apps in order to add an extra step to logging back into them. That kind of worked, but never for very long. I’ve tried turning my phone to grayscale. I simply disabled it. I’ve given my home screens a totally boring makeover to make them entirely gray, icons and all. Did it look cool as hell? Absolutely. It still didn’t deter me from doomscrolling, though. I once managed to go 108 days without social media while still regularly using my iPhone. To this day, I still have no idea where I managed to find that kind of willpower, and I’ve yet to find it again since. Despite the fact that my life remained virtually the same during those 3½ months offline, it didn’t really help change my habits in the long run.

The 2024 election and the proverbial ring-kissing that followed were what drove me to examine my relationship with technology. After the inauguration, I started getting bombarded with bad news that was sometimes accurate, but more often littered with half-truths and even blatantly incorrect. Most of it was designed to farm outrage and despair, which isn’t exactly helpful in such a precarious time. I was also getting a lot more conservative content on my feeds, even though that’d never really been the case before. I put up with about 4 weeks of that before deciding on a whim to get a “dumbphone.” I spent a couple of days doing some research on phones that worked in the U.S. and cheap plans that weren’t a total nightmare to use, and then I took the leap and bought a Nokia 2780 flip phone with a basic talk/text plan.

When my dumbphone and its SIM card finally arrived, I realized that I hadn’t really given this idea much thought. So, for the time being, I’m treating this whole ordeal as an experiment. I’m trying different things and seeing what works. The first thing I tried was leaving my iPhone at home all day and having my calls forwarded to my flip phone. At the time, we were still in the middle of kitchen renovations so our remote work and mealtimes were happening at a different location. Now that we’re back at home full time, however, that’s gotten a bit more complicated because even if my phone isn’t in my immediate vicinity, it’s still in the building. For now, I’ve been leaving it downstairs when I’m upstairs, and leaving it upstairs when I’m downstairs.

Most recently, I’ve started turning on my call forwarding right before bed and leaving my iPhone downstairs because in what world is it a good idea to stare at a device with access to all of the world’s information while you’re trying to fall asleep and immediately after you wake up? This strategy has been a game changer. If I only ever use my dumb phone for this purpose, it’ll be worth the cost because I’m sleeping better. I’m sleeping more, and I’m not starting my day with a good old doomscroll. Was I still up until 3:30am the other night? Yes, but not because I was scrolling through the horrors. Instead, I had my nose in a book that I simply couldn’t put down.

I’ve had my dumbphone for about 6 weeks now, and I’m still figuring things out. I have some things I want to try, like ditching my iPhone for a week or more just to remember how we used to live. Maybe I’ll start with just a weekend. I’d also like to leave my house with only my flip phone more often so I can be more present in my surroundings. When I think about how I used technology when growing up, I remember spending a lot of time online. However, the beauty of that era was that we could easily shut our computers off and return to the “real world.” There was a built-in sense of balance that is difficult to maintain now that we have mini-computers in our pockets at all times.

When I really think about it, it seems kind of ridiculous to have to get an entire second phone just to moderate my smartphone use, but for me, forgoing my iPhone entirely isn’t something I’m interested in right now. There are too many things I like about it; the same goes for social media. I do, however, think it’s worth trying to regain the balance that older technology allowed us. I think it’s worth embracing the quiet. The slowness of it. The ability to disconnect when we need to.

I don’t know where my dumbphone experiment will lead me, but I’m looking forward to finding out. And when I do, I’ll let you know.

The kitchen at my apartment is currently being renovated, which is great, except I haven’t been able to actually live there in over a month. My partner and I are very lucky to have a place to spend our days in the meantime, but the lack of routine has felt a bit destabilizing. Our wedding is also fast approaching, so we’ve been spending a considerable amount of time and energy working out all of the details and logistics. Not to mention the Unprecedented Times™ we’re living in, which certainly aren’t helping the cause either. Thanks to all of that, I’ve found it quite difficult to focus on pretty much anything outside of what’s absolutely necessary to get by.

Honestly, I kind of feel like Spongebob in that episode where Squidward turns the Krusty Krab into a fine dining establishment. He tells Spongebob to empty his mind of everything except for the principles of fine dining and he does. And later, when he’s commended for his exemplary service and is asked for his name, he totally melts down and it breaks his brain because he emptied his mind to the point where he only knows fine dining and breathing. Replace fine dining and breathing with wedding planning, work, and rigatoni pasta, and that’s my brain right now.

This prolonged bump in the road has put a bit of a damper on my capacity to write more this year. I do realize that it’s only early March and I still have plent of time. I also realize that I am writing more, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Either way, it’s felt a bit frustrating to say the least. There’s also a part of me that, for some reason, believes that if I don’t have something profound or valuable to say on here, it’s not even worth trying to write at all. This, of course, is categorically untrue. Nevertheless, I’m doing my best to remember that I’m not here to write Pulitzer worthy prose and it’s not my job to decide what is and isn’t valuable. I’m simply here to scratch my creative itch. That’s all. And the best way do that is to create—even if it isn’t any good.

Because I don’t have much else to say, I figure I’ll share some photos I’ve taken throughout the season. This is something I used to do on my first blog, and I’ve missed it.

We’ve had an exceptionally snowy winter, at least compared to recent years. This used to be normal. I heard a lot of complaints about it, but I personally was grateful to be spared from experiencing the six months of grey-brown winter that has become the norm here.

Someone I used to know once told me that they liked when it snowed because for better or for worse, it made things interesting. I’m starting to see their point. There are few things in this world more beautiful than a fresh blanket of snow and few things sillier than trying to carry a bunch of heavy bags across your ice-covered driveway.

Back in 2020, I bought a Canon M50 that I’d originally intended to use for capturing video. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, that didn’t happen. However, over the past couple of years, I’ve come to love using it as my “walking around camera” because it’s so much smaller and lighter than the R6 I use for work. The compact size makes me much more likely to throw it in my bag just in case. As they say, the best camera is the one you have with you.

I’ve really loved taking my camera out into the world again. In a way, the act of capturing the small beautiful things around me makes me feel like I’m coming back to myself.

Most, if not all of these photos were taken on the M50.

I’ve spent a lot of time these past few weeks watching the ducks swim. When the world feels chaotic, I’ve found that it helps calm the mind. There are a lot of migratory ducks in my area around this time of year and it’s been a joy to watch them come and go. I recently downloaded Merlin which, if you don’t know, is an app for bird identification. Not sure why I didn’t start using it sooner, since I’ve become moderately enthused by observing birds these past few years. Below is a flock of what I believe are redhead ducks.

Finishing off this collection with a sunset and a self snap. (I’d like to think that when I’m old, I’ll be grateful for having captured myself in my relative youth.)

Anyway, this post has become ‘too long for email,’ whatever that means. So, I suppose it’s about time I wrap it up. I’m still finding my footing with this Substack, so if you enjoy this type of post and also happen to feel compelled to let me know, please do.

I have a few ideas of things I want to write about in the near(ish) future. Maybe once I’m living in my apartment again I’ll be able to get my thoughts in order. In the meantime, take care of yourself, and take some time to enjoy the small things.

Despite the chaos that’s unfolding in the world, there is still so much beauty in the mundane. We need only to take the time to look for it.

Until next time,
Hannah

One day, I came across a TikTok of Dr. Sarah Hill’s TED Talk about women’s brains on birth control. Out of desperation for any sort of relief, my brain latched onto the possibility of birth control causing my depression and down the rabbit hole I went. I spent at least a week obsessively reading article after article about birth control and mental health and sought out the stories of others who quit taking their birth control and experienced an improvement in their mental health.

Then I started to question why I was taking it at all (other than my obvious desire to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, which is a pretty damn good reason on its own). My algorithm started feeding me videos disparaging birth control and talking about how horrible it is for our bodies. With every video that came across my for you page, my doubts increased. I started asking myself, What if my birth control has actually turned me into an entirely different person? What if I stop taking it and am no longer attracted to my partner? What if it’s the cause of my depression? What if I could stop taking it and feel better?

After some consideration and discussing and agreeing on alternatives with my partner, I decided to quit, just to see what would happen. It did not go well. In fact, I was an absolute wreck the entire five months I wasn’t taking it. I asked my partner to describe me during that time period and he said that I was “a lot,” “very intense,” and “normal during the day but highly emotional and distraught at night.” My moods were difficult to keep up with. I’d go from feeling elated to distraught in the blink of an eye. Every time it happened, it felt like that first big drop on a roller coaster; I could sense it was coming but couldn’t do anything to stop it. Eventually, it would escalate to the point of a weeks-long existential crisis that had me terrified to fall asleep every night.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s very normal for someone who discontinues birth control to experience mood swings as their body adjusts to the lack of hormones. I assume that was a factor for me. I’d also go out on a limb and say that the pandemic didn’t help the cause either. However, now that I’m long out of those woods, I can say with absolute certainty that the high highs, low lows, and the severe anxiety I experienced during that brief stint without birth control were the very same mood symptoms I had been living with long before I’d ever started taking it. Of course, when I decided to quit, my judgement was clouded by all the misinformation I’d been exposed to about birth control and my own desperation to not be depressed anymore.

After five months of feeling completely unhinged, I’d finally had enough and made a virtual appointment at my local Planned Parenthood to get a new birth control prescription. After I started taking it again, the difference in my mood was night and day. Was I still depressed? Yes—likely because I was undergoing a major transition in my life and, well, it was winter in Portland and I likely hadn’t seen the sun since October. Oh, and maybe because I’d been experiencing long bouts of depression with varying severity since 2009 and chronic depression tends to be cyclical.

But being back on the pill, I felt calmer. I felt stable. I was no longer being held hostage by my own fluctuating moods (and nor was my partner). Later that year, I would be diagnosed with PMDD and learn that my birth control had actually been stabilizing my mood the entire time I was on it. Now? You’ll have to pry my norenthindrone out of my dead, pregnant, or menopausal hands.

I don’t talk about this particular experience of mine very often. Frankly, I find the whole ordeal pretty embarrassing because I always thought of myself as someone who would be immune to falling for propaganda. I think most of us would like to believe that about ourselves. However, the pipeline from normal, nuanced thought to extremism is insidious. Misinformation and disinformation rely on on half-truths to feign credibility, and this is especially true for something like birth control because of real issues that exist within our healthcare system.

Women and gender diverse individuals are criminally underrepresented in medical research and often subjected to medical gaslighting, malpractice, and delayed diagnoses. Many people have horrible experiences with the side effects of certain types of birth control and struggle to get any relief from their doctors, who insist that the birth control can’t possibly be the problem. Many are given birth control without any further investigation into the distressing symptoms they’re experiencing. Not to mention the very ugly history of unethical medical experimentation on and forced sterilization of Black and Indigenous people in the U.S. that contributes to a rightful distrust of the system.

These are all completely valid reasons to be skeptical of our healthcare system, and there are plenty of other reasons to feel that way as well. However, they also serve as very effective fuel for the anti-birth control movement, because when disenfranchised people have nowhere else to turn, they’ll seek out people who appear to have the answers they so desperately seek. Most of the time, the ones with the “answers” are people who aren’t even remotely qualified to be giving anyone any sort of medical advice.

In the five years since my own disastrous attempt to quit birth control, the anti-birth control movement has exploded. I regularly encounter people online saying that birth control is “poison” and “destroys women’s bodies” because of the side effects that many people experience while taking it. In fact, I just got into my first comment section argument in years over this very topic, because I’m of the belief that this rhetoric is dangerous and needlessly demonizes a medication that has been revolutionary for women’s autonomy.

It’s especially dangerous given the deliberate erosion of reproductive rights with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the harmful abortion laws that have since gone into effect in multiple U.S. states, and now, the new regime and the uncertainty of whether they’ll continue the trend or leave things as is (which is still not good, by the way).

Perhaps the most frustrating part of this is that the average “birth control is poison” believer in an Instagram comment section means well and truly believes that they’re helping people by spreading this gospel. More likely than not, they’ve had a bad experience themselves—maybe even a life threatening one—and don’t want anyone else to go through what they did.

However, there’s a world of difference between saying, “Hey, there are side effects and risks you should be aware of before deciding to take this medication” and “Birth control is poison and will destroy your body.” It is entirely possible to talk about our negative experiences with birth control without writing it off entirely. It’s possible to not want to take birth control without demanding the same of others. Hell, it’s even possible to not believe in contraception at all without forcing that belief onto others. (First Amendment who??)

While the average anti-birth control crusader may be well-intentioned, there’s no denying that there’s a deliberate effort to turn people away from hormonal contraception, instead promoting a variety of “natural” methods as the alternative. To each their own, obviously, but let’s not pretend that there isn’t an ulterior motive for sowing distrust in certain types of birth control. For some, it’s religous belief. For others, it’s that plus a sprinkle of blatant disdain for people who dare have sex beyond the confines of marriage. As for the rest, well, they’re probably trying to sell you something—it could be a fertility tracking app, a supplement, or maybe a class on how to “balance your hormones.”

Either way, anti-birth control propaganda harms far more than it helps. We all deserve the freedom and autonomy to make our own decisions about whether we use birth control. We all deserve to be able to do so without being subjected to misinformation and fear mongering and without having our concerns dismissed by the people who are supposed to help us.

Ultimately, my experience is uniquely my own. For every person like me who feels exponentially better on birth control than off it, there’s someone who experiences the polar opposite. For every person who needs it for their own health issues, there’s another who can’t use it because of theirs. Regardless of which camp you fall into, do yourself a favor and don’t drink the kool-aid!

A post script—

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this installment of unraveling. Please note that this is not meant to be a hard hitting informational piece of journalistic quality about the anti-birth control movement.

I’m just here to share my thoughts on whatever happens to tickle my fancy at any given moment and this particular experience of mine just so happened to be the focus of this week’s brainwaves.

If I’ve said anything that’s blatantly false, do let me know. If you’d like to read more about the anti-birth control movement, here are some pieces I found interesting:

The Fight Against Birth Control Is Already Here — Slate

Inside Anti-Abortion Groups’ Campaign to Sell Women on Unreliable Birth Control “Alternatives” — Mother Jones

Contraception moves into the political spotlight — Politico Newsletter

Conservative influencers are pushing an anti-birth control message — NBC

Until next time,
Hannah

2024 in books:

I read 22 books this year. My goal for the year was to read 30, but considering my AO3 history, it’s safe to say I read far more than 30 books worth of fics on that platform alone. (Yes, I’m aware that there are people in the world who would deem that cringe. Thankfully I’m too old to care about that.)

Here are some of my notable reads of the year:

• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto – This was my favorite book of the year. It touched on grief and found family, but the heart of this story was the relationships between the characters and the idea that joy can be found even in the midst of grief and suffering and that if anything, suffering is what allows us to be able to experience true joy in the first place.

• In Five Years by Rebecca Serle – I adored Serle’s One Italian Summer and hoped that In Five Years would feel as profound, and it didn’t disappoint. This book touched me in a way that no other book has. It’s not a romance, but it is a love story, and not at all the one I’d expected.

• Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda – This was a slow read for me. Honestly, when I first finished it, I didn’t love the book, but it’s grown on me over time. I think I’ve thought more about this book than any of the others I’ve read this year. I love Rodoreda’s writing. She has a way of describing scenes that makes you feel like you’re inside a painting.

• Autumn by Ali Smith – It took me a month and a half to finish it, but I’m so glad I did. This book was a tapestry of memories, moments in time, and emotional landscapes, centered around the unlikely friendship between a centenarian and a woman decades his junior. The present-day storyline took place in the first couple of months post-Brexit and Smith did an amazing job of capturing the essence of that era (even as someone from the US, as the political rhetoric was similar here during that time).

• Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess – I bought this book on a whim, knowing nothing about it. I’m glad I went into it with no prior knowledge because apparently it’s quite controversial. It was apparently marketed as a romance between a Black woman and a conservative white man (which, I mean, it was), but it read more like a thriller to me. The ending of this book left me floored and feeling very uneasy because spoiler alert: everything is not fine and it never was!!

• Split or Swallow by Lindsay Straube – This book was absolutely insane, and quite the departure from the other books I’ve mentioned. What can I say? I have range. But I’m not at all exaggerating when I say it was an unhinged fuckfest from start to finish. If that sort of thing appeals to you, I recommend going into it knowing nothing else because it’s best read that way. It may not have been the best or most profound book I read this year, but it was certainly one of the most memorable.

• Unsphere the Stars by cocoartist – Okay, hear me out. This isn’t a book, but it’s a Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle (pre-Voldemort) time travel fanfic. Insane, I know. I would never condone this pairing in canon but this fic altered my brain chemistry and I’ll never be the same.

My 2025 goal is to read 25 books (30 felt a little lofty considering how much AO3 I read), and I want as many of them as possible to either be from the library (via Libby) or books that I already own. Whoever said collecting books and reading them are two entirely separate hobbies wasn’t kidding. My bookshelves can’t take anymore!

2024 in music:

2024 was an absolutely amazing year for new music. In 2024, I listened to more of the same music I’ve had in my ears for the last couple of years, which is mostly glitchcore/hyperpop/digicore with a dash of emo and pop-punk.

Here are some of my favorite albums I listened to this year:

• Brat by Charli xcx – Given that Charli xcx has been my top artist on Spotify for 3 of the last 4 years (and in my top 5 for all 4), this was no surprise to me. After falling in love with How I’m Feeling Now back in late 2020, I was hoping that the album that followed would deliver in a similar way. Crash was good and had some amazing tracks on it, but it was poppier than I’d have wanted. Brat was the album I wanted from her. This will probably remain one of my top albums of all time.

  
  Favorite Tracks: Sympathy is a knife, Club classics, Everything is romantic, B2b, I think about it all the time, 365, Spring breakers
  

• Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat by Charli xcx – Okay, are you surprised? You had to know it was coming. I spent all summer waiting for this remix album to drop and it didn’t disappoint when it did. There were a couple of remixes on here that I actually prefered to the originals, but I mostly enjoyed how she took these songs and transformed them into something new.

  
  Favorite Tracks: Rewind (feat. Bladee), Talk talk (feat. Troye Sivan), Everything is romantic (feat. Caroline Polachek), I think about it all the time (feat. Bon Iver), B2b (feat. Tinashe), So I (feat. AG Cook), 360 (feat. Robyn and Yung Lean)
  

• Pang by Caroline Polachek – I started listening to some of the songs off of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You: Everasking Edition and liked a handful of them, but I started poking around her catalogue and decided to listen to Pang and, well, I fell in love. It’s a beautiful, ethereal album that can easily be listened to in a single sitting.
  
  Favorite Tracks: Pang, Look At Me Now, Ocean of Tears, Hit Me Where It Hurts, Go As a Dream, Hey Big Eyes
  

• A Kiss for the Whole World by Enter Shikari – I’ve been listening to Enter Shikari since I was in high school. When they announced a handful of US tour dates, I had to get tickets to see them, even if the show was all the way in Nashville. I’d had a couple of the songs from the album turn up on my Spotify Release Radar, but didn’t listen to the entire album until this earlier this year, mostly in preparation for the show. Somehow, they’ve been able to keep putting out amazing, cohesive albums over the years while both changing up the vibes and keeping their unique sound.
  
  Favorite Tracks: Dead Wood, (pls) set me on fire, Jailbreak, Bloodshot, Giant Pacific Octopus (i don’t know you anymore), Leap into the Lightning, the whole album tbh
  

• Feeling Not Found by Origami Angel – I don’t know how they do it, but Origami Angel also continues to put out banger after banger while staying true to their style but also mixing it up enough to feel different from album to album.
  
  Favorite Tracks: Viral, AP Revisionist History, Wretched Trajectory, Sixth Cents (Get It?), HM07 Waterfall

Also, here’s a obligatory top songs 2024 playlist plug:

2024 in films/shows:

I don’t typically watch a ton of films or shows. I don’t watch much of anything, unless you count me rewatching The 100 over and over again because somehow it’s become my comfort show.

• Past Lives – I absolutely adored this film. The cinematography was absolutely gorgeous and I loved the story. It was a beautiful homage to those what-if relationships that keep us wondering what could’ve been in another life.

• The Courtship – I stumbled upon this by mistake and decided to give it a chance. It’s a period film, Hungarian I believe, and is a super lighthearted strangers-to-lovers story between a woman who simply wants to be independent and a well-to-do artist who needs the dowry.

• Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story – I’ve tried to watch Bridgerton and I haven’t been able to get into it for some reason. But Queen Charlotte? I absolutely adored and was sobbing by the last scene in the final episode. I also rather liked how the side characters’ stories were woven into the main storyline. If that’s the case with Bridgerton as well, maybe I’ll give it another shot in 2025.

Anyway, that’s all I have for this installment of unraveling. One of my tentative goals for 2025 is to write more here, so I’ll certainly be back soon, perhaps with some thoughts about the year that’s passed and hopes for the year to come.

Wishing you a Happy New Year and safe celebrations!

Until next time,
Hannah

I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t tell you why; it simply happened that way. When I was little—5 or 6 years old, maybe?—my parents gifted me my first diary. What would become an inherent need to write didn’t happen right away, but soon enough I was writing in that diary every night. I filled its pages with silly things that happened at school (such as hiding a pencil that belonged to a boy I didn’t like in the closet as petty revenge), fun facts about my friends, my crush of the month, my dreams, anything that came to mind, really. And the habit stuck over the years. I must’ve filled at least a dozen journals before I graduated from high school and I didn’t stop there.

When I went away to college, I kept writing. Most of it was contained to my journals but for a short time, I had a blog where I ranted about the cost of fruit cups and the state of healthcare in the US. I started another blog in 2016, one that a few of you may be familiar with. It was born out of necessity while I was in a transitional period of my life; I was 22 years old, a year and a half out of college, working two jobs to pay off my student loans, and feeling completely lost and unsure of where to go next. Writing (and photography, which was also a component of that particular blog) was what carried me through that era and helped me stay connected with myself when I moved from New York to Oregon later that year. After a couple more years with the blog, life happened, the pandemic happened, and writing fell to the wayside. I’ve been trying to get back to it ever since.

As cliché as it sounds, writing truly does feel like my life’s work. It comes as naturally to me as breathing, to the point where it feels inevitable. Just as the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow morning, I am going to be writing, in some way or another, for the rest of my life. So, here I am. Trying again. Truthfully, starting over feels embarrassing to me, especially doing so publicly. Even though it’s objectively untrue, it makes me feel like I’ve failed in some way. Where writing is concerned, starting over tends to lead to me questioning my self-worth, my writing abilities, and whether I have anything to say that’s even worth reading. (After all, I’m a navel gazer. I know this. I’ve known this. But I live most of my life inside my head and my thoughts are tangled threads that need unraveling unless I want them to take up permanent residence there.)

Starting over also triggers my fear of failure. What if I put myself out there and then abandon it like I’ve done with so many other projects I’ve started? What if I put myself out there and nobody cares? What if I put myself out there and it ends up being painfully cringe? (The horror!) Whether I actually believe it or not remains to be seen, but on an intellectual level, I know that the only thing worse than failing at something is feeling knowing that I have more left to do and deliberately choosing not to try again. I know that I’m not done writing. I know in my bones that I have so much more to say. So much more life to experience. So many unexplored ideas to weave into something tangible.

Whether any of it is worth reading? Well, that isn’t for me to decide.

I’ll leave that up to you.

Until next time,
Hannah

I don’t know whether my apparent urge to start writing again is a longer term comeback or a momentary blip that has arisen out of sheer necessity, but I don’t really care about that right now. As a matter of fact, it’s rather difficult to care about much right now, and after a couple of days of living through this feeling, I’ve realized that what I’m experiencing right now is grief. Perhaps you are too.

My first adult experience with loss was when my uncle died in late 2014. He’d been very sick for a very long time, and we all knew it was coming eventually. Of course, that doesn’t make the loss of someone any easier. I vividly remember how out of sorts my world felt in the few days following his death. For a short while, it was as if I existed outside of time. The days were a blur. Christmas was one of them. I recall one evening in particular, after my uncle’s funeral, I was sitting on the couch with my dad in comfortable silence when it occurred to me how little mattered. Nothing I had to do felt even remotely important anymore. All that mattered was the person we lost, taken from the world too soon. I broke our silence to bring that up, and as it turns out, he felt the same. To this day, I’ve never felt more understood than I did in that moment. That wouldn’t be the last time I experienced loss, but the grief has never since felt so profound as it did that time. However, what I’ve been feeling these past few days has felt eerily similar to those incongruous December days.

Fast forward to November 2016. I’d just moved to Portland, Oregon after casting my absentee ballot for the woman many of us hoped (and assumed) would be our first female president. On election day, it was as if the whole city was humming with excitement and anticipation of what we thought would be an obvious, easy victory against a man who leveraged hate to mobilize his supporters. Of course, that turned out not to be the case. I’ll never forget how bleak the morning of November 9th felt. It felt like half the world fell silent, gripped with the shock of what happened and the uncertainty of what the next four years would bring. Little did we know, it would end up far worse that we could’ve ever imagined with the pandemic and the orange administration’s bungled response to it. When he lost his reelection campaign, I never imagined we’d ever again experience anything like that Wednesday morning in November.

Alas, here we are eight years later. And somehow, it feels worse than it did then. Maybe it’s because we’ve done this already. Maybe it’s because we thought that after the world came to a halt in 2020, after everything we knew fell apart before our eyes (for better or for worse), and after we somehow managed to pick up the pieces and arrange them into what feels like an uncanny imitation of Before, we would’ve learned something. That we knew better. Apparently, we haven’t and we don’t. I’m not going to wax poetic about what this means for us going forward, because I don’t know. I don’t think any of us can possibly know, and it’ll mean different things for different people. But in these past few days, I’ve returned to that strange place that exists outside of time. I call that place grief.

The word ‘grief’ doesn’t feel big enough to carry the weight of everything that grief is. It transcends time. It ebbs and flows. It can feel subtle, like wading through calm, waist-deep waters. It can feel overwhelming, like being carried out to sea by a rip current. It can be cold, unforgiving, unbearable, terrifying, confusing, and every other unpleasant feeling you could possibly imagine. But most of all, grief demands to be experienced, and the only way out is through.

Anyway, as I said, I don’t know whether I’ll continue writing on here after this. I hope I do. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.

Until next time (I hope),
Hannah