Dear Dreamer,
As the year winds down, I hope you're cutting yourself some slack as we're bombarded by the usual New Year's Eve ads and messages. It's often some kind of pressure to optimize your life, to reinvent yourself, and the stress around making resolutions so you'll "do better" next year. I'd like to offer you something different.
No, I'm not giving the middle finger to resolutions. Instead, I want to talk about remembering to choose gentleness and rest in a world that increasingly tries to deprive us of it. If you received a holiday card, consider this a continuation of that message.
Because let's be honest. Every year asks a lot of us and 2025 has been demanding in its own way.
"Despair and isolation are my greatest internal enemies. I need to remember I am not alone, even when it feels that way. Now more than ever it is time to put my solitary ways behind me, even while protecting my solitude." ―Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
Across the U.S. and around the world, many of us have been facing so much. Maybe it's economic uncertainty, political instability, humanitarian crises, climate anxiety, rising costs, shrinking safety nets... Whether these pressures touch your life directly or indirectly, there is a sense that everything is constantly shifting and somehow we're still expected to keep producing, posting, and performing as if everything is "normal." It's exhausting.
From diving back into Lumecluster in February and using social media sparingly to creating the Dreamer and Wonderlands Collections and preparing for what's next (Mending Collection rings), one of the lessons that kept resurfacing for me this year is this:
Resting and dreaming up fantasies of better futures are not a failure at facing reality. They are often how we survive it.
Audre Lorde once said that caring for herself was "not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
This line is often quoted within self-help circles, but its depth is frequently lost. For Lorde, self-care wasn't about comfort for comfort's sake. It was about survival in a world structured to exhaust and devalue her existence as a Black, lesbian feminist. Rest, care, and tending to the self were necessary acts of resistance that made it possible to keep going and to keep imagining / building something better.
"I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do." ―Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
What her words remind me is that a world built on constant oppression and extraction will always try to convince us that rest and dreams are things we don't deserve. And it's only this year that I've started to slowly break free from this. How?
And everything I'm slowly building toward is rooted in the belief that we need safety for dreams to thrive and spaces that allow us to remain human. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do (especially in times like these) is to rest, to care, and to keep dreaming new realities. Because the world needs you.
So, as we go into 2026, I hope you give yourself permission to honor the parts of you that are tired but still hopeful.
"I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection, a rough place on the chin of complacency." ―Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
Thank you for supporting me through so much this year. You eased my fear of returning to Lumecluster in so many ways. I look forward to continuing to cheer you on in the ways that I can. Let's keep choosing to be human together.
Wishing you a restful new year!
<3 Melissa
P.S. As a reward for making it this far, you'll get a random free gift when you purchase a Dreamer or Wonderlands jewelry piece. This offer ends after January 7th.
If you've been following my IG stories, I've also been refining my patina process now that I've gone through 2025 making all my trials and errors.
I also made one more moody video to wrap up 2025. It's nice just making videos for my art that bring me joy :)
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