2025: We'll See What Happens

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Hi friends!

Against all odds, we have made it to the finish line of 2024. I’m so very proud of us — that shit was outrageous and we’re all survivors. Hope you’re enjoying a lovely holiday intermission while time gets funky with the dregs of the year.

Last week, I drove up north here in Cali to hug my cousin Snacky and hug some old-growth redwoods. I breathed the freshest air and embraced the wisdom of the trees. I didn’t honor the Jewish-Chinese Christmas Alliance with any succulent wontons, but we did go see a movie, A Complete Unknown, which Snacky and I both loved. I think Timothée deserves the Oscar; she concurs but thinks it will go to Ralph Fiennes for Conclave, which I also watched last week and enjoyed. I haven’t yet seen the new Adrien Brody Holocaust joint, but it’s playing down the block, so I’ll put on pants, get a popcorn, and report back on his odds.

Anyways, Timothée’s performance was so captivating that even though an elderly man sitting two rows behind us had some sort of terrifying medical episode in the middle of the screening that prompted his wife to hold his face and repeatedly scream, “Stay with me, don’t leave me,” for what felt like an eon before they stopped the movie and asked if there were any doctors in the theater, which led to an anesthesiologist and a retired EMT locking horns over who was more qualified to help him, I was fully transported out of my panic attack and back to the 1960s once the ambulance came and the movie started up again.

me every single day in November.

I already assassinated 2024, so we shan’t exhume it for an unhinged retrospective. If you’re hankering for a walk down memory lane, this is my 34th newsletter of the year, and I’d like to direct you to the archives. After experiencing and chronicling ten months of 2024’s collective madness, I took up smoking again, and I believe that says it all. For anyone tracking, I stopped smoking a few weeks ago. I do love to light a cigarette off the embers of our burning world, but I love myself more. So, I’ve taken up yoga, yet again.

Since I’m now firmly entrenched in self care and the cultivation of inner peace, I have decided that this new year seems like a most excellent time to embrace the present moment, surrender to the unknown, and to live beyond the noxious layer of fear that hangs over what we’re going with in terms of “reality.”

Today, I am thrilled to share that the official theme of 2025 is: We’ll See What Happens.

Lest you think my schtick began on Substack, I have set a theme for every new year since 2015. It was a decade ago, and I was very drunk back then, so I don’t remember why the end of 2014 demanded the invention of a (now long-running) vibes forecast, but I’m glad it did. The theme I came up with for 2015 was Casual or Caj for short. That year, I quit my job, sold most of my stuff, fled to Asia for six months, and then had to deal with the consequences upon my return. Caj … until it wasn’t. These themes rarely play out as intended, but the ironic expression of my very first theme is rivaled only by Pleasantly Surprised, the theme of 2020, a year that delivered just one pleasant surprise, that I made it out alive.

My yearly themes, the best of which was probably 2017’s declaration of Who Cares, are selected through a process that includes an evaluation of the incumbent vibes, me deciding how I want to shift them, discussion with my secret cabal of vibes-centric confidantes, and since the great fiasco of 2019, a thorough risk assessment.

At the end of 2018, I was feeling taken advantage of. I was hoping for some extremely specific karmic retribution when I went with Well, Well, Well … How the Tables Have Turned as the theme for the new year. Well, 2019 didn’t go so well. It was a disastrous year full of tables turning toward misfortune for me and my friends: health stuff, savage breakups, a new job gone very wrong, heinous happening after heinous happening. My friends all seemed to agree that my innocent expression of energetic vengeance was somehow complicit in that twisted year for all of us, and honestly, yeah, that was a deranged theme. I’ve evolved a lot since then.

As Maya Angelou once said, “when you know better, you do better.” Since we are dealing with unprecedented potential for chaos as we head into 2025, I am being extra careful with this one. We’ll See What Happens shields us from extraneous twists and turns. I am not about to monkey around with these incumbent vibes.

I plan on letting things unfold as they’re meant to in this new year. Will I give up on any of the plots and schemes that I have in the works? Nah. Like, what would I even do with myself? I have to finish what I started. But, I am going to try my best to trust the process and relinquish control. This year, I’ll be moving forward, and I’m going to move differently. We’ll see what happens.

I also chose this theme because it pairs well with a few burning questions that I have: Will Donald and Elon implode before Inauguration Day? Will they open-mouth kiss in front of the nation? Will the aliens stop edging us and make real contact? Will bird flu be what kills me? (I can’t quarantine again, sorry.) Or will my demise come from the raw milk that RFK Jr. makes me drink to cure it? (I’m a lactose intolerant Jewess.) Will TikTok make it through January? Will my last brain cell make it through January? We’ll see what happens!

There’s so much going on, so many things in motion, and so many terrifying unknowns that it feels sanest to observe right now. And, honestly, you never know when some very exciting shit could be coming down the pipeline. We’ll see what happens with that, too.

me dissociating while I see what happens.

I never shared 2024’s theme, because hundreds of you had just joined me and I was feeling shy back then. I have since gotten over myself, and I’m now delighted to reveal that the theme was, quite earnestly, The Wait Is Over. It was set with the most hopeful intention that everything I wanted so badly, everything I felt was lacking, all that I had been waiting for, was destined to fall from the sky. There were shades of it in my 2024cast, where I cooked up a little metaphor about how all the seeds I’d planted in my sanity garden would turn into magnificent blooms. I remember feeling so excited when I fantasized about all my hard work materializing into a perfect, new reality this year.

That’s the magical thinking of a person who owns energy crystals and obviously not how it all played out.

Instead, in the pursuit of overness, this was the year that I finally got my shit together and stopped waiting. I rejected any pull towards stagnancy. I pried my energy back from toxic jobs and poured it directly into myself. I spent a lot of time writing. I felt weird. I felt lonely. I felt powerful. I followed my intuition. I carved a new path, step by step. I gave myself grace when I had my little spirals. I cultivated patience (against my will). I had so many transcendent creative experiences that I’m essentially now a beardless Rick Rubin.

By August, I had made so much progress that I was overwhelmed. I asked my longtime therapist if she thought I might ever chill out and stop questing my way through life. “When you’re dead,” she responded.

By Thanksgiving, I had quested so far that I wasn’t sure I recognized myself, and then I needed to lie down for a bit.

Benevolent cosmic forces never arrived to grant me my three wishes of 2024, all of which I would have spent on true love, but I ended the wait as best I could as a mere mortal. I let myself evolve and I worked hard. I ended up having the most creatively prolific year of my life.

There is literally no way I would have quested so far without the support of this community. Thank you for having my back this year with all of your kind words and dopamine-releasing engagement. Thank you for helping me spread the Unhingement gospel and for making a gal feel so seen.

It blows my mind how many of you now open (and I’m assuming read) these missives of mine. A lot of you have told me that I make you laugh or make you feel better or help you process the absurdity of this filthy, nasty and abundantly beautiful world of ours. Truth is, I write for all those same reasons: to make myself feel better, to laugh at my very own jokes, and to try and make sense of these swirly times.

I’m in a parasocial relationship with you as much as you are with me.

The only way out is through and the better way through is together. So, onwards we go into 2025. We’ll see what happens!

Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️

Liz