New Year's Greetings

Reflections and hopes for 2026

Hello, and happy new year! I hope your 2026 is off to a good start so far. I’m writing this from Matt’s family’s little cabin on Lake Cumberland, where we often spend our New Year’s Eves. As I start this, I’m waiting for onions and leeks to caramelize for the Smitten Kitchen Quiche Lorraine. A nice brunch on New Year’s Day is nonnegotiable for me.

It’s odd to be writing this here, because for the first time ever, the cabin has internet access. One of the things I always loved about coming down here was going off the grid. There was no internet, no cell service, not even a landline. It was sometimes frustrating or inconvenient, but mostly blissful. Good for the brain and the soul. But the cabin has been plagued the last few years by a number of issues that would have been much more easily solved with phone and/or internet access (eg, the furnace going out shortly after our arrival on a cold night last winter). So now this cabin, which didn’t even have indoor plumbing when Matt’s family purchased it in the early 1990s, is connected to the internet. I’m not complaining — I could have easily chosen not to accept the wifi password — but it does bring my ever-complicated relationship with the internet into the last place on earth where I didn’t have to think about it.

Little House on the Internet

So, 2025. 2025 sent me back to therapy for the first time in quite a while. My dog was diagnosed with cancer and died three months later in a manner that I don’t care to recount but that was not the peaceful home euthanasia we had envisioned. My parents are old and ill and stubborn and I have been expending tremendous energy worrying about them and trying to force them to accept help. (They both subscribe to my newsletter and I anticipate an annoyed phone call from my mother about this comment, but it’s the truth!) I wrestled with myself about how much I should pay attention to the news before realize that the correct answer for my mental health was “almost not at all,” and then suffered the guilt that comes with having the luxury to look away. It seems that every aspect of the world is on a trajectory that ranges from depressing to terrifying.

But. In 2025 Matt and I also went to NYC to celebrate our first wedding anniversary and I grinned like a dingdong through the entire performance of the house band at Birdland. We ate excellent food and visited the Motown Museum in Detroit. I spent time in the ocean in Gulf Shores. Matt took me on an impromptu trip to Pittsburgh for my birthday, where I got to see sets from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood that seemed as familiar as my own childhood home. I sat on the patio with my dog while she sunbathed and enjoyed the last days of her life; I played the gentlest, shortest game of tug with her the day before she died. I got over my self-consciousness about the size of the pores on my nose and got my nostril pierced at the tender age of 45 (it looks hot). I had a piece of creative nonfiction published in an anthology. I started a year-long course in psychodynamic psychotherapy with the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center. I planted and tended my first vegetable garden and reaped a respectable harvest. I didn’t write as consistently as I would have liked, but I did write. And my friends wrapped so much love around me through all of the hard stuff.

So 2025 was kind of terrible, but it contained a lot of good. And paying attention to those moments of good — sometimes significant, but often mundane, often easy to miss altogether — increasingly feels like the only way to survive.

My hope for all of you is that 2026 is gentle, but that if it’s not, you’re still able to take time to look out the window at the birds, to gaze deeply into the eyes of a loved one (human or otherwise), to feel sun and a soft breeze on your skin, to smell the earth open up when it’s just started to rain, to drive down the expressway listening to your favorite album for the millionth time and hear it like it’s brand new. There is still so much good, so much beauty, so much awe to be experienced. We might have to look a little harder now, but it’s imperative that we do.

xoxo,
Erin