Well, here we are. December 31st of 2025. Actually, it’s very likely going to be January 1st, 2026, by the time I am finished and y’all read this. I thought that by the end of the year, I’d be looking back at a healthy amount of writing memories on this blog (at least that’s what you’d probably think when looking at my draft folder). Instead, this is my third post in total, and first in about 7 months.
If you’ve forgotten you’d signed up for this, I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest. I hope you stick around. I plan to do a lot more writing, which I’ll touch on closer to the end. I'd love to hear about your own reflections on 2025 and your hopes for 2026. Thank you for reading.
This might get a bit heavy; in fact, I might upgrade it to 'probably' based on the thoughts swirling around as I start to write this. Rather than stop, give myself a chance to edit, revise, and possibly not click that Post button, I’m just going to sail into the storm, come what may. There’s a very silly moment that comes to mind from the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where a squid-like Davy Jones takes over the ship’s wheel as one of the climactic battles rages in the midst of a terrible storm, barking, “Full-bore and into the abyss!”
Another sailor grabs the wheel and screams. “Are ye mad?”
Davy Jones chortles back. “Ha! You afraid to get wet?”
Yeah. It’ll be a little like that.
How we got here
January: 2025 started rougher than it could. I had started dealing with a recurrent UTI in November of 2024, and absolutely nothing was working to stop it. There was an incredibly depressing election cycle. I had also just barely made it at work through a major client leaving, surviving two rounds of staff cuts, and being placed in a WorkShare program while things settled. The program required me to log in at the start of every week and record the hours I worked. This was a constant reminder that, at very short notice, my hours per week could severely drop and force me to use these unemployment funds as a subsidy that would not equal my previous pay.
For the UTI, I went to three separate urgent care visits in the span of a couple of months and largely spent the beginning of the year in pain, recovering from being in pain, or on antibiotics.
The end of January was also the announcement that, in accordance with an incredibly bigoted and unconstitutional executive order, the State Department would no longer provide accurate gender markers on US passports. This was one of the few things I had not gotten done before January.
So, you know, things were already Not Great™.
February: February was my annual voyage to Astoria for the Festival of the Dark Arts brew fest. I had just finished a third longer round of antibiotics, and it seemed at the time to have done the trick. It was my first taste of alcohol in several months, so the significance was profound.
February had a couple of milestones: one year on HRT and one year in therapy. I celebrated the former by trading in my daily estrogen tablets for a weekly injection. For those who know me, I am not good with needles. Not. At. All. I have a hard time with blood draws, and the thought of stabbing myself with a needle every WEEK was petrifying. It was scary, but I did it.
Spurred by the fear of being unable to update my passport, I worked on updating my birth certificate, the only other remaining identity document I needed to update. I gathered my courage and sent my documents all the way to California; fingers crossed for some positive news in a few months.
I want to pause the recounting of the year to address something in that last sentence.
Some people, some of whom are very close to me, have questioned why I needed to have my passport or birth certificate updated at all. "It’s a lie", one person told me. The answer, besides the very obvious nobody’s goddamn business, is that conflicting identity documents not only cause confusion when they are used or cause distress to the individual, but they also pose a danger for trans people as the documents essentially out them in a world that, right now, is hostile to them.
I remember standing at the airport in August of 2024, flying home from my grandfather’s funeral. The bustling queue murmured around me, but in my mind, everything had gone quiet except for the rapid thump of my heart. A TSA agent squinted at my documents. They glanced from the photo to me and back again, eyes lingering a moment too long. It felt like an eternity, amplifying my anxiety to a near cacophony, as I clutched my passport tighter, my skin prickling under the weighty scrutiny. It was a stark reminder of the vulnerability and danger of not having congruent identity documents.
The only person, relatively speaking, that probably needs to know that I’m trans on an informational level is my primary health provider, and that is a purely private doctor-patient relationship. It does not matter, nor should it, when I am applying for a job or a house, boarding an aircraft, enrolling in school, or performing any action that requires identity verification. US passports, for instance, did not have any gender marker until 1977, and the reason for implementing it was to combat the increasing prevalence of unisex fashion because of the GASP shock and horror of the poor border officials not being able to tell if someone was binarily masculine or feminine.
I long to live in a world that accepts who I am, without needing to parade past trauma and (in my case) dysphoria in front of people to have them believe me. Trans people are who they say they are, and that’s the fundamental answer.
[Steps off her soapbox] Let’s continue.
March: March! I have a few anniversaries regarding my transition, and one of them is the day I came out to myself, which happened in March of 2020. I wouldn’t feel brave enough to tell the world until months later, but this March marked five whole dang years since then, and yeah, it was pretty monumental!
March was also when I finally started gender affirming electrolysis. I had a pending referral for almost a year, and I was lucky enough to find someone close to me who practiced. We got along great, and it was finally feeling like some modicum of progress to start tackling one of the biggest dysphoria triggers I’ve had to deal with for such a long time.
April: I actually went to do something for my birthday for the first time in several years, which was actually terrifying for me. Decades ago, I invited people to celebrate my birthday by playing board games, and nobody showed up except my partner at the time. That did a NUMBER on me wanting to plan anything around my birthday. But this year felt different. I traveled to the distant but familiar city of Seattle for the weekend and had a great time. Shush, brain weasels! I have good friends who love me.
When I returned home from that trip, one of the longest and most stressful periods of the year began. Stuffed into my mailbox after arriving from the train station was a letter from the California Department of Public Health. However, it wasn’t the letter and updated documents I had been expecting. Instead, it informed me that my application had been shifted to pending status because my updated middle name included two instances of an Irish character accent called a síneadh fada. According to them, 'English is the official language of California, and we cannot accept diacritical marks on documents.' I sighed and thought, 'No matter, I’ll just resubmit the application without the accents.' This had worked for every agency until now. When I emailed the department office, the reply punctuated the air with a resigned, 'Pursuant to section 6 of Article III of the California Constitution,' as if it were the most reasonable denial in the world. My heart sank; this was just the beginning of this bureaucratic nonsense.
April also marked ANOTHER recurrence of my UTI issues from the beginning of the year. More antibiotics on top of a surprisingly dysphoric and costly medical procedure to determine why I was getting so many of these in a short span of time, which ended up not revealing anything!
“Can you feeeeel the loooove tonight?” No, I certainly fucking CAN’T, Simba.
May: I founded this little blog! I wrote about my experience travelling to my very first KPop concert with a dear friend while also battling the perceived pressure to stay prepped for electrolysis the next day.
Being initially aggressive with the electrolysis treatment, coupled with the dragging feet of my insurance provider in processing my insurance claims, really came to a head this month. The funds I had to cover the upfront costs were dwindling fast, and I needed some immediate financial assistance to stay afloat. Have you ever watched your savings evaporate while paying for necessary care? It's NOT FUN.
June: June (and July) will always be for Pride, and I danced my little butt off in Seattle this month and made a ton of new friends; you can read about those adventures here.
June was also HOLY SHIT PANIC getting my passport application together because of the injunction filed against the heinous passport decision in January. Several friends chipped in to get my passport expedited because I was not in any state to cover such a large and expensive ask at the drop of a hat.
If that was still not enough excitement, June had yet another UTI recurrence, and at this point, the specialist I had been seeing opted to put me on two costly medications, quite possibly for the rest of my life, but prefacing it with a “let’s see how you’re doing after a year.
July: It is also Pride in July, since we have our festival in Portland this month. There was slightly less dancing than in Seattle, but I also marched with my local support group and even helped hold the wee banner! Who is this person?
July was also filled with quite a bit of sadness. I was dropped by my electrologist, whom I really gelled with, for a reason I still can’t quite understand, but that’s a story that I’d rather keep private at this time.
I spent a lot of time furiously and sometimes quite pettily conversing with the California Department of Public Health about fucking accents on a goddamn piece of paper. Ooh, how I wish I had some of that time and sanity back. It turns out there’s a reason the state's a complete butt about it. In 1986 (comically, the year I arrived on this plane of existence), Proposition 63 made English the official state language. This led to an interpretation that prohibited any sort of accents on state documents. One of the more positive developments is that, while I was having the back-and-forth with the department, the California legislature got its own shit together and passed AB 64, the Name Accuracy Act. Next year, allowing for amendments to include the marks will be possible. This will likely be the only time I say “Thanks, Gavin Newsom” anywhere.
The rest of the months: August, September, October, November, and December all morphed together into one ambiguous blob of panic and stress, but I’ll use some bullet points to give the highlights:
I stopped posting stories. My drafts are quite literally filled with ones I started writing before I hit an I fucking can’t wall and left them unfinished. A lot of that process was punctuated by 'who the fuck wants to hear about this', which is something a lot of creatives will know EXACTLY what I am talking about. But as December approached, I realized that silence had taught me the cost of doubting my voice. It's okay not to always have the answers; it's about the journey and sharing even the unfinished parts. Also, YES, people do wan
My birth certificate amendment application was officially denied in October. But I got a lawyer at the end of September. We successfully petitioned the state of Oregon to, in essence, give me a supplemental judgment that says “if you aren’t able to spell my middle name authentically, FER FECKS SAKE SPELL IT LIKE THIS”, except in less shouty legalese. I’m gonna try this whole process again in 2026 once the state sends me the final certified copy. Additionally, thanks to the passage of AB 64, I might finally have my name authentically represented on my birth certificate. Fingers crossed.
I found a new electrologist. Hooray! I reached a point where I couldn’t continue paying out of pocket without landing right back into the same predicament I found myself in back in May. Boo! So I started a GoFundMe. It’s new, scary, and hard to keep on top of, but it’s also helped pay for most of those sessions and a couple of other financial asks related to my transition, thanks to some incredible people (you know who you are) each month. The GoFundMe has been a lifeline, and I’m incredibly grateful for all the support so far. If you’d like to contribute or help spread the word, it’s linked above, or feel free to reach out directly.
I went and got a second opinion about the UTI issues I’d been dealing with all year. A CT scan later, they could not find anything else wrong, and the advice was that in maybe a month, we could follow up about stopping the medication. So, in October, I stopped. I haven’t had a recurrence since June, fingers so exquisitely crossed. It still fills me with dread that whatever it was might come back, but it hasn’t, so I’m taking it as a win. I’m also pretty proud of standing up for myself in a field that often struggles to listen to women.
I made it through both Whamageddon and The Little Drummer Boy Challenge, the latter for the third year in a row. For those not aware, these are both fun internet survival games where you try to go as long as you can in December (and the last few days in November, because LDBC starts after Thanksgiving) without hearing 'Last Christmas' by Wham or any cover of 'The Little Drummer Boy.' As soon as you recognize either song, you're out of the competition. The last day for both is December 24th, Christmas Eve, which was harrowing because the day before, I ran multiple errands, several in places with piped in holiday that could very well have ended both challenges in a rather cruel fashion. Luck was with me, however, and I breezed into the 24th, safe in the knowledge that the only thing that could derail me from victory was myself. Small wins like these remind me that endurance isn't only about grand gestures but also about triumphing in the little, playful, silly tests.
And so now here we are, in the wee hours of 2026, and my only thought about this year is surely it can’t be as bad as 2025, right? RIGHT?
Farewell, 2025
I’ve found that I often like to use lyrics in closing to convey emotional weight. It might be a little late 90s emo girl’s AOL Instant Messenger away status-y for some, but sue me, I'm catching up for lost time a little here.
A song that has been rattling around in my head for the past several weeks has been by a musical project called Fuaim Dhìomhaireach. The vocalist sings in English and Scots Gaelic, and the chorus is particularly powerful:
Thug a’ghaoth thu uam, mo ghràdh, The wind took you from me, my love,
Thug a’ghaoth thu thar nam beann, The wind carried you over the mountains,
Oh carry my voice across the foam,
And guide my lost heart home.
The song is about absence, and BOY, there was a lot of it in 2025. The thing is, despite all of that hardship, I’ve never been as confident in myself as I am at this point. My heart took several hits this year, but guiding it home after the year that was 2025 seems like a wonderful analogy for starting 2026, don’t you think?
Athbhliain faoi mhaise daoibh. Happy New Year to you all.
💜
