What Troubled You in 2025?
Postscript No. 6 | An end of year symposium
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What troubled you in 2025? is the question we asked our writers to wrap the year. What agitated you, bothered you, kept you awake at night — solved, overcome, or yet to be answered? All the essays and conversations we feature in The New Critic answer to discomfort. The responses below capture something of the spirit of our generation this year, our troubles, our questions, and our triumphs.*
Isabel Mehta, 23 | “The Vagueness of Her Discontent”
I think about this year — the days and days and days — and what did it yield? Many nights simply wondering: What, exactly, is happening? The more I make a home in my mind, the more I lose touch with the pragmatic rhythm of society. Yet the closer I exist on this social, integrated energy wave, sometimes the farther I feel from my soul. Can reading save me? Can people save me? Maybe, almost. I have a hunch that the last sliver of hope in a life well-lived — both in the head and in the world — requires real conviction. It’s something I am searching for. The question that troubled me most this year, which often kept me up at night, was whether or not one day I will find it. Whether or not one day my values will be strong enough to disentangle appearance from reality. It seems bleak but it is far from that. These questions are the keys to the universe, the answers to which I really have no business knowing. If I could guess, I think it is going to be about people. Yet for now, as Rilke says, I must settle with loving the questions themselves, and the way in which sometimes, in the middle of the night, the faint shimmer of an answer makes itself known.