EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

The Year That Clarified Everything I Had Been Avoiding

January 3, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Today I was thinking—quietly, sideways, the way thoughts arrive when there's no one demanding conclusions—that a lot of the worst damage in my life did not happen evenly. It concentrated. It arrived in specific stretches, did its work, and left. Out of forty-six years, only two of them carried most of the weight. 1998, and now 2025.

I've come to the conclusion that I am tired of speaking about my life as if it were a series of never ending traumas. It wasn't. Most of it was work, movement, building resiliency, and learning how to hold things together without breaking. Most of my adult life was simply living. The devastation did not stretch across everything—it showed up in defined periods and then receded, leaving aftermath that took a lot of time to sort through.

I think I have always used time as a container, even before I had language for it. I learned early that if you let pain sprawl, it will claim territory it never deserves. So I learned to mark the borders. This happened here. That happened then. The rest of my life gets to stay intact.

Last year was one of those years that demanded immediate containment.

My mother died. That alone would have been enough. But death has a way of stripping away politeness. It does not create character—it exposes it. Grief reveals who is present out of care, and who was only ever orbiting for convenience, access, or relevance.

I let go of most of my friendships this year. Not dramatically. Not with speeches or ultimatums. Just accurately. Some people wanted access, not relationship. Some wanted proximity to grief without the responsibility of truly holding it. Some wanted to be seen as supportive while quietly extracting what they could—information, validation, narrative, the opportunity to have moms things. Some disappeared the moment I said that nothing was available to take.

I did not chase any of them, and that surprised me. Older versions of me would have explained, over-explained, tried to repair things that were never mutual to begin with. This year, I watched. I noted the patterns. I paid attention to who showed up without needing an audience and who vanished when the room got quiet.

Time contained the truth. The truth was plain to see—this time, I did not have to interrogate it. What remains now is a much smaller circle. Quieter. Less impressive on paper. Weaker in social metrics. Stronger where it counts. These are people who did not flinch. People who did not require performance. People who did not confuse my finite resources for endless capacity.

Letting go did not feel like loss the way I was taught loss should feel. If anything, this past year sharpened me. It taught me that friendship is not proven by history but by behavior in the present tense. That longevity without integrity is just inertia. That absence, when someone needs you most, is an answer even when it arrives quietly.