What Worked for Me in 2025
A peek into my Year in Review
If you’re new around here, welcome! Today’s post is a bit more personal than usual - but sometimes a peek into someone else’s process can help our own. Also, this post might get cut off in your email due to length. If that happens, just click on "View entire message."
Some time between travelling transatlantically on Boxing Day and finding myself in a new, slightly depressing city on New Year’s Eve, I lost track of time. It’s been a week (more? or less?) of not knowing what day it is (holidays!), not knowing what time it is (jetlag!), and not always knowing exactly where I am or what side of the road to be on (expat life!).
I love any excuse for reflection, but at this moment, it feels like the main question is “wait, what is happening?” (Can you relate?)
A few weeks ago we met up with friends for lunch and one asked, “what’s new?” only for me to draw a complete blank. The best I could come up with was that my husband was renovating a doorway (a small thing in a regular house but actually pretty significant in a tiny cottage with very few doorways.)
That’s happened a few times this year: meeting up with friends and feeling like my contribution to the conversation is about finally getting a closet (honestly, a total highlight of 2025 in a tiny cottage with zero closets) or feeling like the front bedroom finally has furniture that holds things. Let’s just say it hasn’t been a year of excitement in the classical sense.
And honestly, I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with is wondering how I spent my time, and whether it was wisely used.
Thankfully, I’m a big fan of journaling and was able to read back through what I’ve wrestled with this year. I can’t say every minute was well lived, but I’m happy to report that despite recalling very little beyond cottage renovations at any given moment, I did do some of the things I wanted to do.
There are a million different ways to do annual reviews, but mine generally includes a long read through my journals, taking note of the themes that emerge. I also talk with my husband about the year in order to get a different perspective and see if I’ve missed anything big or if my memory might be a bit skewed.
Overall, I focus on two general questions: What worked? What didn’t?
Read more about it here:
Before Making Any New Year's Resolutions, Do This
It’s that time of year again - the time to buy annual gym passes (that we’ll use twice,) to swear off chocolate (for a week), and the time to decide that we really are morning people…. Really.
Today I’ll be sharing some snippets of what worked for me in 2025. Next week, I’ll send out an email to all subscribers about what didn’t work.
It’s free to subscribe! I’d just like to keep that list a little bit more personal, so if you’d like to read, sign up for free here:
What worked?
On January 8, 2025, I wrote, “Ok. I feel like if 2025 is going to be different, I need to do something differently.”
Not exactly rocket science, I know! But this simple idea was helpful for me in the day-to-day decision making. Things were not going to just start changing without my involvement.
In no particular order, here are some of the things that worked for me:
Spending money on a good haircut
Is this superficial? Probably. I’ve been a ‘supercuts’ kind of girl my whole life, loathe to spend precious resources on my hair. But then I spend months hating my hair every time I look in the mirror. I do not have hair that is easy to cut well, and it finally occurred to me that I could go to someone who was skilled. Only, I’d have to pay them for their skill. It was totally worth it!
On the one hand, it’s a silly thing. It’s just hair! On the other, it’s something that seems to carry disproportionate weight (for better or worse) for me. My dream is to never think about my hair, and having a cut that just works means that I think about it a lot less.
(Apparently I’ve been thinking about this for a long time because I wrote about it back in 2019: Stop Saying You Want the Goal and Start Saying You Want the Process.)
Having enough comfortable “uniform” clothing to not think about it
If you, like me, are the kind of person who dreads getting dressed every day because you don’t want to sit in pinchy or scratchy or too-whatever-y clothing which distracts you from doing actual work, can I recommend just buying some really comfortable cotton pieces that you can wash and wear on repeat? I bought some lovely winter things in the summer sales, and it’s paying off.
This could be classed as another superficial change, but what I’ve realized is that there are often small-ish things that drag my attention away from the more important things of life, and ignoring the small-ish things doesn’t actually make them go away. If I just fix them, they don’t bother me any more and everyone can move on with their days.
Interacting with creative people
As my husband and I talked through the highlights of 2025, I realized that several of my ‘best’ or ‘favourite’ things involved creative people: artists, poets, writers, etc. It’s just been fun to see their ideas emerge, to enjoy their work, and sometimes even to be invited in to the process. Some of these people are professionals, and some are just ordinary people sharing their gifts.
So if you’re experimenting with a creative something, don’t be afraid to share it! It might be the highlight of someone’s year.
Much of my life involves real people in person, but if you’re looking for a few Substack recommendations, here are some that made my 2025 better:
Art on my Notes Feed: Plein Air Poetry & Victoria K. Walker
Poignant, thoughtful, and just plain fun essays: Denise Trull, Katie Marquette Annelise Roberts
Poetry: Rachel Joy Welcher, Sally Thomas, Melanie Bettinelli
Essays/ pieces weaving together distinct threads of thought: Haley Baumeister Dixie Dillon Lane, Christy Isinger, Ruth Gaskovski
Theological reflection for going deeper: Leah | Blessed Endurance
Courage for just being creative in small ways: Aimee Guest’s Good and Beautiful Things
Keeping a reviewed packing list for regular travel
I travel less than I used to, but changes to work mean that we’re visiting some similar places pretty regularly. I wrote out a packing list for each location and season, and then - this is the key part - I made notes of what the weather was like, whether I had access to laundry facilities, and what I actually wore & used. I’ve started packing such that I wear and use just about everything in my suitcase. This is an excellent development for someone whose favourite all-time gift is a luggage scale.
Praying for graces at Pentecost
Pentecost is the traditional Christian celebration of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’ disciples. It’s a season dedicated to asking for the gifts of the Spirit anew. And while I’ve always participated in the liturgical celebrations around it, I’ve never really gotten “into” it, personally. (I think maybe I’ve let myself be turned off by overly enthusiastic people in the past, which is silly, but true.) Anyway, this year I felt blessed by some excellent preaching on the topic and decided to pray for graces - and guess what? They came, and they came in a way that felt very practical, which is always a bonus for these sorts of things.
Clarifying my ‘yes’es and ‘no’s
Part of those graces involved being able to say no to some things so that I could say yes to others, even if those other things are not really public things. (I realize that this could be annoyingly vague, but I’m not trying to be coy.) I’m sharing this because I feel like living in an online world can make us feel like unless we have something public to show for our time, it’s not well spent. Or that we can’t say no to things without telling people what we’re saying yes to instead. But sometimes there are quiet, hidden things in life that need our time, energy, and attention, and it can be humbling to embrace them while thinking that everyone will assume we’re just sitting around doing nothing. (Or, maybe everyone is too busy thinking about their own stuff to make any assumptions about us! Who knows, and ideally, who cares…)
There were plenty more things that worked (and didn’t - more on that for all subscribers next week) in 2025 for me, but I hope that by sharing some of them, you might be inspired to reflect on the things of your own year, be they superficial or profound.
I love getting to peek into other people’s lives, and so I’d really love to hear from you: what worked for your year? You can leave a comment below or reply to this email.