Choosing to {Look Forward,} {I Guess}

In the last two months of 2024, I felt myself changing—and not for the better.

Optimism has never been my forte. Maybe that’s a product of watching too much news or growing up in the internet age where negativity is more potent than positivity. Lately that negative tendency has grown stronger, and when asked what I am looking forward to in 2025, I’ve struggled to come up with an answer.

The pessimist in me sees a bleak world before her, rife with reasons to fear, to give into anger, to believe society is as polarized as we’ve been told. In turn, my emotions have started to feel equally bleak.

To believe that the darkness is growing, and the light is being snuffed out.

Pleasant, right?

This is not the person I want to be.

I don’t want to give hate room in my soul, or for anger to become my only source of fuel.

I don’t want to look out at the world and automatically assume the worst of humanity.

It’s an exhausting way to live life, and for the people in power who thrive off rage and chaos, it is adding another tally to their too-quickly growing win column. Giving them a win is something I have no desire to do.

One thing I’ve been working on in therapy is reminding myself that I am not my circumstances.

We cannot stop things from happening to us. We will have no power over some events that will shatter our worlds and bring us to our knees.

What we do have the power over is how long we let them hold us to our knees, and how we piece our world back together. We decide whether we let events be a fabric in our story or if they consume the tapestry.

But we must decide. We receive no points for avoidance, or vacillation.

As much as I would like to slip into a year-long hibernation and reawaken when the world seems less fraught, that means that I am also forfeiting control of my own fate to a world I don’t trust, a world that feels like it may implode on a daily basis. And that seems like a poor choice.

So, does that mean I am looking forward to this year? Not exactly. But I am choosing to look forward and aiming to practice self-determination like I never have before, and wrest control back from a world that seems to be losing its own.

That’s not to say that I won’t be angry or saddened over decisions, or that I don’t have the right to feel that way. In my opinion, if we don’t respond to certain events where people are being hurt or exploited, we lose a shred of our humanity. To be human means to paint with the spectrum of emotions we are given, but to use each color in its due. In these gray times, I’d rather live with a rainbow, than in shades of solely red or black.