happy new year everyone! and, honestly, what a year 2025 has been for me.
i’ve had a rollercoaster of a year. highs, lows, and everything in between. but the most impactful thing to happen to me this year was that in february i decided to start listening to a podcast.
i’d been seeing tma content on my dash for months and all the amazing fanart had me intrigued, but i was a certified horror hater at the time, and to be honest the prospect of starting it was a daunting one. i can actually remember the exact date on which i listened to the first episode. i remember sitting down at my desk with the intention of getting some work done and telling myself that if it’s too scary then i can always just turn it off and listen to something else. i think i must have ended up listening to five episodes that day alone. it got its claws into me like nothing has done since adolescence, and pretty soon it had taken over my every waking moment.
tma also rekindled my love of writing. i hadn’t written a fanfiction in about three years before i started listening, and though i work on personal fiction projects on and off, i hadn’t felt emotionally connected to my writing in years. i have clinical depression, and oftentimes it steals the joy from the things that i love, but for the first time in a very long time, writing has been fun again. it’s a hug when i’m sad, a soothing balm when i’m stressed, and one of the only things which can make me forget everything else going on around me. during the most stressful moments of this year, listening to tma was an escape, and writing my silly little fanfictions probably saved my life.
somehow, i even managed to find the courage to post my works to ao3, and quite honestly the response, though it might seem small to some, has genuinely blown me away.
if you are one of those people who has read, bookmarked, kudosed, or commented on one of my fics since i started posting in june, then, from the bottom of my heart and with as much sincerity as i can muster, thank you. you don’t know how much it means to me, to be able to have even a tiny positive impact on someone else’s day when my own life often feels like it is falling apart around me.
and so, on to 2026. this year, i’ll be submitting my phd thesis, continuing to nurture that which brings me joy, and, of course, writing a metric shit ton of fanfiction. i have so many exciting projects planned for this year, and i hope that they’ll bring just as much happiness to everyone who reads them as i know i will get from writing them.