February 11, 2025 | Rome, Italy

2012, 2025, and everything in between

By |2025-02-03T21:35:55+01:00February 3rd, 2025|Home, Mia's Archive|
Resolving to write more often by hand fosters a more tangible connection to the self — past, present, and future.

I remember being about seven years old staying up until midnight with my family. The thirty-first of December 2012. Champagne bubbles in Mom’s flute and my dad doing a silly jig in front of the TV fireworks. Next thing I knew, I was profusely crying. Bawling at saying goodbye to 2012. Crying because 2013 didn’t roll off the tongue as easily as 2012 did. I was odd and meticulous about things like that. Still am.

Looking back at my younger self, I see her scared, uncertain, and deeply unsatisfied. Now, I think this year, or should I say last year, I felt that all over again. A lot of uncertainty and dissatisfaction. So I cried. I cried in front of my boyfriend’s parents, who I had met only a handful of times. I cried in front of the TV at 9 pm, wishing the Studio Ghibli film “Howl’s Moving Castle” would never end. Hoping to stay lost in Miyazaki’s dreamscapes and bundled in the moving pictures of street crowds and soft Japanese linens forever. I cried in bed at 11:30 pm, asleep by 12.

I woke up on the first of January to just another ordinary day, so I started thinking about my resolutions. The whole ordeal of New Year’s just feels anticlimactic, and I know how much of a cynic that makes me sound like. The pressure to go and have this amazing time is another expectation I just don’t think I need for myself. How can you have expectations for something so ambiguous? Resolution doesn’t seem like the right word. People get so upset when they’re unfulfilled. I’d say expectations, but I prefer the term affirmations. So far, the ones I have come up with seem quite grounding.

1. My time will be abundant.

2. I will write on paper more.

3. To be continued . . .

The point is, physical documentation like postcards, letters, and scrapbooks are totally ‘in’ for 2025.

My first affirmation is the reason I thought of that anecdote of me at seven years old, personifying the year 2012, as if saying goodbye to one of those friends you meet as a young person on holiday and really come to love but know you’ll probably never see again. 2012 was one of those stickers you save on a shiny, plastic sheet but never actually use or stick. It was decorative and preserved in my juvenile imagination. Not that I can really remember much, but if I remember the loss, then something great must have happened. Last year I learned a lot about the social construction of things. Race, gender, class, and time. I have started to recognize these social constructs, like time, in my life today when I freak out over an essay I have left late and complain that I woke up at 2 pm and my day’s nearly half-gone. I always think I’ll never get it done. Yet, I always manage to, with my dad reminding me, “Who cares what time it is? Just do it now.” We’re basically conditioned to see time as this thing running away from us. Age, dates, deadlines, expectations of when and where we should be in our lives at a given point. It’s such a moribund way to live, and I’ve never been a fan of people who say, “Oh well, we’re all just going to die anyway.” If we are to be so waning in our world view, then the only thing I can do is switch my narrative. Make time abundant. Because it is. I want to take my time. Do things slower. Read slower, walk slower, breathe slower. I have so much of this thing that I cannot hold, but it can be taken. It can be owned, and how naïve to think I don’t deserve to own my time. It’s my goddamned life!

My second one is a bit more proactive. A step for my health, mainly my eyes and wrists. I say this now, typing and cramping up over my keyboard at a quarter to midnight. But the fun part is, I wrote this draft in my journal first. With all the strikethroughs and spelling mistakes. All the things I deemed too niche or awkward to put into the electronic version you’re seeing here. I’m copying as I go and realizing it’s a bit more work. It’s much slower work; I’m fulfilling the first resolution already! The point is, physical documentation like postcards, letters, and scrapbooks are totally ‘in’ for 2025. We should all get over the tentativeness of using the last sticker on the sheet and immortalizing the graphic, whatever it may be, on the front of a book or back of a phone case. Now that I write online, I have stopped writing as much in my journals. My scrapbooks have become more visual than verbal.

At the end of January, I started a new term of university — not in Manchester, but in the Netherlands. I hope to immortalize that experience in postcards and love letters, not on a hard drive or USB stick. I will keep up with my column and clue everyone in on my journey, but just remember, my journal heard it first, not you. I like that a lot. It makes it mine again. When I wrote “An original thought?”, it was because I had come across an old notebook from English classes in secondary school. It was a motivational speech assignment we had undertaken as part of an oracy project, and I wrote mine about forming an identity in a world that thrives on shaming one another. It was thirteen-year-old me airing out my frustrations on seeking individuality when I had experienced years of being the friend who always walked on the grass while everyone else walked on the pavement. It was a letter to me before it became a speech to the class. Rereading the page in that book, the only page I’d filled in that book, felt like sitting down with my younger self as if no time had passed. This year, I hope to revive my past selves through writing more, especially to others, on paper. When I see the abundance of pages I fill, I will be able to flick through and really hold the wealth of my own time.

This year, I hope to revive my past selves through writing more, especially to others, on paper.

My last affirmation isn’t really one at all. It’s just a signpost for continuation. It’s the only way of owning that uncertainty. Of owning the fact that I woke up at 2 pm, but something will always come next. Owning the fact that I may have cried this year, and in 2012, but only because my nostalgia tends to get the better of me. I’d like to leave a little room for change and growth. Soon, my environment will have changed. My relationships will begin to change and must adapt to adverse long-distance conditions. My daily routines will change. I can’t yet hold any expectations or standards for what will come of that, whether I’ll enjoy the experience or absolutely loathe the unfamiliarity of it all. The only thing I do know is that by the thirty-first of December 2025, I will have something to show for it. Whether that be on paper, online, in my sticker collections, or just in my own personal hall of achievements. The nice thing is that I can always just leave it as ‘to be continued’ and try again next year.

About the Author:

Born and raised in London, Mia Levy began writing essays in her first year of university as a way of archiving the discoveries she is making about herself and the people she meets along the way. Growing up with an English father and Dominican mother, she is interested in youth subcultures, family histories, and relationships. Writing for those who find themselves in the awkward phases of young adult life, she brews answers to the "Who am I?" question, sipping on a mug of English breakfast tea.