Happy, New Year, friends. I hope you enjoyed the holiday season, and that the upcoming year treats you kindly. For me, the past few weeks of holiday after holiday were not as enjoyable as they once were; I was straight up just Not Having a Good Time. But the new year is finally here, and we all know what that means:

New Year, new shenanigans, as we Finns like to say.

This is the second time I’m celebrating the start of a new calendar year while working on the project. It feels weird to think about how fast time has gone by, it really feels like it was just yesterday when I got out of the 2022 psych ward period and scribbled my first sketches of the now so familiar character designs. A lot of things have changed, but a lot have also not. Personally, the beginning of a new year has rarely been that important to me, because the only concrete thing that actually changes is the number you write at the end of the four digits. And what’s so special about that?

Well, this time around, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Do you guys have a lucky number? A lot of people seem to have one, either related to their (or their children’s) birthdays, or maybe they’re into numerology and astrology and believe that numbers hold special meaning to each of us. While I am not that well-reversed in the belief system of numerology, I do feel like some numbers just mean something to me. And that meaning is not necessarily a good one, has never been.

Number 5 has been haunting me for a very long time. I don’t have a lucky number, but my unlucky number is definitely 5 and every other number it appears in. And why is that? Because of what happened exactly ten years ago, in 2015. Without talking about it too much right now, I’ll just say that the year 2015 brought a lot of grief and tragedy upon my family. There was one specific date that ended up burning its tramp stamps onto the veil of my fragile memory, and that date had a lot of fives in it. Ever since then, number 5 has appeared in my life in various devastating contexts, and I am still not able to escape the bad luck it has brought me.

I’ve been scared of this year arriving for quite some time now. It might seem stupid to you, and that is completely reasonable. Honestly, I feel stupid for being so terrified of one silly number, but I cannot help but think about everything that happened in 2015, especially that one day. Nothing has been the same since then, not for me or for my family, especially my mom. So I have no idea how to feel about the new year that is just starting, how to position myself in relation to all of this, how to cope with the past trauma of what happened a decade ago and how it still continues to affect me. I guess there really is no way to prepare yourself for stuff like this.

The New Year as a holiday in Finland is one with a heavy focus on alcohol consumption. I mean, what holiday isn’t in this country where every tenth person is an alcoholic… But the New Year along with vappu (The First of May/Labor Day), and juhannus is a holiday of heavy drinking, often to the detriment of your own health. Since falling ill and being prescribed eight different medications, I have not had enough of alcohol to get intoxicated. But this New Year’s Eve, me and my best friend decided to have a few drinks, ciders and long drinks, and the next day we both felt extremely ill. I felt like a complete idiot, because I knew that would happen to me. So on New Year’s Day, after my best friend had left, I sat there wondering if there could have been something else to do instead than drinking. And once, there was a cultural tradition that we Finns liked to do every New Year’s.

Molybdomancy or tin-melting. It’s an old pagan tradition in the Nordics and some other parts of Northern Europe like Germany, where you melt a tiny horseshoe made of tin in a small pan, you put it on the stove, and when the tin is melted, you throw it into ice-cold water, where it solidifies instantly. The shape the tin takes in the cold bath is used to predict what kind of a year you will have this upcoming year. There are traditional ways of reading the tin, one of which is if the tin’s texture is uneven and grainy, it means the new year will bring you fortune (money, usually).

So there I was, sat down in my vague state of hang-over and nausea, thinking of the New Year of 2009, when the Kid was melting tin horseshoes on the stove with her dad, and I felt sad that I had once again chosen the wrong kind of Finnish tradition for holiday celebration. I could have done something far more meaningful.

But even then, I have a feeling that the tin would not have told me anything I didn’t already know.

Hyvää uutta vuotta,

ichigonya

Life Update: (Un)lucky Year

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