January arrived without edges; in a fog—present, but hard to touch.
One day it was cold and frosty, typical of early winter; the next it was 65 degrees and raining. The trees were bare but full of birds, singing in confusion. Even nature was out of sorts. I sat at the window watching it all, wondering what time is up to now.
My body, however, knew exactly what season it was in. Melancholy season—the one where internal weather overrides the world beyond the window.
Words came harder than usual. Not because I wasn’t present, but because everything felt… unnecessary. The state of the world is absurd in a way that bleeds value from everything. Useful. Productive. Meaningful. All of these words felt hollow and suspicious.
What to do? Breathe. Deeply. I slowed myself enough to remember my chosen word for 2026: focus. Then the others followed—home, family, peace.
I flirted with ideas—TikTok as raw data, experiments in manipulation and meaning—but even curiosity lost its grip quickly. January has a way of humbling ambition.
Somewhere between the beginning of January and the end, time dissolved into a blur. I was sick—in body and in mind. The kind of sickness that steals not just energy, but coherence. I couldn’t read. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t reason. The days slipped through me like water. Purposeless. Or perhaps simply unrecorded.
At midnight on a day in late January, I was baking brownies. Because—why not? The world outside felt absurd; I might as well eat brownies. On the television, people were shown being forcibly taken, beaten, killed. It was hard to reconcile ordinary domestic rituals with the collective unraveling of society. Hard not to wonder if this is what the end of something looks like. Capitalism. Certainty. The illusion of control.
Overall, January has felt void-like. Nebulous. Fleeting. Not exactly empty—simply hard to grasp.
Melancholy. Every January I feel it. I think about how it was once treated as something dangerous, something to be locked away—hidden. I wonder what was threatening about the mood. Maybe it was the willingness to feel the weight of the world without immediately justifying or numbing it.
Empathy has always felt like a gift to me. In this modern age, it can also feel like a weight. Some days it moves through me as kindness or compassion, something useful and connective. Other days it tightens around the body, slow and constricting, especially when the world feels perpetually on fire.
The void is often described as empty, but that has never been how it feels to me. It is clingy. All-encompassing. Like another layer of skin we can’t quite see. In its presence, I feel stripped down—vulnerable, raw—not exposed so much as open.
Surrender is often mistaken for giving up. I’ve come to understand it differently. Surrender is releasing the need to outthink the absurd. It is letting time move through us, unchanged and unpersuaded, while we remain—still here, still breathing, still continuing.