Dear 2025

fuck off

Dear Clementine is a reader-supported publication. I rely on subscribers more than ever. If my work has ever helped or even moved you at all, I would love for you to become a paid subscriber. Your support is literally the only income possible in a world that has so thoroughly punished writers like me for speaking out against genocide! Thank you for your support x

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December 31, 2025.

The last day of the year is traditionally a time where everyone, even the most determined of cynics, is willing to engage in the magical practice of ritual: release and renewal.

Some of us write letters to the past and burn them, sending the ashes into the wind with either whispered thanks (for blessings had) or stoic banishment (for grief endured). More common is the ritual of release-and-renewal that involves groups of people coming together under jankily lit fairy lights to “ring in the new year” while cursing out the old one. To get into the party mood, we all agree to slap on maniacal grins and laugh hysterically while wearing novelty glasses, terrified that if we appear to have emerged from the experience as anything less than irreversibly insane, the spirits of misfortune will decide they didn’t go hard enough and pledge to double down before we’ve even made it through the first chorus of Auld Lang Syne.

I’ve started this post with a joke, but it gets a lot less funny from here. Blah blah blah insert comment about that being an analogy for the season etc.

The truth is, this has been the hardest year of my life - emotionally, financially, spiritually, mentally and probably some other -ly words I can’t think of right now. I have crashed well below rock bottom in basically every aspect of my life, and it has almost destroyed me.

I know I’m not unique in this feeling. Across the board, I keep hearing the same thing from different people, whose different challenges have led to the same conclusion: this year can suck a fucking fuck.

There are obvious reasons for this collective despair. Israel’s genocide continues uninterrupted, and those of us who care about this have continued to feel the moral injury of being told it’s not only “not happening” but that if it WERE happening, it’s because it’s morally justified.

Even beyond the west’s mass complicity in genocide and Zionist terrorism, this year also holds the depraved honour of producing a record-breaking amount of billionaires. People around the world are being strangled by the obscenely named ‘cost of living crisis’, all because the world’s most reprehensible individuals see the provision of even basic human rights like shelter and food as inconvenient to the building of their stock portfolios. But let’s think of the silver lining, hey? There was also a record-breaking number of female billionaires this year. Girl power! Equality at last.

I’m getting sidetracked.

The truth is, this year has made me feel like I genuinely have gone irreversibly insane. Spirits of misfortune, you’ve done your job well! I am officially the crackpot standing on the corner in a sandwich board, warning passersby that the sky is about to fall. I don’t need to sense the growing distance between me and people I once felt very simpatico with - I can see the bottomless chasm that separates us. The friends, former colleagues and even family members who’ve begun to steer clear of me and my bloody-minded rantings.

When are you going to get back to the feminism? one of them asked me recently. You had a great business model with that.

‘The Feminism’ was a safe bet, see. A great business model! Being a bloody-minded ranter is great for business when it’s subversive enough to turn rage into ticket sales. But bloody-minded ranting - zealotry - becomes a little scary when it proves itself to be more concerned with justice than with being able to continue filling theatres at the Sydney Opera House, or with pleasing the people whose donations oversee its programs. Zealotry like that is bad for business.

Worst of all, it’s just so sad. It’s so sad to see someone go from being so smart and so brave and so galvanising and someone who appealed to so many women, to now being so unhinged and so hateful and so fixated and someone who most women just cannot relate to anymore.

Doesn’t she know that The Feminism is only a great business model if it doesn’t ask anything more of its audience than to buy into the idea of themselves? The Feminism can only be a great business model if it understands that feminism is a business, not a liberation movement.

Capiche?

But there I go, getting sidetracked again.

The truth is, I’ve been filled all day with a terrible sense of grief and loss and fear and unknowingness and the thought of ritually hoping that next year (which is, at the time of writing this, approximately only four hours and fourteen minutes away) will be better makes me feel so incredibly naive and stupid. I’m trying to think of how I can let it all go while optimistically stepping forward into a season of new possibilities, when I have no idea what new possibilities even look like.

The truth is, I don’t know who I am anymore.

I never thought I’d feel this way, untethered and completely adrift on the ocean of my own self. It’s a very disconcerting place to find myself in, with no land yet in sight and no way of knowing when it might appear. Throughout my life, I’ve experienced immense challenges and uncertainty. Some of them are common, others are more specific to me. The loss of my mother at 26, the unrelenting onslaught of hostility and abuse from online misogynists and trolls, becoming a mother myself, relationship breakdowns, battles with mental health and various diagnoses, even a global pandemic - no matter what rug was pulled out from under me, I’ve always been held steady by the unwavering sense of knowing who I am.

I’ve always been strong willed and defiant, and I’ve worn the criticism that comes with that. It’s not easy being the killjoy at the dinner table, the one who can’t let things go just to make things easier for the people who won’t let things change. This tendency I have to ruin the night has been lifelong.

A ‘great business model’, yes - but business ought to be left at work.

I grew up with a father who loved having smart daughters, only so long as they didn’t have smart mouths. As a young girl, I was frequently warned against ‘backchat’. My demands for fairer working conditions in the home (read: a more even split between my brother and I for the household chores) were always met with anger, and the subsequent arguments would see my father accuse me of always turning things into a fight as he aggressively pushed me out of the way to do whatever task I’d tried to negotiate over that he refused to assign to my brother. Whenever I raised my voice to try to prosecute my position, he’d tell me to ‘stop bloody going on like a fishmonger’s wife’.

Despite that, I kept going. For years, I knew exactly who I was. I was the person who isn’t afraid to say what she thinks, who’s prepared to fight for what’s right even if it means getting knocked down in the process, the one who’d rather be hated for being too much than liked for wanting too little. I’m the woman with the unwavering voice who called out to other women to use theirs, because I knew that the portal to a new life would open up if they could hear themselves really speak for the first time.

Who I am (or at least, who I was) was a person who could withstand whatever public garbage was thrown at me, because I believed so strongly in the purpose of what I was doing. I could be resilient and tough in the face of daily abuse, because I knew that someone had to be. I believed that taking those knocks and getting back up would show other women that it could be done. That being knocked down was worth it, if it meant we were building a better world for us all.

But the blows of the last two years have been unlike any I’ve ever withstood before. I’ve survived some pretty orchestrated attacks before, many of them from well oiled shit-pumping machines like the Murdoch press. I’ve been deliberately misrepresented and defamed by people whose goal has been to silence me once and for all, but nothing has come close to this.

I don’t know how to fight back against people and systems that are so diabolically evil and well organised, and whose greatest weapon is making you appear irreversibly insane - especially to yourself. I don’t know how I can even be the person I’ve always seen myself as when everything I spent my life fighting for suddenly feels like a ridiculous joke whose punchline I only understood too late.

It’s taken almost twenty years, but I feel defeated. I don’t know if I have it in me to get back up anymore. I ate a lot of shit for The Feminism, only to learn that a lot of people only liked me when it felt like I was eating it for them. I don’t want to keep fighting for people who don’t fight for me. I don’t want to stand with people under the banner of The Feminism and pretend that we care about the same things anymore when they’ve spent two years resolutely ignoring a genocide because to speak up is ‘bad for business’.

I don’t know who I am anymore. I just know that I have to be something else if I want to be able to live with myself.

And so I end this year not knowing who I am, and releasing the instability of that. I end this year not knowing where I’m going, but letting go of the fear of what that means. I end this year grateful for the chance to learn who I’m not and who I never want to be again.

But magic brings possibility, even in the hardest of times.

I don’t know who I am anymore, but I have an idea of who I might like to become.

I want to be someone working towards a better world, not a better business model. I want to build something with other people that matters, a world that values justice and collaboration. I want to fight for something that’s real. I want to be brave and strong, and I want to be soft and loving. I want to fight against oppression. I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with people who are willing to withstand abuse meted out by the powerful, because they know that someone has to be. I want to love people who are willing to be hated for what they believe in. I want to tend to the wounds of those who believe that building a better world is worth taking some knocks for.

I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror each morning and be proud of the decisions I make, and I want to lie in bed at night and know that I tried.

I don’t know who I am anymore. But I think maybe it’s possible for me to become the woman who’ll save my life.

Happy New Year. May we globalise the intifada, fuck Israel and free Palestine.

Clem xx