MARK MY WORDS: 2025 IS MY YEAR.

In this article, Emily Bagg writes about her feelings about the new year, change, and how there comes a time when you just have to trust that everything will be fine.

I feel a weird sense of calm this year. Usually, in the lead up to a new year, there is a great sense of trepidation or panic at what is to come. I am the type of person who Loves (capital el) to know what is just around the bend. I like to know what the plan is. I find it monumentally uncomfortable to sit in that “waiting room” period, no matter how long that waiting period is. Ten minutes or ten weeks or ten months, I fucking hate it.

I’ve been like this for as long as I am able to remember. My mom would tell this story about how, in pre-primary school or kindergarten, the teachers would have to sit five-year-old Emily down and say “okay, now we are going to have a break, and then we are going to go outside for a bit, and then we are going to read a book” and so on and so forth, detailing the outline of the day so that I would have some semblance of the day. I would get anxious and scared and freak out at not knowing. 

me and this cat are the same

I could go into the therapy of it all, which I have hashed out a thousand times over many hours, but I shan't bore you. It is an ongoing hurdle that I must jump everyday in a variety of ways. If I were a horse, I surely would win a prize in showjumping. Maybe not first place, because I am not always the best at sticking the landing, but I definitely would get at least a ribbon. I’ll pretend it's a nice red colour. 

All that to say: I am not usually a super chill person when it comes to new years. It's always a time for me to feel a little bit inadequate about the previous year and all the things I didn’t accomplish and gloss quickly over anything I did happen to accomplish, because my brain loves to ignore the good where possible. I usually spend a few days mulling over the goals and hopes I have for the forthcoming year and writing them down as a list—but I can’t write down anything I want too much, as I am just going to put myself down if I fail at whatever it is. I hate the “what are you doing for new years” question that implies and enforces the expectation that I need to go out and have fun. 

But, a month into the new year, and I still feel a relaxed sense of tranquility that I have not felt before. On the last few day of December 2024, I made my list for 2025 (chucking a few items on there that were a little silly and a little lofty) and I spent the night alone. I didn’t feel embarrassed by that, which I might have done the year before. I wanted to bring in the new year with just me, myself, and I, because this year feels like it is going to be different. 

I am turning thirty this year. Imagine my surprise that I feel excited about it! I have spent a significantly large portion of my twenties fearing getting older. That hasn’t gone away in its entirety (because how could it with the many years of indoctrination and subliminal messaging from society and the media telling me that women aging is a gross and unnatural thing that should be avoided at all cost?), but the idea of leaving my twenties behind has introduced a sensation of peace into my life that I was not expecting.

My twenties didn’t start off great. Just over a month before my big two-oh birthday, my mom died. Soon after that, I dropped out of university and spent the rest of the year trying to figure out my place in this strange, motherless world. I got a few different jobs, helped my dad with the school run, and just generally tried to exist. It was not a stellar start to what are supposed to be “the best years of your life.” It was very up and down from there, and over the next ten years, I have found myself unable to totally get out from under the weight of it all. I have not had the best years of my life by any stretch of the imagination.

Now, they haven’t been all bad. With each passing month, I have come more into myself—as we are all wont to do in this liminal space between youth and adulthood. I’ve had an abundance of okay times, plenty of good times, and some brilliant times, too. I’ve seen more of the world, become a far more independent version of myself, and fought tooth and nail to like myself just as I am (mostly), I’ve made friends, I have sung songs, I have gotten tattoos, I have laughed! Laughed so much! 

But, generally, I don’t exist well. I don’t always like how deeply I feel or react to things, and it can make going through daily motions a little frustrating. I think I can often make things harder than they need to be. I have never felt at ease with life, and I work really fucking hard to just show up. I am proud of how hard I work. But, I get tired a lot, and it's not nice to constantly feel like you are catching up or on the backfoot, compared to how you perceive others to be doing. 

All that to say: this new year feels like a blank slate! It feels a bit like this tumblr post I saw:

YES!

That is my energy for 2025. I am allowed to breathe deeply, cordon off the last decade of my life, say “thank you” to it, and feel an overwhelming (and possibly foolish) amount of hope for whatever is on its way to me.

It's not that I don’t feel scared. I am scared utterly shitless if I think about what is to come and my lack of a plan regarding my work and living situation. Not a clue where I want to be, will be, could be. I feel uncomfortable when thinking about the vast amount of money I will probably be spending this year. I am petrified of the unknown—and there is so much unknown!!! But, as I have heard on a Queer Eye episode or three: you can only grow when you are uncomfortable! I should be well over twenty feet tall by now, but I am ready to keep on growing. I am not done growing. 

And I know it will all work out. Tom Petty said it, so who am I to argue? I also used to be a little bit obsessed with the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. There was something lovely to me about all these seniors just taking such a drastic step and moving to a new country, and I found that inspired hope in me at the age of twenty six to do the same thing. In the film, at one point, the hotel’s owner/manager Sonny (played by the absolutely incredible Dev Patel) says “Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right, then it's not yet the end.” That has run through my head about a million times over the last few years, and a million more times over the last few months. I am choosing to believe wholeheartedly in those words. And, so far so good!

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Emily Bagg is a writer originally from Cape Town in South Africa, now living in Galway, in Ireland. She's worked as an editor and copywriter, and is now looking forward to celebrating being TOO LOUD.