RE: Sorry. What Year Is It?

The great sage Gracie Abrams once said,

“Made it out alive, but I think I lost it

Said that I was fine, said it from the coffin.”

While the songwriter’s viral bridge is referencing a past relationship, my subconscious connected the lyrics to how I felt about my life throughout 2024.

If you have an ounce of reading comprehension skills, you will allow that last sentence to also explain why I have been incredibly absent from this space. (Congratulations if you noticed. It’s understandable if you didn’t.)

This past year was hard for me. I am incredibly privileged to say that I mean that in the gentlest way possible. Life kicked me around in a way it really hadn’t before, in that it told me “no.”

And then it told me “no” again.

And again.

And, one more time for the people in the back, again.

I will not fault you if you are now rolling your eyes, beginning to scroll back to the top of the page, or closing it entirely. I am not telling you this because I am trying to garner some weak sympathy points. All in all, I was fine. (This was almost entirely due to Anyone But You. The 2023 film became my emotional support movie, and I clung to it like a life raft. I am not joking when I say there was a week in May or June where I was watching it more than once a day.) I was just a little heartbroken over the hand I had been dealt and the way I felt powerless to fix it.

The last one of these I wrote was me trying to cope with these feelings at a moment when I thought I had turned a corner. It turned out the new door hadn’t led to an emergency exit, just another hallway, which again wasn’t a bad hallway. It just wasn’t one I felt like I made a conscious decision to be in. As someone who likes to connect plot point A to plot point B to plot point C and so on (I think I talked about that before.), feeling like I had no choice in the path my life was taking was incredibly distressing.

I think it is important to clarify here that throughout my 29 (almost 30…, we can talk through that later) years, I have not gotten every single thing I wanted. Life has told me no before. It has slammed doors in my face. But it has pretty much always quickly provided a window. Sometimes, the escape hatch required some gymnastics to see, but I usually found it. Life might have told me no, but it was for a good and obvious reason. This time has not been like that.

I still do not know why I wasn’t allowed to stay in London and why pivot after pivot led to dead end after dead end. After a while, I decided I was going to stop looking. It was too frustrating. The mental escape room held no more findable clues. I accepted my fate and just let it all go. Whatever came my way, that is what I was allowed. (Again, it's not a bad outlook or practice. I encourage people to live this way if you can; go you! But, unfortunately, I can’t.)

Maybe I wasn’t a main character after all – scary sentence to utter around here, I know – maybe my life wasn’t a plot-able story.

I said maybe.

There’s more to the That’s So True bridge I referenced above, although I’ve taken the liberty of omitting the irrelevant parts.

“I'll put up a fight, taking out my earrings

Don't you know the vibe? Don't you know the feeling?”

Ladies and gentlemen, I will be wrestling some of that control back somehow, some way.

The last thing I want to say is that it is okay to admit you did not like a year in which some good things did happen. I’ve gotten to watch some of my best friends thrive; there was a wedding, some babies, some promotions and just a tad of the good kind of trouble. I love my new apartment. Baltimore is growing on me. It’s comforting to be near my family. I have my cats back. I finished the draft of my second book (and I am kind of obsessed with it). It wasn’t all bad. But I will forever say with my whole chest that I didn’t like 2024. I was ready for it to be over. I needed the blank slate, the fresh start, the endless possibilities.

This year, I am not doing ins and outs. I have no resolutions. It took all of my energy to simply pick a word (and 15 songs*) for the year, and that was probably because I took the exercise much too seriously. (I’m worried it’s going to be prophetic and what if I choose wrong. You could also read that as: if I pick right, the story might be better.) After much much deliberation I have landed on ‘Hope.’

Metamorphosis was a serious contender, but what I want this year is not to become someone new but to find my way back to who I was in 2023. Two years ago, I had the guts to bet on myself, to believe in the best possible outcome for every situation, and to trust that I was going to be okay. All those ideas – faith, trust, dreaming, wishing – are Merriam-Webster synonyms for ‘hope.’ Somewhere in the last year, hope became a feeling I was fearful of. I didn’t want it to be the source of any more heartbreak, but in the act of protecting myself, I lost a fairly significant portion of my personality as well.

I’m not expecting it to be easy, but I would like to find that part of me again in 2025.

Whatever you’re wishing for this year, I hope it blossoms into more than you could ever imagine.

<3,

Sydney

P.S. I will also willingly admit that I *might* be feeling doubly optimistic about this year because it started on a Wednesday and thus can be tied to Begin Again (Taylor’s Version), and, as many of us do, I wholeheartedly trust in the magical, enchanted, friendship-bracelet wielding power of Taylor Swift.

*The 15th song on this playlist is a bonus from a game I play with my Spotify Wrapped. Highly recommend putting your most listened to playlist on shuffle and navigating to the 25th song to see how your 2025 will turn out. You know, for the plot.