I choose energy...
I didn't start off 2025 as ambitious as I usually approach a new year. I tend to have a long list of resolutions and goals ready to go. This January I've taken my time mapping out my manifestations. And honestly for no reason other than I haven't felt the same buzz and energy that a fresh calendar usually brings with it. I've been navigating the complicated reality of deep heaviness amidst extreme happiness. I'm surrounded by high highs and low lows in my personal life and the world at large. My mind is in so many places that creating and sharing has been the last thing I feel like doing. And while I've been avoiding creating and sharing because I don't feel like lending any of my energy, deep down I know that creating and sharing are really what give me energy.
I don't have a solution to the complexity of being happy and sad at the same time but I know that it's time to create. Below are a few of the screenshots and saves that have meant something to me over the last few weeks, especially this passage from Mari Andrew;
I am washing my face before bed while the world appears to be crumbling: wildfires, a shooting, an epidemic. It feels ridiculous to wash my face. It feels ridiculous not to. It has never been this way. And it has always been this way.
Someone has always clinked a cocktail glass in one hemisphere while someone loses a home in another while someone falls in love in the same apartment building where someone grieves. The fact that suffering, beauty, and mundanity coincide is unbearable and remarkable.
How is a person supposed to do ordinary things like face-wash or big things like fall in love when a quick phone scroll is both advertising designer socks and informing me of wildfires?
I despair with an exhale. Then I refuse to despair, with an inhale. I scroll some more: a new baby, a flower, firefighters. A threatened world holds so much.
"I must choose between despair and energy, I choose the latter." -Keats
What does it look like in the midst of despair to state, "I choose energy?" For starters, I choose to finish washing my face. Then I choose to look: not away from but toward. I choose to trust: first in goodness, then in people I know, then in people I'll never know, always in myself. I choose to enjoy.
I choose a new record. I choose to change my habits. I choose to send a supportive text. I choose to show up at a birthday party because grief and celebration often happen in the same night.
Mari Andrew





