Every year, at the end of November, I begin to think about how I’d like my next year to look while reflecting on where I’ve been and the progress I’ve made. This year, 2025 threw me a few major curveballs.

The death of my mother and working on a major area of trauma through EMDR are the two biggest things I dealt with in 2025. Both had unexpected results, which I am still processing.

When my mom was in a head-on collision on July 15, 2024, I didn’t know what to expect, but held onto a little bit of hope she would get better. With each passing visit, it was more and more evident that the motherfuckers in charge of her care were not taking care of her. This is a problem endemic with nursing homes. In New York, you don’t get to choose where you go from the hospital. You are required by law to take the first place that offers a bed.

When I visited in January, I didn’t see her getting better physically. I couldn’t really determine mentally because she could only speak a little. Her eyes though, they fucking said everything. It crushed me every time I had to say goodbye, whether in person or via WhatsApp. She didn’t want me to leave. I didn’t want to go. I tried for nine months to get her out of that fucking place. She was in a better nursing home for less than 12 hours before she was sent back to the hospital. She had a heart attack the next day and never woke up. She passed peacefully three days later.

I am still struggling with whether I did enough. I have nightmares of her begging me for help. Sometimes, they are daymares as well. They come out of nowhere and I’m crushed all over again.

In June, I began working in EMDR with the incident I call “The Day After Labor Day” (DALD). I’ve written about it before. It’s has profoundly affected my life in ways that would be a post on its own. When I began EMDR in 2022, I didn’t know if it would work. I forget the exact percentage, but if you have one trauma, it has something like an up to 85% success rate. If you are like me with multiple traumas, it has an up to 50% success rate. I knew it was a crap shoot, but I was willing to try it because it had hard data behind it.

To say it has been life-changing is an understatement. I could write for days how much it has helped me, but that would require more details than I’m willing to share. EMDR, in general, is hard. I’m still working on DALD. It is filled with so many layers that it is going to take a lot of time to peel them all back and heal each one individually. While I say it is difficult, it is also productive. It is a necessary piece of the process to go through in order to be healed.

While these two experiences have consumed a lot of my 2025, there have also been other positive changes.

I have always struggled with remembering dates. My therapist has told me, on more than one occasion, that I experience the world through sight and sound. It makes sense why those are my two biggest triggers activating my PTSD. If I was writing this five years ago, I would be kicking myself that I have to check the date and day of my mother’s passing. I remember what she looked like. I remember the family gathered ‘round her hospital bed when they extubated her. I remember the doctor’s phone call telling me she passed and how “she was there and looked like she was sleeping and then, she simply stopped.” I have to look at a calendar every damn time to make sure of the day and date. Wednesday. April 2.

Today, however, this is mostly only a frustration. My brain was wired differently at a young age because of trauma. It might not ever untangle for this thing. That’s okay. That’s what pen and paper are for. That’s how I remember. It’s how it works for everything. This year marks the first time that I don’t think I’m a complete piece of shit for the things I can’t remember.

I have gaps in my memory with the trauma. Some of it is there, but some of it may forever be gone, lost to dissociation that protected me and allowed me to survive. Does it suck knowing this? Yes. I like to know the details of things and the “what happened next” part of it all. Over the past three years with my therapist, I have slowly begun to shift to “this happened. I don’t remember it all and that’s okay.”

With the EMDR work came more intense flashbacks. I sometimes struggle to come up with good descriptive words other than vivid and visceral “in the moment” from the thesaurus in my head. I think I need to buy a good thesaurus. A hard copy though, like the Roget’s Thesaurus I had when I was a kid. I’m a nerd and would flip through that thing learning all the connections between words. And I just realized I sort of described a little bit of how EMDR works.

Even though my flashbacks are clearer and extremely vivid – more than the vividness that was already there – it is part of the process. Once the memory has been processed it’s a shade of gray and sometimes the details are gone. This is what you want to happen. So, even though it fucking sucks sometimes, you have to go through to vile, violent, vivid, vicious, visceral visual to get to the gray to heal.

I have also finally reached a point where I don’t care to argue anymore. If you want to have an honest debate, great, let’s do that. If you’re a MAGA person, just go the fuck away. I don’t have the energy anymore to speak with you and I don’t want to give my precious time to someone who just shouts over me and is angry all the time. I am thankful and grateful to those who can still do this. I think 35 years in the trenches trying to convince others to be more compassionate is enough. It’s time for someone else to take that place. I’ll support causes as I can financially (FFRF, WWF), but I can’t do the war of words anymore and that’s okay, too.

As I look forward to 2026, the biggest thing I want to change is reading. I used to read 15-17 books each year. I know this changed partly because of Mom’s accident. Some of it is therapy and all the writing I scribble in my journal as I processed things each week. As I wrote in my previous post, if you have 15 minutes a day, you can read 10 books a year. I’ve got 15 minutes. I want to see how far I can go.

Professionally, I have begun to accept ads on my podcast. Hopefully, they aren’t intrusive. I hate ads (use an adblocker, folks), but I also would like to make some money for my efforts. I would also like to record my writings and put them up, probably on YouTube, to try and make a little bit of money. At some point in 2025 – or maybe it was late 2024 – I accepted that I can’t do what is necessary in sending out queries and the arduous process of getting published. I know I’m a good writer. There are acceptable alternatives to getting my work out there. I need to learn how to record myself via my desktop or laptop and then figure out how to edit the video.

Plans are already afoot to sell off many things Paul and I own. My mom was a bit of a hoarder. So was my grandmother. So are several other family members. When I look around my house at the things I have, there isn’t much I need.

I want to go back to just the simple things and keep only what I actually need. I also promised my nephew that, when the time comes, he won’t have to go through someone else’s clutter again. It’s a soul-crushing experience and he’s already done it twice.

My final plan for next year is to write more. I have everything organized. My house is quiet most of the time. I enjoy the solitude. I enjoy the writing, even if no one ever sees it. I’m probably going to end up like Van Gogh – minus the suicide bit and cutting my ear off. I already did the accidental finger cutting so I’m good. I like all my body parts. I imagine someone else will make money off me long after I’m dead.

I hope to write more letters and emails to my friends than I did this year. I truly do enjoy sending and receiving them. I received a postcard from a friend yesterday. She went to Maine. I nodded my head yes in agreement to a lot of what she wrote. I also thought, “I need to get a letter out to her.”

There are several other positives from this year, just ones I’m not willing to share at the moment. I’m keeping them between myself and my therapist for now – maybe forever. It’s a lot for a human being to take. It’s even more to for another person to listen and understand.

I hope to keep learning and sharing my new knowledge with anyone willing to listen. Most of all, I hope to be a better person in 2026 than I was in 2025.