hello, lovelies, from the holiday break in London, where like so many of you I am taking stock of the year-that-was.
2025 was king cakes and karaoke floats and wigs and glitter and monsters, it was a baby hippo and Pink Pony Club, it was yarn and hot glue and Scrim and bullying Teslas and Doechii at Glastonbury (on the TV). It was flowers received and sent, gifted handknit sweaters and blankets from and to. It was Lucinda Williams and cemetery walks, data centers and James Joyce. It was Waymos on fire and ice whistles and inflatable frog costumes and nighttime noise demos and picket lines. It was George Michael karaoke and archives of the state and its discontents, letters from women a century ago that still carry the same pains. It was dancing in the streets and kissing at a bus stop and on a tower, it was hundreds of selfies over Whatsapp and it was movies on the couch.
It was academic library access and climbing a mountain path in the dark, it was teaching for the first time and realizing that I loved it. It was health scares and pulled muscles and mysterious bruises. It was sangria and creme catalan and prosecco for lunch on my birthday. It was weighing and packing my entire life and taking it to London for real this time, and it was housewarming parties and gifts and hosting and baking cookies and cheesecake and challah for the people who hosted me. It was promiscuous networks of care, it was citizenship parties and the light on the canal at sunset. It was Alexandra Kollontai and Kathi Weeks and Leopoldina Fortunati and redheaded torch singers and so many books about love.
It was trash foxes and magpies and pandas and wild boars and feral parakeets and other people’s dogs. It was New Orleans and London and Barcelona and Dublin. It was late night and early morning arguments over the nature of the state, left melancholy, the end of neoliberalism, Materialists. It was heartbreak twice over. It was aching and fighting against the making-disposable of my friends and neighbors and people I will never meet around the world, in Palestine and right down the block. It was loss and loss and loss again of people that should still be with us and it was messages at just the right time from people I love. It was resisting the pleasures of doom and the realities of fascism.
I am looking across the room at the gift from a beloved friend that I have yet to open this year and it has a Fragile sticker on the outside and this feels appropriate, somehow. Everything feels fragile except for the strength of the relationships we build and maintain. I have a novel by a new friend on the table in front of me and knitting supplies strewn across the coffee table and a scarf from a community organization and a tote bag from my PhD supervisor’s new book. This world feels fragile like a bomb right now, one misstep could detonate, and yet it makes me think of one of my favorite revolutionary cliches, too: be careful with one another so you can be dangerous together.
Two people I loved and admired this year left us too early. I am still reeling with the news that we lost Asad Haider, whose clarity and kindness were well known and yet. I do not want to gatekeep sorrow: we should all be mourned widely. But I am holding on to a memory from that awful Covid winter when Asad was one of a vanishingly small number of people I saw in person. When he helped keep me going.
Rather than doing a year-end round-up, then, I’m offering you this talk that Asad and I did with Robin D.G. Kelley during lockdown. Maybe you watched it then; I haven’t been able to rewatch it yet but it’s on my list of things to do in this quiet holiday week.
Coming on the heels of losing Joshua Clover, this loss has knocked me sideways. A sentence that I wrote about Joshua at the time is also true of Asad: “I don’t remember how we became friends, only that it probably involved Twitter and our mutual disdain for a type of condescending social democracy that masquerades as radical politics in some corners of the left.” They were both the kind of thinker that demands more of you and the kind of friend who never gives up on you. I am a better person for having had them in my life. For all the good, too, that this year brought me, I am sitting with this grief right now and trying to live up to it.
And so I am ending the year thinking a lot about friendship and comradeship and love and what it means to sustain each other through apocalypse. These are preoccupations of mine at the best of times but it is very much not the best of times and so I am committing myself (the closest I will come to a New Year’s resolution) to loving better in the new year and the years to come after that, however many of them I get. To practicing comradeship and care even when it is hard, even when I want to let go because being vulnerable scares me half to death.
I wrote a book that very few people read (but a higher percentage of y’all are probably on this list than anywhere else) about grief and I still believe that it can be a force for transformation. I am still hoping to do less of it in the new year, but I know better than to really believe that’s possible.
A lot of this next year will be spent finishing my new book and so I don’t know how much you’ll see from me in the public realm, though I will still be writing here on occasion and I have a couple of projects you’ll likely get your hands on soonish. And of course, you can find us doing Heart Reacts wherever you get podcast, and send us questions.
And so, happy holidays and happy new year. May you be stronger and fight harder and love more fiercely despite the prospect of destruction that looms over us all. Resist the pleasures of doom, my dears, and take solace, sometimes, in the sweet eagerness of these two glorious dogs.
Sarah Jaffe is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire.
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