Sanity's biggest year begins
It's a landmark year for our community. I need your help to chart our direction.
Thank you. Here's some calming music I've been listening to while writing this. Take it as my new year gift to you. Now read on.
Woodstock Chimes, started by musician Gary Kvistad, has a lovely little story. #NotASponsoredPost
Hello there.
I hope you've had a peaceful, or some kind of, start to 2025. What a skippy and satisfying sound 'twenty-twenty-five' makes when you say it out aloud. It almost charms you into believing that this year won't stink as much as every other year. Who knows. Maybe it won't? On that wishful note, welcome to edition#1 of 2025. It's a big year for Sanity, and I'm ready to renew my commitment to my roots:
Community.
If you're new here: Sanity is the only solo, independent, reader-funded mental health storytelling platform in our neck of the woods to enter its 5th year in existence, with readers in 50+ countries. I don't take ads, don't have a paywall, and depend 100% on voluntary financial support from readers. Sustaining this platform is an endless battle. Still, considering most solo newsletters in the global south die swift and lonely deaths, the survival of this work and the impact it has been able to make is a minor miracle.
Over the past 4 years, I've addressed dozens of topics that matter to our community – including the big crises within the mental health ecosystem – by combining lived experience and original research and analysis. I'll continue this approach in 2025, with one bias:
I will also create more space for you on this platform. I plan to do this in 3 ways:
2. Helping you make meaningful connections with each other. Our community has so many incredible folks - lived experience experts, caregivers, therapists, psychiatrists, researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, funders, students, artists, writers. Bringing all of you together will be magic.
3. Writing the stories that serve our common interests, and sharing knowledge through other formats (more below).
Please take this quick survey if you haven't already to help me prep for the year.👇🏽
Learning beyond the written word
Of all the things I want to invest my energy in this year, School of Sanity is closest to my heart. I launched School of Sanity as an interactive online learning space to explore key topics at the intersection of mental health, work, money, culture, and technology. It helps me reconnect with my love of teaching (fun fact: my first job was teaching English to MBA aspirants) and diversify my income sources. Last year's pilot sessions were great fun (testimonials here), so I'm rolling out a full-fledged learning calendar this year. First four sessions and sign-up deets below. 👇🏽
Fri, Feb 21: Celebrating the joy of books, movies, music, and therapy in your mother tongue
Sat, Mar 22: "My audience is too small" and other lies you need to stop telling yourself as an independent creator
Sat, Apr 26: Therapy in the age of artificial intelligence: Cutting through the bullshit, finding real hope
Before I go...
I have to doff my hat to the pleasing anticlimax that the first week of the year has been so far. My mood usually plummets around this time – something to do with the unreasonable cheeriness in the air. To boot, 2024's last week was enormously stressful, with three major health scares in the family.
That included my own frequent episodes of discomfort in the chest and breathlessness, and spikes in my resting heart rate to ~130. An ECG indicated tachycardia and right ventricular hypertrophy. But a treadmill test and an echo cardiogram didn't reveal any cause for alarm, and I was advised, for the millionth time in my life, that all that's wrong with me is hyper anxiety. 🤷🏽♂️
I was disgusted and slept early on the night of the 31st, which is the only acceptable way of ending the year. I woke up in the new year without feeling too much dread or exhaustion, a reminder that 9 hours of sleep can neutralise the most choleric of nights. I celebrated by eating half a dozen mini waffles and three slices of leftover pineapple pizza.
As I write to you, I'm in the city of Mysuru in the south of India. It was in these parts 100 years ago that a British-era 'lunatic asylum' was renamed as the Mysore Government Mental Hospital, which would later mutate into the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, India's apex mental health institution.
Quite the fitting locale to kickstart Sanity's biggest year, huh?
Happy New Year, then. Let's do this.
Love,
Tanmoy
