Y2K, 26 Years Later

Maybe the world is always ending, and always being reborn

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. In 2025 I posted over 60 different Substack posts between HIMSI and STRONGWILLED. That’s a lot of content! If you find my work valuable, please consider supporting this endeavor financially or emotionally or just sharing it with your friends who might like it too. Thank you so much, I cannot do this work without you and I truly am so grateful.

Happy 26 year anniversary of the Y2K scare to all who celebrate! This post isn’t really going to be about Y2K at all, but it’s been interesting for me to take a moment and reflect on how scared I was on December 31st, 1999. I was a junior in high school and believed that Y2K would usher in a horrendous period of persecution, suffering, global catastrophes and political instability. I didn’t plan for my future as a teenager because I was being told by the adults in my life that there was no need to do so. Now, looking back, I can see how being terrified of the future keeps people under the control of authoritarianism. Now that I am 41, I have lived through my fair share of disasters. But guess what? The end still hasn’t come. And constantly living like the world is going to end tomorrow doesn’t actually make it any easier to survive all the weirdness and sadness and joy that comes from being a human being in these times.

Anyways, happy anniversary to yet another histrionic apocalyptic scam that many evangelicals fell for. I’m always glad to see them proven wrong yet again.

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I don’t know about you, but it’s been really hard for me to conceptualize what 2026 is going to be like. This is probably due to the fact that so much happened in 2025, and there was so much change. Political, social, relational, economic. The bad news sometimes seemed to crush my soul and make it hard to breathe — but I also experienced a lot of small, beautiful moments as well. As someone who often thinks about what is coming next, my brain is stuck when it comes to 2026. I (like a lot of other people) accurately predicted the rise of Christian nationalism and how they would take over our country, sending us ever closer to societal collapse. And I was right.

So now what?

2026 appears to be a year where none of us can predict what is coming. I am assuming our president will continue to make horrible headlines every day. I am assuming the cruelty will increase. I am assuming my gender identity will continue to be seen as the biggest threat to the Christian patriarchy and will be treated as such. I am assuming terrible men will continue to get away with abusing children. I am assuming that prices will climb higher and insurance rates will double and that some of us might get some kind of mystery illness that has long-term impacts on our physical health. I am assuming that people who do not care about the future of all of humanity and of the planet will continue to reveal themselves and we will continue to take notes. I am assuming some tragedies will take place, both big and small. I am assuming the moral injuries will pile up as the same six men get ever richer.

But. If 2025 taught me anything, it is that expecting the worst doesn’t actually help you survive it. But you know what does?

Building resilience through joy, pleasure, connection, and autonomy.

I am assuming in 2026 people will come to know on a bone-deep level what their values are. That people will help each other in whatever small ways they can. That we will laugh until we cry, and we will cry until we laugh. I am assuming we will make and also appreciate great art because that is what horrible times do to the human spirit. I am assuming we will develop inside jokes with ourselves and learn how to not let every single headline into our fortress of solitude. We will read books and watch movies and listen to music and gaze at the trees. We will learn how to be in our bodies just a tiny bit more. We will feel some of the feelings we had to bottle up as little children or teenagers or young adults, and we will show up for ourselves in new and better ways. I am assuming some relationships will deepen and grow. I am assuming that some things will die and some things will be reborn. I am assuming most of us want a future that is so much better than the one currently on offer to us all and we will do what we can when we can to work towards it.

Now, if I can go one step farther and I want to tell you what I hope for 2026. This is vulnerable for me to even think about, much less type. I am the sort of person who was raised to believe the end of the world was always imminent. First Christianity and then activism convinced me that life consisted of suffering valiantly until the end so for me hope is a fragile, fleeting emotion. But here are the threads I am pulling on as we enter into another year around the sun:

I hope self-compassion blooms in our hearts and colors everything we do.

I hope our bodies are thanked instead of shamed for the ways they help us survive.

I hope pleasure is found in the smallest of moments.

I hope children are protected from predators instead of trained to obey them.

I hope we stop protecting religion and institutions and billionaires and start protecting people.

I hope we keep processing our pasts in order to not perpetuate the harms we experienced.

I hope we all get to know our true selves just the tiniest bit more.

And I hope that we all find ways to be creative, a birthright of being born human.

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2025 was a year I really felt the weight of everything that has happened to me. I suspect 2026 will be more of the same, but I am already scheming up different ways of processing that I hope will integrate all the emotions in a way that doesn’t overwhelm me. We shall see how successful I am at that.

In 2025 I took 4 months off of social media and put together a one-day weird immersive art show all about evangelical indoctrination materials. I just felt compelled to do this. Partly because I knew I was gearing up to finally write/record my James Dobson’s Worst Nightmare materials and that I was going to be tackling the subject of pedophiles and purity culture. Doing something creative with all of the horrible books I had collected felt really important, and I am so glad I did that. It’s one of my proudest moments of 2025 for sure.

For 2026 I have been having another weird creative urge. I have tried to write a memoir of growing up with an end-times obsessed mother for years but it never goes well. It feels like a slog, and honestly it triggers me during a time when . . . well, a lot of things are triggering to me. But I have become interested in writing a screenplay loosely based off of my life as an evangelical teen in 1999 who truly believed Y2K was going to usher in the end of the world. So that’s what I have started working on, and my brain is really enjoying the puzzle of writing something that is completely outside of my wheelhouse. It feels like play, which is a really nice feeling to have these days.

I am feeling less and less like being on social media again, partly because I am in the thick of parenting and taking care of other people’s children and cooking and cleaning and all of the unsexy parts of creating a cozy life for my family. The activist part of me needs a break, and my silly, slow, and soft parts need some time and attention. Winter seems like the perfect season for this, so I am going to listen to my body and continue to prioritize my mental health. Because 2025 taught me that crises can and will happen no matter how hard you try to avoid them, so why not be good to yourself in the meantime?

I don’t know what 2026 will bring to any of us, but I do know that if you are here and reading this that means we survived. I honor that survival, and all the work that has gone into us learning more and more every day how to honor the totality of our human bodies and brains.

For today, I am wondering how everyone is feeling about 2026 -- and what you have been processing about 2025. Any reflections, thoughts, and emotions? Or maybe you are like me and feel rather overwhelmed at the task of processing the past year OR thinking about the future -- both extremely valid responses! Either way, I would still love to hear from folks about how they are processing these days and what they are thinking about for next year. Any creative projects on your horizon? Let me know in the comments!

And lastly, for everyone who has supported my work in the past year -- by sharing posts or podcast episodes, supporting me financially, sending me a nice note or interacting here in the comments -- I can’t thank you enough. My work often makes me feel isolated and overwhelmed by the cruelty of religious men, but interacting with real flesh-and-blood people who are just trying to heal and not cause harm to others is so important to me.

The world didn’t end on December 31st, 1999. And it won’t end any time in 2026 either. So here’s to living our lives in the shadow of the apocalypse, and finding ways to connect with each other despite it all.