Disorientation and Navigation: Words of the Year for 2025
Trump's strategy is daily disorientation—change reality overnight, repeat. Here's what navigating daily disorientation taught us about resistance and community.
We went to sleep with the Kennedy Center. We woke up to the Donald Trump Kennedy Center — sign changed overnight, photographs everywhere proving what was erased. A Congressionally chartered institution literally renamed overnight.
That image sums up the year. We kept waking up in a different world than the one we went to sleep in. DOGE purges. Agency dismantlings. Executive orders rewriting policy. ICE operations. Tariffs imposed, reduced, rescinded, re-imposed in rapid fire. Every morning: what changed while we were asleep?
When I try to find words to capture my journey through 2025, two keep surfacing: Disorientation and Navigation.
Two sides of the same coin. Daily disorientation demanded continuous development and upgrade of navigation skills.
I didn’t set out with a master plan to write about navigation in 2025. But when I look back through a year’s worth of posts, the metaphors are everywhere. Waypoints. Footholds. Finding your footing. Terrain. Bushwhacking through wilderness where no trail exists. Staying steady when the ground shifts. In hindsight, I realize navigation is a throughline for most of my work this year.
We use travel metaphors for life all the time. The journey. Take the high road. Pathways forward. But this year they stopped being poetic and became literal.
The terrain of daily life has been intentionally disrupted, moved, torn up, mislabeled to make navigation harder - on a daily basis. Our old maps got shredded. We had to learn to become mapmakers. We had to learn to navigate landscape that changes every single day - by design. We had to learn how to archive our mental maps to preserve our orientation and collective memory. It’s not a coincidence Trump’s goons disappeared public health and climate change datasets. Reducing our capacity to remember what the societal landscape looked like before the Trump regime is their intent.
The disorientation was the weapon. Navigation became the response - this is what I mean when I end my posts with ‘stay strategic, shape tomorrow.’ Navigation is strategy for survival, for turning intention into motion, for reclaiming agency.
Maybe that seems obvious. But naming it helps me make sense of what this year demanded. Our paths got obstructed. Our journeys got disrupted. We experienced profound dislocation - there’s another navigation metaphor - and relentless disorientation.
We’re navigating emergent wilderness together. Terrain that’s sometimes terrifying and unstable. Landscape where it’s hard to plan, hard to feel secure. We’re doing it. We’re finding our way. But I can’t stand here like a cheerleader because I know too many people who are deep in suffering right now. People who’ve lost jobs, health insurance, housing. People whose families have been torn apart. People barely holding on.
This is supposed to be “the hap-hap-happiest time of the year,” right?
I won’t give you false assurances that everything gets better in 2026. I don’t know that. Nobody does.
But I can promise you this: I will remain at your side on this journey. I’ll keep navigating right alongside you, trying to make sense of this rapidly shifting landscape. I truly believe the old saying: together we can do what we could never do alone.
I’m incredibly grateful for all of you. I’ve met some of the most amazing people here on Substack this past year. I’ve held space for people who are struggling and had the favor returned generously.
I’ve learned firsthand that “resistance” is not just about making signs and shouting slogans at rallies. It’s about navigating with each other through this disrupted landscape. It’s the coming together with others, the building of community in the face of shared hardship.
I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
That’s what I’m carrying into 2026. Not certainty about what comes next. Not a roadmap for the year ahead - because I learned this year that roadmaps are useless when powerful forces keep changing the terrain overnight.
What I’m carrying is this: We navigate together. We notice the patterns. We name what’s happening. We stay human in the face of systems designed to numb us. We stay strategic when chaos wants us reactive. We shape tomorrow by finding footholds where we can and helping each other when someone loses their way.
The journey continues. The wilderness persists. And we’re in it together.
In solidarity,
Paul
Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.
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