The Longest Year

Hi there,

It’s been a while and I wanted to start the year off by making contact here in the inbox. Like you, I am ingesting the horrors and the beauties of the nationwide response to the further intensification of fascist mobilization. As a friend in Minneapolis texted me this week, “there are more of us than there are of them,” and that’s something I live on these days. Being somewhere that is not directly targeted, spending half my time in a deeply compliant and rural state, I try to keep myself and those around me brave. The bravery on display from regular people is what I’ll always remember from 2025, along with the cowardice of those who sign up to play thug for some of the most pathetic specimens humanity has yet produced.

Even aside from the horrors, it’s been a fucked few months for so many of the people closest to me. Daily stressors, heartbreaks, illness, accidents, and death. This has made it hard to write here (and in general) and hard to focus on existence beyond day to day survival. As a friend pointed out today, all of the situations we’re in interpersonally, professionally, and so on are also being compounded by rising fascism. Please remember that if you’re like me and tend to be hard on yourself as a default state.

Now, with a new year descending upon us, the ambient pressure to optimize and focus on the self swells in its predictable cycle. Maybe with so much feeling out of control, the individual desire to optimize grows even stronger. American fascism also holds the optimized, isolated, striving individual in particular regard. It’s only you out there, and you’d better be good or we’ll get you. No wonder I get so many Youtube ads like this on my little yoga videos now:

Resolutions are built to fail, but the impulse to improve persists. For me, the year really started with Sunday’s first New Moon of the year. I’ve written here before about how my practices of marking time have changed and how that has changed me in kind. The lunar cycle makes sense to my bodymind in a way that the 1st of the month, the 1st of the year never did, and the more I interrogate the culture I was raised in (the one that’s expressing its worst impulses daily in acts of violence and state terror), the less any linear modality seems to work for me.

Despite all this, and despite my desire to move more slowly and with less of the maniacal productivity impulse behind me, in 2025 I made my first Uberlist1. In short, the Uberlist is a list of 100+ things you hope to do in the coming year, from the mundane to the aspirational. The “+” in “100+” is determined by the last two digits of the year—if you’re making one this year, you would have 126 items. Why? I don’t know, but it gave me a place to land.

Rewind to last winter: 125 was an overwhelming number for me, especially as a person who often has trouble locating my desires in the first place. What do I want to do this year? What do I need to do this year? How can I plan for pleasure and labor and relationships in a year that I know is going to be fucked and, yes, again, unprecedented.

I settled in with a giant sheet of paper and started to map out the areas of my life. This was, by far, the most important part of creating my Uberlist. The paper ended up looking like this:

When I reflected on what I want from life and what makes me feel connected to my life’s purpose, I landed on these eight categories: Seasonal, Travel, Relations, Achievement, Learning, Ritual, Home, and Self. I figured out to-dos of different difficulties within those and left 12 Wildcard slots for things I had inevitably forgotten to remember. I won’t share my whole list with you because it’s quite personal, but also rather boring. I will share some things I learned from doing this as we enter a new year and a new cycle of pressure to suddenly transform our lives and habits, in case you, like me, can’t completely kick the habit of wintertime scheming toward a “better” life.

Lesson 1: Time-bound goals work better.

My best-performing categories were “Seasonal” and “Ritual” (I completed 21/28 in those combined categories!), and it’s because those goals were attached to finite timelines or, in the case of observing the solstices and equinoxes, specific calendar days. I notice the seasons more every year, even as they shift and weird, and it helps me keep moving through time.

Lesson 2: Be specific, but leave room for poetry.

I wrote a pair of Uberlist items next to each other, but I only crossed off one: Say no to something hard. Say yes to something wild. “Change your perspective” proved too vague, but at the same time, “A personal revelation” was the very first item I checked off in 2025. Probably the balance here looks different for every person.

Lesson 3: Gigantic things should be broken into steps.

A lot of cumulative effort paid off in my life this year, which is how “Achievement” ended up being my third most-completed section (8/14).2 I’m pleased to report that those included “get a grant/residency,” “earn $2,000 from writing,” “lead a workshop,” and “have something published,” but were I doing this process again I would probably re-write them to reflect the process rather than the outcome. That would look like “apply to at least 60 grants and residencies” and “submit three essays/pitches to at least 20 places each,” allowing me to celebrate effort and failure as part of success.

Lesson 4: Collaboration is more fun.

It would have been nice to link up with friends and loved ones to plan some of these. Some were completed in tandem, especially Travel (7/14) and Home (7/14), but I’m working to interrupt my tendency to make elaborate plans in private and then make my loved ones compete against my Grand Plans. So this year, I hope to scheme some Grand Plans with the most important people in my life, rather than dragging them along or leaving them behind.

Lesson 5: You can’t plan it all.

Sigh. The lesson of my life, and of my many troubling Capricorn placements. Leave a little room to breathe, because you’ll need it, and you’ll enjoy it.

While it was an interesting experiment that left me with a nice secondary journal of memories and reflections from the year, I won’t be Uberlisting again so soon. I have the feeling that this is going to be a year of fewer, more complex accomplishments and experiences. I’m going back to working full time for the first time in many years (wish me luck), I hope to finish my manuscript (big swing in combination with that first thing), and I want to expand my gardening practice (see prior parenthetical).

Beyond that, I feel repelled by the idea of focusing on personal improvement or, worse, optimization right now. I’d like systems that help me and my friends survive (some of us are delving into shared meal prep), but I’m far less interested in, say, last year’s aspirational “30 consecutive days of yoga”.

In our neighborhood sauna, we like to choose a reflective question for everyone to answer while we sweat and enjoy quiet darkness together. I wanted to ask something about the new year, almost reflexively, but wanted to avoid “resolution” talk. Instead, I found myself asking What do you want to commit to this year? And, sure, “resolve” and “commit” are synonyms which both sound a bit municipal code-ish, but the latter pointed me, and the others present, in the direction of values rather than behaviors.

I found myself answering that I’d like to commit to a better practice of everyday antifascism. I still don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but when I attended the queer sewing circle a couple days later, I felt compelled to adjust some of the messages on the communal chalk wall that anchors one room. Thus did “Jesus loves you” become “Jesus loves when you abolish ICE” and so did “MELT THEM” (inspired by my neighbor’s window array of hand-printed “MELT” posters) appear in orange chalk, and a good, old-fashioned “FUCK ICE”.

It’s not going to change anything to do that, I know. But to look at an unguarded pile of chalk and a wall of doodles and Bible verses and do nothing feels wrong! And each small act builds in ways we can’t know toward both our own capacity for larger acts and toward the kind of incredible, communal bravery at play in too many of our cities and towns, bravery I’ve been watching from out in the country and trying to support from afar.

Committing to our collective capacity to remain awake and angry and caring seems the baseline Thing To Do.

As part of my commitment, I’ll be re-reading the book I once labeled as my favorite,3 Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. It’s a pretty funny title to throw out as your favorite book, and an ideal choice if you’re a young, upstart German-resistance-to-the-Nazis nerd.

In the novel, closely based on true events, a working class couple begin leaving postcards printed with messages of dissent out in public places. We follow their careful, tiny actions alongside the actions of the Gestapo investigators assigned to their case. The cumulative efforts of two regular people appear (to the paranoid Nazi state apparatus) as powerful as the work of a sophisticated network. Unfortunately for the couple, no such network exists to support them.

Every Man Dies Alone is, as the title suggests, a real downer, but I know it’s time for our reunion. Stay tuned and perhaps I’ll write something more substantive about it when I do. Until then, I hope you’ll take good care of yourselves and each other, do the small things you can do each day, and remember that there are many, many more of us than there are of them.

Until then,

TRW