December Please
Circling out the year / for honesty's sake
Dusk outside Joanie’s house, at the end of 2025
Scores of crows circle the open purple sky. Curlicued oaks host the joke-songs of jackdaws (corvids dressed in vocal drag as squeaky rubber ducks). Nesting swallows gurgle away from me and the dogs1 as we snap through the hollow-hearted barley stubble. Duck wings alight from the old clayworks quarry pond. Add to their wingclap the magpie rattle and partridge scrape — a whole percussion section but no soloist, no lark. But then the visitors arrive: great V’s of geese to roost at the basin. Pink-footed geese in from Greenland and Svalbard, and the odd Alaskan snow goose, too, chronically social, taking whatever company they can get in these parts far from home. The geese each honk their two-note, quaver-crotchet phrase; in an imperfect, perpetual round. For now they are home, and I am too.
Thank you for reading the last letter for 2025! By way of [re-]introduction2, my name is Hannah Lees. I work in education and, for the past six years, have written this letter to you on the last day of each month. What started as a post-English MA thesis outlet for book reviews and cultural studies has turned into something of a mental health lifeline. I write to learn how I think and feel, and hope that it can give you a moment to think and feel, too. I sometimes write in other places — something I want to do more of in 2026.
One night this month I walked from Broadway Market in Hackney to Hornsey Rise in Islington. Crossing borough lines always gets me excited, but this walk hadn’t been my first choice. I needed to get to where I was staying that night, my phone was dead, and there was a bus strike3. On my long walk in the dark of this December afternoon I stopped at every supermarket on my path. I didn’t need anything, I just liked the break from walking to look through each bright shelf. I realised I felt happy. So many losses and shocks this year, but I am facing them with something like (at least a little bit more) spiritual muscularity. In these recent years I have become less ironclad sure of the promised moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. But we can act as if it is so, regardless. All I know is that I refuse to adjust to this world.
The year in letters
January Please - “I will be starting at a new rental home soon,” I said in that letter. Unfortunately it didn’t work out and I was in yet another temporary situation.
February Please - “I’m almost at the stage of life where a decade can be said to pass quickly. But just one week with my sister was a whole lifetime.” Okay, wow, I can be a melodramatic so-and-so, can’t I. But the euphoria of seeing my sister after being so mentally unwell in my meant-to-be-well new life meant everything to me.
March Please - “March was a mostly wordless month anyway, with a missing last day for me, and a monthlong missing net with which to catch much verbal sense-making.” Okay, wow, I was really going through it. The exhaustion is dripping off of me here. I felt gagged, I couldn’t speak, I was in deep despondence for our world, writing was lost.
April Please - The Pope’s death got me reflecting on growing up Catholic. “…The involvement of lay people, shy women turned full-throated by the dignity of the reading roster. A cappella singing from a swishy-robed priest directed at a host that we were promised was now the body of Christ. Not just a symbol, but the real thing! Transubstantiation, baby!”
May Please - This one was my favourite — when I stopped masking. I can remember precisely how I dropped into my body when I wrote it, and that being honest gave me more of an ability to look outside of myself again. It looks simple now, but at the time it took a lot for me to write that, “for the past while I have been really very depressed”.
June Please - Oh I was having fun psychoanalysing everything that month: “an ugliness: if I can’t be loved then at least I can win, and it will be like nothing, it will be no effort for me, but I will win so easily; it will be so easy for me and everything will run off me and my huge great feathers. It will be so easy for me! I will whirligig myself skyward, and no one will ever keep up with me, and I will finally understand why I am so alone..”
July Please - Oh I was angry that month: “Within all the settler-colonies is this posture of hollow largesse that risks (and redistributes) nothing: those who only give a land acknowledgement or an Indigenous greeting when their ill-gotten supremacy or conception of ownership is not really in question — not in their minds, anyway. It seems that western leaders are wanting the Palestinian situation to get to this phase.”
August Please - Oh I read a lot that month! An old-fashioned letter of impressionistic book reviews. On Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno trans. Natasha Lehrer: “Reading this book made me white-knuckle glad to find new forms to say the unsayable.”
September Please - Oh, there was a bit of a manifesto budding: “I don’t want to be fixed. The question is, simply, can I speak? I want to get and give more of that permission to just be present. We’re so programmed to preclude just being present because we can’t bear it, or it’s not allowed.”
October Please - On falling [back] in love: “My skin was electric. Why are you so funny now? Because you are enjoying who I am. How does it feel to be enjoyed? Like home. Today we are away from each other and it is exciting. The absence is not non-presence but rather an active, imaginal thing”
November Please - Tree-comfort, for loss: “On the night my uncle died I went outside and faced a colossal weeping willow. I parted its great dancing curtains and placed my heart against its silver-barked trunk.”
These are my deceased uncle’s dogs, four of them. Tara, Abby, River, and Ruby. Painfully, they have to be re-homed. They are at Joanie’s house right now, but Joanie is not well. Part of the reason for coming here for ten days was to help walk them. Together these four dogs and I have circled this house of memories in the surrounding fields each sunrise and sunset. We are saying goodbye to so much with each circle. Joanie’s vet friend is organising homes. We are all very sad, which is only right.
It feels different to write a jaunty introduction here, but also good. Being rollocking and easy again in my letter to you? Wow. A marker of progress. You see, I’d been ‘lost’ for more than two years. In early 2023 I hit a frightening burnout. Innocence, idealism, esprit de corps - they all died after experiencing bullying in an institution that had had a big place in my life. With this also came a loss of income and relative independence. I also lost my home in a place that had had a big role in my life. And that was before the genocide — the world-tilting loss of faith in the inevitability of justice, writ so large as to block out the sun. When I tried to speak about any of it I felt misunderstood. I stopped speaking but didn’t exactly loyally listen to myself either, or didn’t let the deaths sink in and slowly mulch down into the next thing. Against my will that mulching and putrefaction has been happening anyway. I haven’t found my way, but I can say I’m enjoying finding my way. That’s a lot, for me. I am grateful.
The strike was a good thing. There was probably some bus still going that could have got me there but, in the way of all encounterings of major or minor disasters, I was immediately calm and accepting of the task ahead of me. It is only when I still have control in a situation that I feel stressed, nay, plagued by the possibility of still yet optimising the outcome. If I can make the best decision then I must, which ups the ante in situations that others find low stakes. But the objectively higher the stakes, the more calm I feel. I am best in a catastrophe, decent in a pickle, and terrible in day-to-day decision-makings and plannings. I don’t work by task lists, I work by cues. Disasters do not rely on executive functioning and evaluative prioritising but, instead, bypass straight to the control centre. There is no low stakes priority list to organise, there is only the problem right there in sight. My whole being becomes an arrow for this bullseye. I’m loving putting myself in scenarios where this way of being is a strength rather than a liability. May you also find the settings that make the most of your way of being.
Curlicued winter tree branches silhouetted against a last Scottish sundown of 2025 (photographed at 3:46pm — oh these exquisite short days, drinking up each drop, not a beam of light unadored)
Until next month may you enjoy finding your way into 2026,
H x
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“Curlicued” — new word for me, so smiley. “Spiritual muscularity” — yes!
Thank you for this year of your beautiful writing, Hannah. Here's to another, full of comfort and joy <3