New Year, New You

Let 2025 alter you. You can never go back to who you were.

I was never one of those people who enjoyed this day. New Year’s Eve, what is it for? I don’t even recall what I did last year, did I go somewhere, did I do anything, or stayed home — this is not a new thing for me. I’ve never been one for joiner activities or organized cheer. I like to be joyful when I want to be, not when someone tells me I should be; Palm Leaves by Bukowski always felt like my New Year’s Eve manifesto.

I’d gone to bed at 9 p.m.
turned out the lights
pulled up the covers –
their gaiety, their happiness
their screams, their paper hats,
their automobiles, their women,
their amateur drunks…

New Year’s Eve always terrifies
me

New Year’s Eve doesn’t terrify me like Charles, but people who see today as anything else but the 452nd day of genocide terrify me. I tried to wake up today and give you some hopeful words, but they just escape me. There’s a reason no one sane posted any plans, wishes, goals, or aspirations for 2025; what can we expect from an incoming year when the one we’re leaving behind gave us a million heartbreaks?

I have nothing for you today, but this, I don’t know how to be in this world anymore. I don’t know how to handle the world when even babies frozen to death cannot draw any sympathy from the people who are trying to make space for their own children; over small, white, frozen wraps of someone else’s children. That is if they even find the wrap to tie them in, or if there’s anyone left to wrap them. What does it matter, they already froze?

How do you live in the world where the notoriously Zionist Twitter account writes —“Also, it’s in the 50/60 degrees in Gaza, not exactly freezing weather” below pictures of a frozen baby?

I read someone saying today - “Most days it feels like as though Earth began spinning on a different axis and I’m the only one who noticed and when I turn to the person next to me and ask if they too felt the weight of the planet shift, they reply what planet?” — I don’t know how to be in this world anymore, I don’t know how to look at people, I don’t know how to get out of my house and face them, hear them, I’m afraid of what they might tell me and I’m not ready for a thousand new heartbreaks.

I read someone saying today “Everything I thought I knew about the world and everyone in it was a mirage”—how do we do it, how do we step into 2025?

Every time I walk out of my house that’s not my house I look at the faces of people and wonder if they know what’s happening, do they care, do they wake up every day like me and scroll into the abyss, numb, angry, hopeful for the tiny instances of time, but defeated the rest, waiting to see anyone who could stop this; why do I still feel like a child who’s waiting for an adult to stop this?

There are no adults, we are the adults, and that makes this world even scarier, it’s us, we are in charge; what are we doing? No one to blame. I go through the motions every day, trying to find the smallest instances of happiness, joy; any meaning, just any, give me any meaning—and there isn’t any; waking up is hard, what is the point of all—then I see a one decent person saying something, seeing what I see and I feel a glimpse of hope that only cheats me into surviving each day.

My friend asks me “Why are you so involved in this, why do you care about the Middle East, are you planning to get an Arab husband” and I say no, I haven’t gotten any such plans, I just don’t want them to die, and the sigh of relief when he heard me say it sends me into a tailspin.

Who are these people, and how did they come to be my friends? I blame myself. I’m repulsed for ever thinking these people are more than what they are; I read someone saying today “The greatest contempt of all I reserve for myself for ever thinking we were anything more than we are, for ever believing in even an ounce of the mythology we drench ourselves in. What a dumb bitch.”

What a dumb bitch.

I call my family and all I can talk about is the politics of a geocode, I make them tired, worn out from my constant rhetoric that just cannot let this go, so I pretend to care about things I don’t care about, and pretend I do things I haven’t done in 15 months; I tell them about a piece of clothing I bought, trying to mask as a normal, superficial human who’s not intense, so I tell them about a new sweatshirt I bought, it’s 100 % Cotton Terry, extremely hard to find, while thinking to myself if that sweatshirt is “the appropriate item of clothing to wear when the world is crumbling”?

I go through the motions of life, all that’s required, pretending for people who need me to be a functional human being. It comes easy for me, my neurodiversity trained me to mask every single day; I do it so well, it’s like a choreography I got down to the tee.

I can’t remember many details about my life, or the last names, sometimes even the first names of the people I know. But Hind Rajab, Sidra Hassouna, Shaban al-Dalou, Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, Refaat Alareer, Khalad Nabhan, and Reem, a soul of his soul—why are these names engraved in my mind? Will I ever in my life again sit down for food and not think about these names, will I be able to stretch in the morning and not see the images of their shredded limbs while I stretch mine?

I read someone saying today they feel “Contempt for all of the institutions for whom ethnic cleansing is the second-worst thing that could happen; the worst thing is controversy”. Controversy, what a peculiar word. People who slaughter children in Gaza, then travel to New York to stroll around 5th Avenue are less controversial than me who can’t ever walk down the same avenue without looking at all the faces passing me by, thinking which one blew people up with his or her iPad, while passing me by.

I’m contemplating going to a movie theater today, I haven’t been in a long while, they say Babygirl is good, a story about someone played by Nicole Kidman who falls for a much younger guy; hardcore they say, very steamy, soft porn like even, and I feel like I should go and see it, rather than endure small talk about a prosperous 2025 from people who, when you say the planet feels off its axis, ask what planet?

Love is the only thing that makes sense to me in this screwed-up world, people have always said this—it’s the only thing that truly makes sense and I didn’t believe them; I have a strange rapport with love. Lust is what keeps me going, what is love exactly? No one I had asked ever knew how to define it properly; I love my sister, that’s love, I love a few people, that’s also love—but how is it the same feeling as entering a room with a hundred people and seeing that one person in the sea of others, just that one person among all those on earth who alters you?

Lust is a pathway, it’s how I measure love. We've all experienced lust and passion beyond reason, where you know you can't, but you absolutely have to. It demands from you. It militates you.

This world didn’t become screwed up now, overnight, we just see it now. Nothing is new about the establishment exploiting people who go to wars for the ruling class, billionaires, and oligarchs; we always did, only before they were called Monarchs, Dukes, and the aristocracy. Regular people always bleed for someone else’s causes and money—we just didn’t see it on our phones, and we believed all the myths.

What a dumb bitch, we all were.

“The greatest contempt of all I reserve for myself for ever thinking we were anything more than we are, for ever believing in even an ounce of the mythology we drench ourselves in. What a dumb bitch.”

I don’t know how to be in this world, seeing what we have seen. I have no answers. I only find hope in history; this is what the world has always been, and being in the dark about or knowing about it doesn’t change what the world has always been. Just our awareness of it.

I don’t know how to be in this world right now.

But what I do know is that 2025 is the year when the phrase “new year, new you” finally holds meaning. You've said it countless times before, but you weren’t the new you. You did the same shit as the year prior. Nothing about you was new.

This year, after everything you’ve witnessed over the past 15 months, and that feeling you experienced during this holiday season, is quite literally you shedding your skin. The horror you feel when you see the images on your phone, the realization of a world that tolerates it, and the sensation that you’re going insane—have altered you. You can’t ever go back to who you were.

That feeling you have today, the one we all share, the gut-wrenching nausea—it’s the new you being born. A new you who isn’t naive anymore, no longer consumed by myths about the people around you, your friends, or the world in general. You get it now. Embrace the terrors and horrors you feel.

Let them change you. Be that new you in 2025.