2025: How It’s Going To Be
Welcome to the New Year, everyone. A little over two weeks in and it’s feeling a little heavier than I anticipated. My mind keeps bringing me back to the comforting nostalgia that is Gerard Way’s Hesitant Alien. An album that helped shape my high school experience and, frankly, rewire part of my brain, seems like the sort of bandaid we need to get this year back on track. In this masterpiece of an album lies the tenth track: How It’s Going To Be.
For context, I am writing this soundbyte at the age of 25. This was, for a long time, an unfathomable age to me. Without weighing everyone down with the details, it was a milestone I never expected to reach. That, and 27. Listening to this song now, at this age, swirls in new emotions I never planned to address. The Brit-pop inspired album as a whole carries the perfect balance of any emotion you want to project onto it, but experience changes the game. In high school, this song felt dreamy. It felt distant and like it belonged on the soundtrack of someone else’s life. To me, it was a snapshot of a world that was foreign. At 14/15, the idea of 25 felt like more than a decade away. In all actuality, 25 felt as realistic a goal to reach as being a teenage billionaire.
I’m 25 years old and the year is 2025. As thing song plays, I hear Gerard asking the same question I ponder nearly every day.
“Wishing wells and magic spells and everything between/ Can you tell me what it’s like/ or how it’s going to be?”
None of us know what’s coming. None of us know how this year, or any year, will unfold. None of us know what happens after we turn 25 except for those of us who have done it. I’m promising you, reader, as well as all of my friends that I will be one of the ones who finds out. I’ll be here to tell you about 26, about 27, and even 28. G-d willing, I’ll tell you all about the best concert I saw during my 80th trip around the sun.
I can’t promise that 2025 will be a good year, if I could divine that, I don’t think I’d be making so little at my day job. What I CAN promise you - is that 2025 is not a death sentence by virtue of the year itself. We’re okay, you and I.
I’m proud of you for making it here with us. Stay longer. Find reasons, find stories, find friends, find light.
Find out how it’s going to be.
hannah epstein