Goodbye, 2025

Last week’s prompt over at DrawTogether was to make a comic of your year. The first step was to make a list of things that happened to you this year, and I sort of froze, because I wasn’t sure that anything had happened to me. Not by typical standards, anyway. I hadn’t traveled anywhere (except for a day trips to Indianapolis and Milwaukee to see doctors). I hadn’t moved or had a baby, gotten divorced or married, learned a new skill or adopted a new pet. I hadn’t even befriended a crow, which was my number one goal for the year and I assume only involves going to the same park a few times with a handful of peanuts.

I decided the phrasing was what was getting to me. There’s not much opportunity for things to happen to you when the only time you leave your house is to drop off/pick up your kids from school.

So instead, I tried to think about what I’d done. The answer was still nothing much. I’d canceled lots of trips and gatherings and restaurant reservations. Got a refund for a lovely looking botanical illustration class someone gifted me that I didn’t have the energy to take. I’d scaled back on socializing, activities for my kids. I’d whittled away every possible unnecessary demand. It was a year of letting go.

And that was it: it was a year of letting go.

I let go of my expectations that I would someday get “better.” I let go of pointless efforts to change the way my body felt and functioned. My brief Midwest medical tour notwithstanding, I cut way back on doctor’s appointments and scans and tests. I quit doing hours of exercises and stretches that were only making my symptoms worse.

It was a year of acceptance. A year of grief.

And it was also a year of sharing that acceptance and grief. Of writing and making art about what was happening to me.

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago, I wrote about my life exclusively. I mostly stopped after my kids were born. Suddenly, everything I said or did impacted them, too. Especially when they were little, the lines between our lives felt very blurred. So much—maybe all of—what was happening to me then was about becoming a parent, how it rearranged my body, my sense of self, my past and my future. I was burned out after years of sharing my hardest, most vulnerable truths. I was split open raw in a way I’d never been before. I decided I wanted to keep my life to myself, for a while. Even after my kids were older, and my body started to fall apart, I still didn’t want to tell that story. Because I wasn’t ready to believe that story.

But this year, I was. I am. And telling some of that story through polaroid pictures and comics and collages and terrible poems is saving me.

That’s what art does. Both yours and other people’s. It saves you.

Here’s to more pictures and words in 2026. Let’s keep saving ourselves and each other, ok?