if the answers are blowing in the wind, then thank god it's Aquarius season
hello 2025
The energy I felt heading into 2025 was buzzy, electric. In many of my conversations about this lap around the sun, there seemed to be a collective agreement that it would be a good one. I wondered if this was because of the 5, a satisfying odd number that signifies the halfway point in a group of 10. While 2025 does have an alluring ring to it, the last twenty-one days have left me in a disorienting state of emotional whiplash.
On January 1st, I spent the morning in my favorite coffee shop. I went to a juicy yoga class and savored a delicious diner lunch of biscuits and gravy. A shared plate of pancakes. I witnessed three bald eagles carve neat circles around one another above a serene, snow covered field.
On the tenth day of 2025 and back on the east coast, I wrote this in my journal: “Things now feel upside down. Indigo goes back to Italy on Sunday, and I envy her untetheredness. And her time in Europe. The world is so much bigger than the places I’ve gotten good at frequenting, and the monotony of this scares me. LA is burning…..what if everything goes to shit well before we thought it could and we soon know the Apocalypse? There is a terrifying sense of dread braided into the crisp blue skies and rustling woods that surround me on this train.”
On the 14th, I barely slept because I was coming to terms with a sad but undeniable realization: I had to end my relationship. It turns out that as I lay awake, staring at my ceiling, my mother was 2,000 miles away and dreaming about me. The next afternoon, when I told her about the break up, Mom said the timing was interesting because of this dream she’d had. In the dream I appeared only briefly, but my face was glowing, radiant with what her dream self knew was a conviction that I am on the right path. Doing the right thing. We were both quiet as we considered the implications of her dream coinciding with what had just transpired for me in Brooklyn. Cosmic Confirmation, Mom called it, even though the abrupt ending of a relationship that was home to many beautiful moments is indeed something to grieve.
In the wake of this rupture and before my classes start up again, I turned towards a time consuming knitting project and spending far too many hours on TikTok while I still could. I thought the ban was going to play out like Flappy Bird did ten years ago, we’d be able to use it until it glitched and fizzled its way into the past, but obviously I was wrong.
On Sunday morning, after seeing the notification that accredited our good fortune to Donald Trump, I closed the app with a strange sense of foreboding and settled into a day of writing and reading and all the other non-TikTok things I vowed I would make more time for this year. At the end of the day, however, I was in bed and scrolling on TikTok. Twelve hours did not feel like a significant amount of time, but now that it’s back something feels off. Like one of those games where you spot the difference between two photos. I know I’m not alone in this: similar claims to mine are now being made all over my For You page. It’s eerie and unsettling.
In TikTok’s brief absence, I found myself burrowed deep into the haunting rabbit hole of Norman Seeff’s website:
Norman Seeff is known for his intimate photographs of well known figures (most notably, musicians) in the 1970s and 80s. Now, of course, we exist in an era that looks quite different from when these creatives were young, with our addictions to social media on our overpopulated planet where it feels harder than ever to make yourself known as an Artist. As humans have continued to have babies, develop technology, engage in wars, and fry the planet, artists have continued to create. Now we find ourselves treading the waters of Instagram and obsessed with the era that feels just beyond our reach (Patti Smith is still alive, after all).
I saw A Complete Unknown in theaters twice in one week. I’ll be the first to admit that my perpetual state of nostalgia for eras I’ll never know firsthand manifests as a kind of obsession, but in 2025 this nostalgia is verging on existential. It’s not that I dream of what it would be like to walk the rooms of the Chelsea Hotel sixty years ago, though obviously I am curious (the garments those closets held…), but more so that I find it unfair that I’ll never know the experience of being an adult in a world without smartphones. Yes, I could trash mine and feign a dedication to old fashioned ways, but even if I wrote directions and phone numbers on a piece of yellowed paper with a no.2 pencil, everyone around me would still be tapping.
I know that getting stuck in the past can be inhibitive, and I cannot deny the inspiring and informative wisdom I’ve gleaned on TikTok, but now more than ever (ahem, the scariest inauguration day yet) I am running towards content of eras that have already come and gone. I’m daydreaming about crowded bars where the glowing lights pulled from our pockets and purses are not from devices but from matches igniting cigarettes.
I was verklempt both times I watched Joan and Bob conclude their singing of “Blowin’ In The Wind” on the morning after their first one night stand. I wanted the warm hazy hue that filled his apartment to leave the screen and wrap itself around me. I yearned for the staticky television box and the vintage refrigerator. And yet both times I emerged from the theater, the first thing I did was reach instinctively for my iPhone.
I am eagerly stepping into Aquarius season. I need some some wind in my sails full of reassuring urges to stay true to my most quirkiest Self. Twenty-one days in and I don’t know what 2025 will bring. No one does. But despite my existential tendencies, I remain optimistic (hello Leo/Scorpio). I grieve the chapters that have closed and work on cultivating curiosity for the ones to come. Maybe that’s what living in the moment is. In sixty years, what will the young artists say about the 2020s? Will they itch to know the details of being someone like me? As we remain on the brink of of unprecedented times, one thing does seem to be clear: we must keep creating.
Thank you, as always, for reading my words. I will leave you with this photograph of Joni Mitchell floating in a swimming pool in 1975:
I so admire your great wide open heartedness in your writing- beautiful.
Beautiful Isabel!!!!!!