EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

This December, I Said Fuck The World

December 6, 2025—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)
This December, I said fuck the world. Not in the loud, reckless way I might have meant it in my twenties. This wasn't about theatrics or setting fires for the thrill of watching them burn. It felt more like an exhale I had been holding for far too long—months, maybe years. A slow, weary surrender to the truth that I have spent most of my life showing up for people who will never, not once, show up for me. People who treat my loyalty like an expected service. People who see me carry everything and quietly decide that means I should.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment when the realization landed. It wasn't sudden. It wasn't cinematic. It showed up the way winter does—first as a chill around the ankles, then as a cold draft across the floor, and finally as the unmistakable understanding that something in the house has shifted and you're the last one to notice. Something subtle. Something that whispers instead of announces. The discomfort that lingers until you eventually stop pretending you don't feel it. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is stop editing the truth to make it easier for someone else to hold. I'm finally learning that.

2025 kept circling the same lesson like a crow over a field—some of the best things in life are the ones that do not last forever. I didn't want that lesson, and I sure as hell didn't ask for it, but it came anyway. It threaded itself through every season like a diagnosis I didn't want but already knew.

Spring arrived with promises I shouldn't have trusted. I wanted to believe them—god, I wanted to believe them—but even in the thaw, something felt off. The air had a hesitant quality, like it knew something I didn't. Summer broke things open in ways I never anticipated. Not everything that breaks does so loudly; sometimes the fracture is quiet, almost polite, and still permanent. Autumn peeled back truths I'd been too tired—or too hopeful—to confront. Truths always wait. They outlast denial. They out-stare it.

Mother Nature tried her best to hold onto the joys of autumn—by the time she relented, winter immediately showed up, and I wasn't surprised by the cold. I had already been living inside a version of it for months.

I used to think permanence was the goal. Find the right friends, the right spouse, the right life, and hold on to those feelings of stability for dear life. But this year split that belief clean down the middle. Some things flicker out before you're ready. Some people drift no matter how tightly you hold them. Some chapters close so decisively you can feel the air shift—an atmospheric pressure change you can't ignore, like the seconds before an oncoming thunderstorm when everything goes still.

None of it means they were bad. None of it means they weren't necessary. It just means they weren't built to stay.

When you've seen enough endings, you stop romanticizing permanence. There's a certain mercy in broken things; they no longer pretend to be perfect. I learned to build altars out of ordinary things—coffee mugs, dead pens, cracked mirrors—and call it faith.

There were nights this year when I realized I had found meaning in stranger places than comfort. I've seen god in worse places—under flickering fluorescents, in the hum of a vending machine that still accepts quarters. I learned to pray sideways, under dashboards and stairwells, where the air smells like smoke and rain. The kind of places where breath, fear, and instinct blur together and you don't bother with ceremony—you just ask whatever force is listening to help you get one more person through one more night.

2025 had that kind of sideways light. The kind that doesn't warm you, but keeps you from walking into walls. The kind that doesn't offer clarity, but still gives you enough brightness to take the next step.

Sometimes the silence feels like an old friend who doesn't ask questions, just sits and lets me breathe. And the strange part is—those old instincts never really leave. Some nights I'd catch myself listening the ways I did when I was younger: for changes in wind, for the far-off rumble of something I can't name, for the quiet shift in the house that tells you someone's awake, for the sudden stillness that always meant something is wrong.

I don't jump at those cues anymore, but my body still registers them. The muscles still recall their assignments. There are evenings when I stand by the window and the cold Vermont dark looks too much like the long drive back to the station after a call that didn't end well. The same kind of black. The same kind of quiet. The same kind of unresolved question hanging in the air like breath that doesn't quite dissipate.

This year was harder than most. Not catastrophic-hard. Not tragic-hard. Just relentless-hard. The kind of year that doesn't strike—it erodes. A steady drip of loss and clarity, endings and beginnings, and the long, uneven walk between the two. I learned that people who love you can still leave. Strength is what grows in the cracks when there's no other choice. Silence can be merciful. Letting go isn't the same as giving up. Some people never say sorry. Time does it for them.

Somewhere in the middle of all that unraveling, something inside me shifted again:
The past doesn't ache like it used to. It just hums quietly, like a song I know by heart but don't need to play anymore. I stopped checking the weather. Whatever comes, I'll stand in it.

There were evenings when the cold Vermont air pressed up against the window, and I realized I wasn't bracing the same way I used to. I wasn't running imaginary disaster scenarios. I wasn't listening for the next emotional tone-out, that old EMS habit of predicting crisis before it arrives. The land here doesn't ask for vigilance. It doesn't demand translation. It doesn't alter itself to fit anyone's comfort. It simply stands still and waits for me to decide whether I'm going to meet it honestly.

Some nights I sat on the porch watching the sky dim into that muted winter blue that always feels like a held breath. The wind moved through the pines like it had something to say but didn't want to start the conversation. And I found myself thinking,

Sometimes I sit on the porch and think, this is what surviving looks like when it finally stops hurting. Survival doesn't announce itself. It settles. It becomes muscle memory the same way trauma does, only quieter, less urgent, more willing to coexist.

When I was younger, I thought surviving made me exceptional. I wore it like a badge, like proof, like armor. Now I know surviving just made me early to the lesson everyone eventually gets—besides the earth below and the sky above, nothing lasts forever, and maybe that's the point. Endings don't make things meaningless. I used to survive out of reflex. Now I live on purpose.

Somehow, despite everything this year took, everything it revealed, everything it forced me to set down—I'm still here. Finally alive, and somehow we made it through together.