Your hold is ready! (12. 30. 25)

Author

Cavar S
December 30, 2025

Hi everyone, from the end of the hardest year I (and many of you) have had in a very long time.

This month, I celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas and my birthday, and there were immense moments of joy, a welcome relief. Mostly, though, things feel scary. And I know I’m not alone.

It’s strange to look back on a year of accomplishments –– receiving my PhD, completing a writing residency, preparing for the publication of my next poetry collection –– and understand them all to be undergirded by a deep, enduring current of pain. I realize that this sounds melodramatic, but I am being completely serious. I faced the worst and longest period of depression I have in more than a decade, and it hasn’t fully let up yet. Some of it is personal: the job search, the lost feeling one feels when school is done and their (my) brain wonders, what next?

Much of it, too, is a feeling of sickness at this country, this world. Even mediocre students of history understand where this leads, right? Or, better phrased, where it has led? This is a bad year because I feel bad and struggled a lot. But. I felt bad and struggled a lot against a backdrop of abject terror: genocide, fascism, direct attacks on the fundamental freedoms I (naïvely, whitely) believed would endure, somehow, Despite. I don’t know if I actually believed this. I think I forced myself too for lack of other options. It’s like Shirley Jackson wrote: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

Sanely, being the operative word there. I haven’t felt sane. This isn’t so unusual; at any given time, I typically don’t feel sane, but this time, I feel insane in a frightening and crushing way, like a teenager burdened with the responsibilities and, worse yet, ethical commitments of my newly-twenty-seven-year-old self.

I’m not going to pretend I think this is going to get easier in 2026. But I do think we have more infrastructure and preparation to fight back, and fight back with skill and passion, than we did at this time last year (when we were mostly scared and flailing). So, take this in-between time to rest and care for yourself, and come back next year with the strength and resolve to keep protecting those we love and resisting those who seek to destroy all we hold dear.

Happy New Year.

Housekeeping:

If you want to read about transMad queercrip nonsense as aesthetic and praxis, check out Differential Diagnosis, which is now available for pre-order on Northwestern University Press’s website and on Bookshop. Be sure to request it from your favorite indie bookstore, add it on Goodreads and Storygraph, and email me if you’re interested in a review copy.

If you want to read about transMad queercrip nonsense as aesthetic and praxis, speculative fiction-style, check out Failure to Comply digitally and in print and on Bookshop in both formats, on Goodreads and Storygraph, and request it at your local bookstores and libraries. Find inspo/similar reads/books that fed Failure to Comply at my Bookshop affiliate page, where each of your orders gives me a dollar.

Also: manywor(l)ds is open for submissions through 1/31!

Now, onto the recommendations.

Today’s Recs:

Books:

Watching:

  • Pluribus, S1 (Apple TV+ or on the high seas)

Poetry & Prose & In-Between:

Essays and Articles:

My Recent Work: