Little Things Win
How I'm coping with 2025: The year of utter garbage.
I started the year with an anthem call of “Enough” as my theme. If you read my January newsletter, hopefully you were inspired by it! I was. For…like a week. And then, well, the world basically took a turn for the suck. Turns out, sometimes life throws a poop sammy in your face, and I guess 2025 is my time to get hit!
It started, personally, with the flu in January, then norovirus, then three straight colds in February swapped back and forth between the members of my family. There has been barely a day this year someone wasn’t coughing or blowing snot in the house (with two sinus infections on top of that, yay!) Being constantly sick is a pretty typical parent complaint, but with so much other awfulness that has been piling up on top of the plagues, it’s been a very emotionally tough few months. Starting with the fires that took place in Los Angeles in January.
It feels simultaneously like yesterday and one-hundred years ago that infernos burned down huge swaths of my city. Living through it, even outside the directly affected zones, was very disturbing. The skies were a hellscape of ominous hazy orange. I had an inch of soot I recently cleaned off my patio that we’d been breathing in for weeks. Evacuation notices, real and false alarms, popping up every other day made my anxiety soar.
With the rubble cooled now, there’s no denying it: LA is not the same. It never will be. There’s a hollowness to the streets, so many empty buildings and shopfronts, vast gaping holes that I don’t see being filled anytime soon. No one wants to start something new here. I don’t blame them. And I’m not even talking about areas where the physical ashes are. In those places, there is still danger from chemicals and debris, so basically they’re no-go zones.
Many friends and acquaintances have lost everything. Every area of the region is filled with the re-homed: Families struggling to create new beginnings out of nothing. We had friends who lost their home stay with us for six weeks, but after fruitless searches for a new place, where landlords would jack up the rent on them when they showed up to sign a lease, they decided to move out of the city. It’s so sad. Los Angeles is a huge quilt of small cities and neighborhoods stitched together, but they are all connected in spirit, and to have so many patches and people torn from it feels like a mortal wound.
An extra sad part about all this is that the people of Hollywood, who live in LA for the entertainment industry, many of whom were affected, had already been beaten down by Covid, two years of back to back strikes and constant layoffs due to the failure of the streaming business model. Everyone had already been struggling for so long, but there was hope that things would finally turn around. A constant 2024 mantra was “Survive until 25”! Clearly it’s just “Survive 25” at this point.
That hopelessness, especially around work, is hard to fight off. I’ve been feeling it myself. It’s been very hard to find acting work the past year, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to turn around anytime soon. Again, will Hollywood eventually recover? Who knows! I always keep making things on my own, thank goodness. But after the soaring joy I felt performing in “The Guild” The Musical a few weeks back, I’ve been hit with the post-project blues of, “That was so fun, I have no idea when I am going to do that again. Will I be able to do that again? Please let me do that again, world!” Just another layer on the seven layer bean dip of emotional wretchedness that is 2025!
And then, of course, on top of it all there’s the politics of it all. I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of it, but having many things I care about attacked and dismantled (Like, why is Canada our enemy now?!) has been very hard for me to deal with. I’ve been glued too closely to political news and it’s created a “constantly looking at my phone for bad stuff” habit that’s led anywhere but in a healthy direction. I also recently read “Fall of Civilizations” by Paul Cooper (TERRIBLE TIMING!!!) and issues like extreme wealth disparity and unexpected climate issues seem to be a common thread in the failure of many a great empire. I hope with all my heart we aren’t next, but things don’t feel great in those departments right now!!
ALL THIS AND MY NINETEEN YEAR OLD CAT, Speedbump, DYING A FEW WEEKS BACK have led to…guess what? A tiny dose of depression! I’ve been eating a lot, baking a lot, thinking I need to exercise, but not exercising at all. I’ve been looking at too much anxiety-inducing stuff on social media, and then wondering why I’m not motivated to create anything. I’ve been sleeping badly, and during the day constantly thinking, “Wow I can’t wait to get to bed tonight again.”
A few weeks ago I knew I needed to break the cycle, hard. So what did I decide to do? In the face of disaster and death and everything else? I decided to focus on what little I can control.
Meet…my new guest bathroom.
This is my eight-year-old daughter’s dream room, and we did it together. We measured the blinds and ordered them online, hoping they’d fit. (They did!) We picked out the sea-themed removable wallpaper that has cans of “Mermaid Stew” on them and laughed when we put it up.
We shopped for in-your-face coral accessories. And when we put everything together last weekend, she placed a unicorn patch and a poke ball with a Sylveon in it on the hand towels, then looked at me and said, “Mama, this is the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen.”
Yes, I guess it might be trivial and superficial and flippant to essentially say, “I spent a little money and was happier!” but it wasn’t about the money, promise. It was about the setting of a small goal and doing it with someone I loved. Proving to myself that even though it feels like it, life isn’t totally out of my control. Breaking down the wall of anxiety that had accumulated over the past few months has been key in getting my mind back to a place where I can move forward and not stay paralyzed and bake biscotti and eat seven of them for lunch every day. Those were good times, but yeah, my thighs would like to have a word.
Finishing the bathroom project has gotten me to a place where I feel…better. Since hanging those putrid pink towels I’ve felt empowered again. Since laying down that fuzzy, terrible quality rug, I’ve felt ready to go back to work. Fierce about it, even. I’ve been doing more writing, setting up meetings with producers for “The Guild” The Musical (which went amazingly by the way, if you watched online you know!!!), volunteering at my kid’s school, rationing my news input to once a day. Let’s face it, the year isn’t going to get more calm or stable as we go forward. 2025 is just…a nasty little a-hole. But during a year of chaos and unpredictability, I’m going to just try to keep taking little steps forward to prove to myself that I can still make change happen. We all can. And, one day who knows, maybe we all band together and combine our little steps and do big steps. As a team. That’s one of the most beautiful parts of being human.
So set that tiny goal. Finish that item on your to-do list. Get back to “Enough”. It might turn your month around. Your whole year, even. Or you can stay cocooned like I was for a while longer. That’s okay, too! Whatever you decide…
Interesting Links:
My daughter is super macabre and was excited to learn that human corpses move around a lot in their graves, for a LONG TIME after burial. Pass it on!
What was really served at a medieval tavern? Turns out: I’d rather have Thai takeout!
Speaking of, can someone go to this place in northern Burgundy, France, where they’re building a castle using medieval building materials/machines? I WANT.
Personal Links (also interesting):
I’m excited to show off the poster of “Ugly Chickens”, the short I starred in, produced by George RR Martin. It has won a lot of festival awards in the last six months. I am excited for people to be able to stream it somewhere soon hopefully!
On Twitch, I’m currently playing “Avowed” which is a very fun RPG, a mix of Skyrim and Dragon Age, feels like. Highly recommend for the “run around everywhere doing quests and talking to NPCs” vibe.
I am on BlueSky at felicia.day and enjoying it a lot. It’s full of what I used to like about Twitter. Follow me if you are over there!
See you next month, and on my Discord channel in between for chatting and friendship! <3
oxxo
Felicia
Now I am compelled to recommend the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Your daughter is probably a little young, but if she’s into the macabre— this book is the perfect mix of macabre and science. Also— love the bathroom.
You know what the ef is great about you?
Your decision to maintain being true to yourself as often as possible in your career.
You bring yourself. When there's less work, it's probably because you're less compromising more often than not.
Communities heal as the individuals heal.
Springtime is here 💚