January, four ways

My month in travel, books, mental health, and queer joy

I know this month has felt several years long but it’s (somehow) still the first month of 2025, which means it’s time for my first monthly recap of the year.

Last year, I followed the monthly “REPORT” format, sharing the best of what I’d been reading, eating, playing, obsessing over, recommending, and treating myself to each month of 2024.

But for 2025, I thought I’d try something new—and a bit more closely related to the topics that Carry On is really all about. I hope you enjoy it! I’m going to leave a little poll at the end, so please do let me know which format you get the most out of.

Either way: Cheers to finally reaching the end of this godforsaken month, and here’s to a better (read: shorter) month ahead.

January in travel

In the future, this section will recap where I traveled each month, Iinking out to any travel writing I published about the destinations in question. But oops! This month, we didn’t go anywhere.

We started off the New Year all snuggled up with our pup Stella at Basecamp Amsterdam, then we hunkered down here at home like bears in hibernation. We’ve had a few pals from Amsterdam over to show them around Haarlem and our new apartment, but otherwise, we’ve mostly been bundled up on the couch, reading and drinking tea.

It was a big month for travel planning, though! I booked a weekend in London with my partner in February, sorted out train tickets and hotel reservations for a few days in Berlin, planned a Spanish getaway with a friend to Madrid, and arranged flights for a book launch event in Edinburgh.

The next trip to tackle: My book tour's US leg in April. More details to come!

January in books

I was lucky enough to spend the first day of the year tearing through a gorgeous work of fiction, We All Want Impossible Things.

Books often make me feel things, and many even make me feel like laughing or crying, but rarely do they genuinely make me laugh out loud and/or cry actual tears. This novel by Catherine Newman managed to do both. Such a beautiful story of love and loss and friendship, of small things and big things and how none of it really matters in the end, or maybe all of it does. These pages would have ended up tear-stained even if I hadn’t forgotten to pick up my antidepressants ahead of the holiday before the pharmacies had closed for New Year’s Day! What a gift to start the year off this way, feeling it all. Five stars, easily.

Here’s everything else I read this month:

If you don’t already, consider using the Storygraph app to track what you read—it has helped me learn so much about my reading habits (and it’s not owned by Amazon, like Goodreads is).

And if you do already use the Storygraph app: Yay, let’s be reading friends!

January in mental health

I mean… Is anyone’s mental health actually in a good place right now?

Come on. It’s January.

Who among us isn’t trying to recover after the whirlwind of the holiday season, freezing our asses off, clinging desperately to the few hours of sunlight our Vitamin D-deficient asses can get each day, attempting with varying degrees of success to avoid catching any of the slew of respiratory illnesses making the rounds, and visibly twitching each time we get a Breaking News alert about the smallest man in the world’s most recent executive order?

So I take my meds.

I make myself eat breakfast.

I drink my coffee and put on my headphones and listen to a podcast and walk on my walking pad.

I shower even though I really, really don’t feel like it.

I work and write and work and write.

I try not to forget to eat lunch.

I delete TikTok in favor of my meditation app, my word games app, my self-care Tamagotchi app.

I take afternoon naps.

I write down reminders to call and check in on my loved ones back in the States once our time zones line up.

I make plans with friends and promise myself I won’t cancel them at the last minute.

I eat dinner and it’s already dark outside.

I curl up on the couch with the dog and my partner and we decide whether we want to watch TV, play a game, read, or scroll on our phones next to each other.

I wash my face and brush my teeth, or I don’t.

I go to bed so early it’s maybe embarrassing?

And that’s that. We keep moving forward. We slog toward springtime. Slowly, things begin to thaw and bloom and eventually, it all starts to feel a little less bad each day.

January in queer joy

Ugh. The LGBTQ+ community has been inundated with awful news over these past few weeks. It has been heartbreaking and infuriating, and we and our allies all need to take action in the fight to protect our community’s rights.

We also need to cling as closely as we can to queer joy wherever we can find it.

So, here’s some happy queer news I was able to eke out of this horrible month:

More than 100 local vendors came together to organize a free group wedding for LGBTQ+ couples in Cambridge, Massachusetts called the Queerly Beloved Ball, wherein seven happy couples were joined in legal matrimony.

And Thailand has been all over the headlines recently after making a historic move to legalize same-sex marriage—but did you know that their public health ministry also agreed to allocate more than $4 million for trans health care? They're expecting to provide care for around 200,000 trans citizens!

In less historic, but still exciting news: Drag Race is back with a new season, which means I’m back to watching new episodes ‘with’ friends back on the East Coast each week and live texting our reactions to each other in real-time.

And I finally hit the Vinted jackpot and managed to find the Bi Pride flag-inspired Acne Studios beanie I’ve been searching the internet for like an obsessive weirdo for the past year and a half (worth it!) and now I wear it everywhere.

Last but not least, my very queer book’s publication date is getting so! so! close! and I can’t wait for everyone who has preordered it to finally hold a physical copy of it in their hands!

What do you think?

Did you like this new month-in-review post format? Did you prefer how they were structured before? Or would you prefer a different type of content altogether over a monthly recap of any kind?

Thanks so much for your input and for being here in the first place. What an honor it is to hold your attention when so many things are vying for it all at once, all the time. You rock and I appreciate you. And I do mean you. Yes, you!