12/01/25

We hear it time and time again. Under any given circumstances, the most healthy and therapeutic advice to be given when one finds themselves unable to dig out of a deep rut, is to 'not live in the past'. It can be framed in a multitude of ways - don't dwell on it, live in the moment, appreciate how far you've come - all summarizing the same key point that is to just be thankful for each day. But today, as I sit at a table encircled by my entire family, lit by small tea candles and adorned with stuffings and puddings, mashes, and poultry, I find myself (and everyone else) encountering a confusing question: What are you most thankful for this year?

Anyone older than two has heard this question before, and after an additional 20 years, you become accustomed to the typical answers. Your cousin is thankful for a promotion, your aunt is thankful you could all be together, and your grandma is thankful that your uncle could make the drive. And after 22 years, you just can't bring yourself to rehash the same sentences one more time. I'm in no position to brag about my career, or even tease at a career-oriented thanks giving for 2026. Everyone knows I've graduated - we all celebrated it together months ago. They don't know my friends or care about fashion. They already know I'm gay, so that pin drop is out of the question. But this year, I don't want to fall into the hollow answers of someone just trying to pass it on to the next person. This year, I find myself craving honesty - an answer that honors the year I've had and the staggering amount of thanks that are due. 

Throughout the years, one of the most consistent aspects of my writing that I receive positive feedback on is authenticity. Say what you will about my ability to write well or expand on an idea thoroughly, the one thing I know I am is honest. Not only is this very important to me in any aspect of writing, but it is also an intentional choice. A choice I make in order to curate some sense of relatability, or if nothing else, understanding, for what I or someone else may be feeling or thinking. And as a result, I tend to circle certain points in myself repetitively, cementing them as concrete elements of who I am in my core. One such point I bring up quite often is how much time I spent thinking, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, thinking about any and everything I can, so that maybe I can fully understand an occurrence I regularly run into. I think it's this very part of myself, one that I have often felt somewhat embarrassed by, given the firm standing most mental health professionals take on not getting stuck in the past, that makes the question of what I am most thankful for feel so haulting. For the first time I find myself unwilling to reflect - avoiding looking back and thinking about all that made this year what it was, and all that I knew wouldnt last forever.

As I continue down my spiral, a few truer questions come to my mind. This year has truly been a year full of living in the moment - and maybe my first one. More than any in recent memory, 2025 was so genuinely and purely plagued with positive presents that there wasn't much space in my mind to focus on negative pasts. The budding friendships that closed 2024 grew into lifelong companions, the humble story-liker grew into what will forever remain a very beautiful Summer, the degree I spent every waking moment pursuing through blood, sweat, tears, and non-prescription medication finally found its way into my hands. I experienced some of the most profound examples of love that I have ever known, and the ticking clock of its eventual demise left me with no choice but to live within every single second. Because that is exactly what happened. After years, months, weeks, and days spent slowly recognizing how thankful I truly was, a five-hour flight and three-hour drive left every single aspect of it transformed to the very thing I know all too well I can never get back: a memory. And now I sit here wondering why? Why, after a lifetime of reminders not to live in the past, am I now not only forced to reflect, but to reflect on the moments that I should deem the best; the moments I can never live through again?

This year has not just been a good one, nor even one so full of things to be thankful for that I find it hard to pick just one - though both are quite true. This year changed me. This year will be one that I continue to look back on as one of the best, at least from the perspective of where I am now. But one of the hardest parts is that the good, the great, and the beautiful that encapsulated it is not only over, but at this point in time, sitting at Thanksgiving dinner trying to recall it in all of its splendor, it is so far in the past that I can't even find it anymore. I am changed. I look different, my hair now a dark brown, 20 shades darker and 10 inches longer than it had been then. The friends I found myself terrified of leaving now have their own apartment, in their own city, paid for by their own jobs, their own lives - all of which I have missed, watching on the sidelines. It stops being a matter of reflecting on the things that I am most grateful to have experienced in 2025, and becomes a bitter reminder that anything I am realistically thankful for is either boring or too painful to recall - a dilemma to the highest degree. 

All this to say, the real predicament I have found myself in is not that I need to have the best thanks. I don't care for what anyone thinks about what I have to say. Rather that I am faced with a beautiful problem to have - I have so much to be thankful for that it verges on the painful to remember it at all. From the position my mother has allowed me to be in, to lifelong connections that will continue to grow and blossom under the circumstances, and a four-year-long degree now placed proudly in a box under a box in my closet in my room. My problem is simply that I am now learning that living in the moment has just as much of a downside as clinging to the past. Imagine living in the moment is like a pillar jutting from the ground, allowing you to jump from pillar to pillar, appreciating each post for what it is providing you. Now, imagine that living in the past is like a rope hanging from the ceiling. You have to swing from each rope to grab onto the next, which takes longer to get from one to another, but as you look back, the ropes continue to sway back and forth, crossing and lingering over one another. I have spent the year jumping from post to post, thankful and appreciative of each milestone I reach, yet, eventually, I somehow grabbed a rope, swinging back over the last post that does not reach back for me. I now swing back and forth - from my future to present to past - desperate for just a taste of the pleasure the pillars once offered me. 

I am more thankful than I have ever been, but this year is especially bittersweet. It was good. Through and through, I have now experienced a year so significant that, for what feels like the first time, I am not looking forward to its rapidly approaching closure. And now what I am left with by the time it does come to its end are remnants of what the year once was. I can't end it the way it started, and for that, attempting to give thanks for its existence does not feel as honorable as it should - it feels almost too hurtful to even attempt, as if acknowledging that it is over, that my life no longer includes them, somehow makes it cemented as fact. As if pretending graduating, or getting a job, was the most impactful moment of the year would save me from accepting that the person I am today is a result of the year I have lived, and I am now left with him, and none of the pillars that built him.