The Major Lesson I Learned In 2025

I’ve had a habit over many, many years on LiveJournal and DreamWidth of writing about the lessons of the previous year in late December and then focusing on new goals or ideas in early January. I’m a little late to that now, but I have my reasons.

The last few years since Covid helped to ravage my already precarious health with lingering and often severe chronic migraines have decimated my energy, good cognition days, and will to do much of anything at all, even write– which has been a lifelong compulsion that has steered me through many strange and often difficult realities.

Yet my life hasn’t ended! Indeed, new information and an expanded understanding of older information has continued apace. I haven’t been writing much that I’ve shared, but I have been managing to post privately once or twice a month most of the time. I’m still way “behind” sharing what I’ve discovered or experienced, but I haven’t given up trying.

Please know that above all else– I’m still trying. I will continue to keep hope alive to move forward, even if it’s at a slower pace than before.

Up until recently, I’ve found myself especially paralyzed with fear from the middle of 2024 (when I had visions that Trump would win, thus setting off the timeline I’ve dreaded since visions of the future I started having in the late 1970s thru the late 1990s) through the early autumn of 2025. It seemed like the practical survival stuff I had to figure out was too much to deal with on top of the existential dread about where things are headed in general for everyone.

On top of that, I got information from a memory– not a dream or a vision– that was about my personal future and how something substantial will change: My “death” or transformation of sorts that will mean a very bizarre transition to a new way of life. Even if I don’t or can’t believe that information (and it seems very implausible) I know that I’m not going to be able to move forward in my current form without some radical shift. In a very real way, I’m at the end of my rope!

To clarify, I don’t mean I’m going to die of natural causes any time soon. Nor am I suicidal. Far from it! Rather, I’m coming towards the end of my ability to continue as I have for much longer.

Yet my adventures on this planet are supposedly no where near ending. I’m supposed to bear witness to, and participate in, some massive changes to what we’ve considered “normal” for a very long time. I have faith that this is true, but it is very tentative and fragile. I wait and watch for more information, and for corroboration of what I have so far. For now, I can say that I’m not afraid of either carrying on in life nor of leaving it. If I’ve been sucked into a fool’s errand and a fanatic’s faith– so be it.

In the meantime, as I watch and wait to see where this all lands, I have to deal with the realities of my life now. And many of those realities are on the grim side. Trying to handle it all was a massive challenge. I managed to overcome my depressive episode by late January of 2025 and went off antidepressants successfully. Then the major challenge was anxiety ratcheted up to an overwhelming degree.

Somewhere around late autumn, something in me SNAPPED. I got sick of being on the losing end of nearly every serious confrontation. I got sick of being acutely aware of my lack of power and money. I got sick of putting up with people pushing me.

And I finally started pushing back.

I may share some of those incidents and how I sorted through them eventually. For now, it still feels too raw. I’ve had a lot of social confrontations, mostly minor, that brought the point home, though. It wasn’t easy for me to give myself permission to push back, regardless of the consequences, which include my losing my home, or my supportive social contacts. I’d rather be alone than with people who are okay with hurting me. I started standing up for myself, even when people subtly threatened to abandon me to face this world alone.

Death feels close. I think that’s why I started to say “Fuck it!” to myself. Something’s about to end, one way or another, and I don’t want to walk gently into that good night! Fuck that. I’m tired, and I’m chronically ill and in pain, and democracy’s ending, and people are going radical fascist in my own country, and political corruption is at an all-time high, and the wheels of justice are moving so slowly that we’re grinding towards a massive and likely violent reaction. And I have no power to stop any of it. All I can do is talk “resistance” and wear a paper clip! The whole thing is insane!

So when these petty disputes were popping up and making an already almost unbearable life worse, I couldn’t play meek anymore. I just couldn’t. I started to be more assertive when pushed, and I got a LOT of flak for it (not counting my friend “Thea” who just made a fair point when others were making unfair ones)… but I didn’t cave. I would take a breath, re-evaluate, and then either throw down a boundary, making it clear I was prepared to just ditch the entire situation or relationship, or I would withdraw and refuse to engage further.

It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m not comfortable with hostile behavior (despite always being pretty open about my sometimes hostile feelings) and so crossing that line felt risky and awkward and scary as hell.

Yet I couldn’t NOT do it.

I’m fed up. That’s all there is to it. I’m fed up with being pushed around and manipulated. I haven’t even been engaging much socially for the last couple of years, given my light exposure restrictions from migraines on top of the rest of the issues I’ve had for decades now. But when shit comes up and my attempt at fairness is dismissed–? I’m not having it anymore. I’m just not.

And guess what-? People who are used to me backing off and giving in are not liking the new me. Big surprise, eh?

Luckily, those people don’t include my roommates. Cat’s been working on medications, seeing her doctor (FINALLY!) getting some therapy, and learning to work with me on my boundaries. We only had one evening of fights, instigated by Sleep, at Yule. During that altercation I made it clear I was done with her threats (of my losing my home every single time we have a dispute and she’s losing the argument, so she mentions “giving up” our living situation to make me shut up). I finally called her out on it in a big way, in front of Sleep as a witness, and I think she may have gotten the message at last. If she wants to separate, then fine, but we bring it up to discuss it with purpose and sit down calmly to work it out. She can’t just blurt it out every time she’s losing an argument with me (that’s generally about respecting my limits where she responds that she’s the victim who just can’t be limited to being fair to me.) Other than this rather messy incident, however, she’s been more conscientious and considerate in general.

But Sleep, and my sister, and Amara, and my mother, and several other friends from the Michael’s Arts N’ Crafts days and Facebook have all been weirdly defensive and petty in the last year, and some of that bullshit came to a head in the second half of last year. I didn’t enjoy it, but I realized I was indeed willing to lose all those relationships if the connection was marked by too much disrespect towards me.

I’d rather be a bitch and alone than scared and defeated with shitty people.

That’s not an easy decision to come to, but I guess I’m just at my wits end.

I know many of those people I had to push back on are having their own set of personal crises. I get it. But the solution is not to hitch their issues on my wagon! I’m not going to follow a faith healer who is obviously a fraud to keep a friendship, for instance. Nor will I pretend to! I’m not going to be corrected on my handling of my finances, or my spiritual life, or my health. That’s my business unless you live with me.

I also finally seemed to have released the fear of turning into a monster myself. I mean, come on! I’ve been scrupulously monitoring my motivations and behaviors for my entire life, and I’ve rarely crossed the lines into “unjustifiably bitchy” let alone anything ethically serious! I’m a good person, period. Yes, I make mistakes. I can miss cues or jump to the wrong conclusion. But I don’t pick on good people. I don’t manipulate others to get my way– I just plain ask for it and explain my motivations openly. I’ve always been a very frank and fair person! If anyone wants to paint me differently, I don’t have to stand around and listen– and I won’t anymore.

I feel like much of my life has been about this process. Coming from an abusive and neglectful home where I was programmed to accept shitty treatment from everyone because I wasn’t all that special (like decency from others needs to be earned? HUH!?) has meant a fucking lifetime of weaving together self-esteem from bits of scrap. It took thirty years to overcome the first twenty! And it’s been another nine years since my divorce to get away from the paranoia and insecurity borne from a partner who regularly bullshit me to get his way like some teenager! He wasn’t as bad as my parents, but I NEVER would have accepted his bullshit if I hadn’t been trained for twenty years by my parents to accept bullshit as normal in the first place! It’s taken years to get to some semblance of who I might have been had I been loved and supported to begin with.

In a nutshell, I’m physically weaker but psychologically stronger now. And that’s not nothing.

Source: https://lucretiasheart.livejournal.com/1722708.html