Fuck! It's 2025
mosquito bite madness ☼ meditations on despair and hope ☼ an unfamiliar kind of new year feeling
I am sitting in an airport in Colombia battling seven welts the size of char siu baos dotted around my arms, the tell-tale sign of a victim of skeeter syndrome, a diagnosis for those who are fatally allergic to mosquitoes and balloon into blobs of a painful, itchy, pussy red whenever bit. Every time I find myself stuck in a lagoon of itch and pain, I attempt to reframe the meaning of the mosquito bite. At first, I thought: This is a learning lesson, always always douse yourself in mosquito spray and cover your arms and legs, even when the weather is hot and humid. The only issue is that I have written this lesson down in my “life long list of advice” note—which I add to whenever I want to reframe a negative experience as a learning lesson—over four different times, which indicates that existing in winter clothes and a layer of citronella oil 24/7 is an unfeasible feat. Then I thought: This is an opportunity to practice mindfulness. Every time I thought to myself fuck why didn’t I wear my long-sleeve or fuck it’s so itchy or fuck they’re so painful, I attempted to redirect my mind to something else: the blue sky, the calm breeze, the blue sky with a hot sun that baked the inflamed skin around my body, the calm breeze that tickled the excruciating volcanoes around my body and made me want to scoop my own flesh from my bones like blobs of mold from an otherwise edible block of cheese. At last, I thought: Okay, no matter what, I am a part of a larger ecosystem, and being bit is integral in the cycle of life itself. I am food for mosquitoes, mosquitoes are food for other life. The only problem is that I Googled whether or not this was true, and it turns out it is not: mosquitoes are one of the only species that would have zero impact on their surrounding ecosystems if obliterated from the earth…FUCK. How could I let this happen? I am always careful to arm myself with natural bug spray as soon as I wake up in a new place and yet, that fateful morning in a cab to the airport I was bit eight times by an invisible mosquito. One day you are rich with presence, enjoying the view of the jungle. The next you look like a discombobulated version of the Michelen man. What if I get chikungunya, which is not a Nikki Minaj song but a mosquito-transmitted virus, alerted to me by my friend Grace. Fuck. Okay, stop saying fuck. This, too, shall pass. The only thing you can do is let the bites go down.
In the first ten days of the new year, we have witnessed ongoing layoffs, a major communication hub (TikTok) threatened by the US government with little to no basis, and the tragic blaze of Altadena and Los Angeles on the news, social media and messages from friends and family. What I feel the most, walking into 2025, is that we need reminders more than we need resolutions. Reminders that everything is okay until it is on fire. Reminders that the fires will eventually go out. That everything will be okay again, even if it seems impossible.
Even if all we can think about right now is what the fuck, the bites will go down. Things will get better. At least, that is what I tell myself.
Walking into 2025, I felt surprised at the modesty of my emotions. Typically, I approach the new year with zeal and a side of oversized hope: that this year will be the year for exponential growth (more exponential than last year’s), that all of the gargantuan goals I noted for myself on the eve’s prior would miraculously manifest over the next twelve months, and that, with a clean calendar, anything was possible. The world could be better. What I felt this year more resembled the affability I now experience while boarding a plane. Like: “Oh, here we go again,” remiss of the helium gut feeling of going somewhere, anywhere.
I wondered: Maybe some years aren’t meant for zeal. Maybe, at a certain age, it fades like the elasticity of our skin.
On the way to the airport, our cab driver played music from the 2000’s: Rihanna, Rihanna, Rihanna, and then a Calvin Harris song that I used to binge listen to in the 10th grade. I thought about how long it had been since I fell in love with that song, how hopeful I felt whenever I listened to it. I recalled driving down the empty, olive-dotted roads of my hometown and feeling the Northern Californian breeze hiccup through my half-opened window: Anything was possible, because nothing had really happened. There was college. There was growing up. There was living in a city for the first time.
I questioned what, exactly, made me so excited. What happened to the silver, glimmering part of my brain that smiled at the simple thought of: What if? If anything, I have more than I did back then: more freedom, more knowledge, more self-compassion, more love, more money. And then I realized I was leaving something out of the list: More expectation.
As I have grown up, it seems I have acquired, like a taste for alcohol, an affinity towards spending more time in the bittersweet expectation of the future than unfolding, in the present, life’s unpredictable wonders. I book my flights four months in advance, plan things out to a tee and consider the unknown akin to a dangerous place I should not venture back to, even though it was once a place I loved. As we grow older, we learn to plan. We learn to live in the future: do this then do that, get this then that. We think that if we plan our lives out perfectly, we will be perfect too, become a version of ourselves that is better than the version that we are, which is, it seems, the ultimate human illusion: that self realization will make us whole. And if we are whole, if we are perfect, if we are better, everything might be okay—even as the world burns around us.
Watching clips of Altadena on fire between check-ins with friends and family, I thought: Is it growing up that makes us jaded, or is it growing up in this particular time? Everything is on fire again, but this time it is worse, it is different than before—severe drought conditions and abnormal winds have amounted to over $135 billion in losses—and what is most confusing about this all is that things feeling worse and unprecedented is, perhaps, the only reliable thing about life today.
Helpful Links:
• Resources regarding aid for the LA fires
• Donations that will reach those impacted by the fires fastest can be made through the Wildfire Recovery Fund, American Red Cross or the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation
• Many affected by the fires have started GoFund me campaigns
On New Year’s Eve in a queer bar in Medellin, I asked a question I often ask strangers to generate a response we might not write down on an immigration form (current address, occupation, location of birth): What are you most excited about? A friend of a friend told me that they barely made it through 2024. They were just excited about making it through another year.
I realized, then, that many of us barely made it through the last year. 2024 was difficult for anyone who cares about genocide, LGBTQ+ rights, or the future of America. While I laughed at several memes that depicted us stumbling from one year into another, I did not register—in my own words—that 2024 had been traumatic, nor the likelihood that most of us are still processing what happened (and continues to).
In the first week of 2025, there is already more to process. There are already a lot of people who are feeling like they might barely make it through this year.
I have been trying to understand how entire neighborhoods, let alone cities, can be burned to ash. I have been trying to understand what this means, when the shapes and settings of the stories of our lives that we so closely associate with who are suddenly cease to exist. Perhaps it is impossible to understand this type of trauma until it reaches us at our doorsteps. In many ways, as residents of today, we are simply waiting until it reaches us: a fire, a hurricane, a tornado, a war, displacement or unemployment or the lack of affordability that living seems to follow on an upward curve.
Existential burnout is a double edged sword: With so much going on in the world, the world needs us to participate, to believe in better, to believe in ourselves. The world needs us to recognize that not everything is terrible and not everything is bad, that we are good enough ourselves, so that we may live as active participants of our own lives—and each other’s. Yet doing so is difficult when the world itself seems to be broken at the seams.
I can only imagine the grief associated with the loss of home. The loss of an entire country. The loss of a neighborhood. The loss of a garden, kitchen, hall and window you know better than the words Monday and Friday. How do we start over again? We do, because we have to, because we want to. Because, with the help of each other, we can.
The trite things are always true: The best that we can do is do with what we have. The most beautiful part about being human is that, though we are unable to direct the course of our lives in any guaranteed way, we are able to direct the way we experience life itself. When faced with the devastating effects of natural disasters that have become supernatural in the wake of the climate crisis, all there is to do is help each other. I think that is what we do best. At least, that is what I am telling myself.
The thing about being young is that we do not know as much. We are able to wonder about the world because we have yet to come to expect certain things: that big corporations lay waste to the land, that the people suffer the consequences caused by corporations, that there are more of us who want change than the people who have the power to make it. Now, in a time where it seems that there is too much to know—too much that we already know and do not act on—maybe, in order to keep fighting, to start again, to bring hope into the new year, we need to tell ourselves things that might be true. Things that can be true, even if it is difficult to imagine along the life we see today: a new home rebuilt stronger, a nation reborn into a better future, a time where we are all good enough because we feel so, because we remind each other.
Things that can afford us a brighter outlook on life, so as to light the way forward. ☷
Note: This week’s edition of Sleepover was sent a week late. Newsletters will resume as normal (with the next out on Thursday, January 23rd).
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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