I’ve been writing less lately, though I still write every day. The work no longer holds. The threads dissolve as soon as I think of them. Even when something forms, the center gives way. It bores me. Everything returns to loneliness, no matter what I intend to say. So I walk more. I joined a gym. I listen to loud music. I try to inhabit my body with the kind of attention winter demands: slow, grounded, unadorned.

The days dim early, and my mind follows. December arrives with its rituals already assigned, a script everyone seems fluent in but me. Birthdays. Holidays. Consumption. I am supposed to feel lifted by repetition, soothed by familiarity. Instead, a familiar heaviness settles in my chest. I envy the fantasy of inherited ease, the idea of warmth that does not require calculation. I want that. I feel its absence.

This year, though, the pattern feels thinner, weakened. The despair still arrives on schedule, but it no longer governs me. Something in me meets it rather than absorbs it.

Part of that shift comes from understanding that a life is lived inside two stories at once: the material conditions you inhabit and the narrative the culture assigns you. Loneliness forms in the gap. I was shaped by a class position that accumulated over time, never securely placed, only close enough to safety to appear stable and far enough from capital to remain exposed. My position shifted through comparison, through proximity to people whose needs were buffered by assets, family wealth, or institutional insulation. I finally understand those shifts.

I never believed I grew up poor. The Air Force provided a version of stability that felt ordinary. Health care was socialized. Groceries came from the commissary. The “American Dream” appeared plausible. My dad disappeared across oceans for months at a time, yet the structure around us held. My mom carried three daughters through lean years with a steadiness I mistook for security. I did not yet understand the difference between surviving and being supported. I only knew that we were not falling.

Class did not announce itself through deprivation. It appeared through contrast. Tammy’s purple Nikes. A scholarship whose meaning I didn’t know. The thrift-store clothes my grandma assembled into something that passed in popularity contests. None of this registered as a lack. It registered as an orientation. Constant adjustment. Where do we stand in relation to those whose lives are not contingent on wages, debt, or uninterrupted labor?

Class is not an identity. It is a relation. It does not reside in individual bodies. It becomes visible only through contact with others. You feel poor when your needs are exposed to someone whose needs have been structurally removed from risk. You feel secure when the ground holds beneath you because someone else’s labor, debt, or precarity absorbs the shock. Class is the atmospheric shift when two forms of safety encounter each other and do not recognize themselves as equals.

Across all of this, love persists. I can love people whose lives are no longer shaped by the same pressures as mine. I can want closeness with someone whose stability is underwritten by conditions I do not share. Desire does not disappear simply because it cannot be reciprocated. It remains unresolved.

Loving across unequal conditions carries weight. A moment that feels consequential to me barely registers for them. I reach for language, a depth of understanding that others recognize in theory—hearing it from a distance, rarely reciprocating. This loneliness is not emptiness. It is surplus space, produced by a system that trains people to detach from dependence. It is the cost of refusing to flatten myself into something easier to absorb. It is evidence of my continued reach in a culture organized around withdrawal.

The strain in my relationships is not separate from the strain of the country. We are trained to privatize need, to endure rather than rely, to treat support as a moral achievement instead of a collective obligation. Families absorb pressures displaced from the state. Marriages bend under economic stress, misnamed as personal failure. Friendships thin under schedules shaped by exhaustion. These fractures do not originate in intimacy; they originate in a political economy.

The space between us stretches across economic, emotional, and civic life. It marks the distance between a society that organizes itself around meeting human needs and one that offloads survival onto individuals while extracting value from their labor, attention, and care. My loneliness is not separate from this. It is produced by the same conditions that generate inequality. It registers the failure, then internalizes the blame.

There is no resolution here—only recognition. My emotional life is inseparable from the conditions that produced it. Loneliness is not a personal defect. It is political clarity. It exposes what has been withdrawn. It measures the cost of decades of policy that dismantled the social supports that once allowed people to feel held, then repackaged endurance as evidence of virtue.

This may be why the Year of the Snake cut so deeply. Snake years specialize in exposure. They strip away the narratives that make endurance appear as stability. This year forced me to confront how often my sense of security was simply capacity. How often “I’m fine” meant: I can carry this without complaint.

The shedding happened regardless. Old beliefs loosened. Old attachments fell away. What remained was lighter, not because conditions improved, but because the illusion no longer requires maintenance.

The calendar now tilts toward the Year of the Horse. The Horse does not coil or wait. It moves. It demands direction. If the Snake removes illusion, the Horse asks what action follows.

I do not know what waits in 2026. I only know it does not feel sealed shut. I have new friendships that showed up unexpectedly and stayed. New ideas form like constellations at the edge of my mind. New possibilities gather quietly at the margins of my life.

This is not optimism. It is readiness.

The days are still dark. My mood still tracks the sun. But there is motion beneath the quiet.

The Snake is finishing its cycle.

The Horse is at the gate.

For the first time in a long while, I am not bracing. I am preparing and looking forward to the year to come.