Going into 2025, the only thing we can honestly say of our future is that it is uncertain. The disasters crowding the horizon are nothing if not diverse, and the possible outcomes of their discordant combinations seem too infinite to rationally place any bets. Back when I was studying Haitian Creole, my professor told me that after the earthquake in 2010, Haitians effectively eliminated the future tense from the language and replaced it with a future conditional—an ever present reminder of the power of disaster to make mincemeat of mortal schemes. We’d be wise to do the same, but our society is too skillful at avoiding confrontation with our fear of uncertainty, and so we go on making plans, oblivious to the foolishness of assuming that the future is willing to negotiate.
Mystified though I may be about where the changes coming this January will ultimately take us, there is one thing I know for sure. Going into the new year, I will be bringing with me all of the flaws, failings, and subconscious saboteurs that have held me back in this one. Try as I might to defeat them, my bad habits are as stubborn as I am, and I’m continuously impressed by the ingenuity I bring to getting in my own way. No new year’s resolution exists with the power to do away with the limitations obstructing the path to my innermost desires by simply wishing it so. Success in the new year will depend entirely on how well I understand the problem, and how carefully I implement the necessary solutions.
The problem, as I currently understand it, is structural and therefore systemic. Self-discipline has never come naturally to me. I’ve always confused indulging my headstrong tendencies with freedom, associating discipline with the whip. An inveterate seeker of shortcuts, it took me quite a while to see the infallible wisdom of the slow and steady, but there are only so many times a hare can get her ass kicked by a tortoise before the truth starts to sink in.
But even knowing this, after years of desperate trying, the proper execution of this principle continues to elude me. In the past two letters from an editor, Dan Fox and Marisa Clogher both wrote about the power of discipline, politically and personally, and as someone who works closely with them, I can say they know a lot more about it than I do. Take this very issue of ANTIGRAVITY, whose particularly tight holiday deadlines revealed the extent to which the lack of discipline in my personal editorial operating system leaves it vulnerable to even minor stress tests. The January issue is fantastic, but I can’t really take much credit for it (bragging rights for this one belong primarily to Marisa, along with Tammie Quintana). I fumbled communications, failed to write reviews I was excited about, and as we speak am getting this letter in embarrassingly close to our print deadline, much to Dan’s chagrin (you know it’s getting bad when he starts quoting Lorne Michaels1“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”).
But perhaps there’s something fitting about our closing out the discipline series with the person who needs it the most. Years ago I came across a passage in Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti which describes self-discipline as medicine. In the event of psychic illness, the Vodou priest will prescribe a patient a course of action which enables them to heal their relationship to spirit through the rigors of self-regulation. “The salutary effect of the exercise of self-discipline is indeed remarkable,” Deren writes. “It exercises the will, tightens one’s forces, focuses the personality into integration. Instead of accepting an objective destiny with indulgent despair, the Haitian assumes a subjective failure which is accessible to correction.” Committing to the discipline of change means that eventually you will get out of whatever hellhole you’re in, no matter how agonizing the process might be.
And agony it is, because change is death. The idea that something must die in order for something new to be born is a tidy concept, but it’s hard to be circumspect when that death is happening to you. Being present through it, a requirement for maintaining discipline, is like burning alive. It’s humiliating, and lonely, and sad. Nothing feels right—at once alienated from your past self that was, if nothing else, familiar, and facing a future that appears impossibly distant, the pain feels eternal. Discipline may be the road that takes you through the flames, but it’s a long one, and I’m constantly wondering how I’m going to make it. But I never give up. When I fail, I try to figure out what went wrong, and then I try again. The successes might be tiny, but they accumulate, and little by little I witness my internal landscape take new shape. I grow stronger, let go of old hurts, and surprise myself with small deviations from destructive patterns that would have been impossible not so long ago.
As we enter the new year, there’s no denying that we’re in for another rough one. Knowing how much must die in order for a new world to be born, the road ahead looks absolutely terrifying. But I am motivated by my firm conviction that everything our hearts desire lies waiting for us on the other side of that burning ring of fire. True love, clean air and water, safe places to raise our babies, justice that rings as clear as a bell—if we commit to the discipline of fixing what’s broken, surely we can get there. The process will be long, stretching far beyond our lifetimes. Likely it will take at least as many years as an old growth forest needs to come of age. But maybe, just maybe, we’ll look back on 2025 as the year we planted the seeds. —Holly Devon
illustration by Henry Lipkis
January 2025 cover by Romey Petite.
