A commissioned piece exploring the psychological weight of January. While most content around the New Year focuses on achievement and transformation, this essay argues that January’s true power lies in forgiveness. By leveraging the "Fresh Start Effect," we use temporal landmarks to distance ourselves from past failures.

The designated devil's crime was not cruelty or failure or rebellion. It was witnessing. She was in the room. She remembers what was said. She noticed the distance between the family's narrative and the family's actions, and she made the error of not forgetting. She holds the archive the family needs destroyed.

The objective was to deconstruct "Goblin Mode"—Oxford’s 2022 Word of the Year—moving beyond its surface-level definition of laziness. I wanted to explore it as a legitimate psychological rebellion against the "perpetual performance" of modern life, specifically within the high-pressure context of the Singapore expat community.

There is a photograph of a woman eating toast at a kitchen table in 1976. The toast is simply toast. Fifty years later, breakfast has become unrecognisable. Not the food itself, but everything surrounding it. The decision-making apparatus. The expert guidance required. The moral weight of choosing correctly.

Fiction's capacity to expand moral imagination is also its capacity to colonize it. Every time you inhabit a character, you bring your own architecture of feeling to their experience. You can only understand them through your available emotions. This is why diverse literature matters.

We are creatures of nested time. Your circadian rhythms follow the sun. You move through seasons no calendar marks. Beneath all this, deep time—evolution, continents drifting—there is pattern, recursion; and recognising this anchors us.

We have no generous vocabulary for pauses in adult life. We never call them necessary, never sacred. But what if our lives, like fields, need seasons of rest? What if the gap isn't empty but essential? The rest between notes that makes music music.

Our biology insists on honesty even when our psychology does not. The flush rising in our cheeks, tears springing to our eyes, our voice breaking when we speak of what matters. We are, whether we like it or not, transparent.