Reflections on 2025

Hello, dear readers, and welcome, somehow, impossibly, to 2026. If you're reading this, you made it, and I'm proud of you. 2025 was a wild year for most everyone I know, with some towering highs and terrible lows, and I thought I'd take a little time to reflect on my own version of that here at the start of the new year. Much like last year, I'm still feeling out exactly how personal I want to get with this blog, but today I'm feeling compelled to write a bit, so we're going to go with it.

While 2024 was objectively one of the hardest years of my life, 2025 may have been one of the fullest:

• It started out in January with the quiet but devastating end of a long-standing friendship that forced me to reckon with some hard realities I'd been ignoring. I also put many hours into my capstone project for my degree, writing and editing and soliciting playtests of the games from friends.
• February found me participating in FAWM for the 8th time, and I wrote 18 songs over the course of the month. My dearest friend came to visit while my partner traveled to help our kiddo and their spouse out after the kiddo had surgery. I presented at my seminary's symposium and ran games for (mostly) strangers for the first time.
• In March, my husband had surgery, I sold my first tarot readings, and we kicked off discussions with my best friend from undergrad, a realtor, about buying a house.
• April brought my first experience of running a spiritual companionship group session, we started talking with a friend about perhaps buying a duplex together, I walked at my seminary graduation, and then took my first real vacation in ages—a trip to Chicago where I had at most one concrete thing on the calendar each day. If you can give yourself the gift of a weekend with zero obligations, I highly recommend it.
• In May, we thought we'd found a duplex to buy with our friend. We walked away from that after learning there was about $100,000 of structural work needed to make it safely habitable, and decided to look for a single family home instead. This meant some hard conversations with our friend, but we all worked through it together. At the end of the month, we put in an offer on a house we'd fallen in love with.
• June saw me traveling to NYC on my birthday for work, which I was cranky about, but ended up being a pretty nice trip overall. A few friends came to visit throughout the month, and I got a flash tattoo of a unicorn rampant for Pride. Inspection on the house revealed no major structural issues.
• In July, we closed on our house. We spent a couple of weeks painting and prepping, and finally moved in toward the end of the month. The day after we moved, I accompanied a friend to his hysterectomy. My partner and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary.
• August was when I finally finished my last class work at United, bringing my seminary journey to a close. We met many of our new neighbors at National Night Out, and went to the Renaissance Festival with some friends (my husband's first time going).
• In September, I embraced my newfound freedom post-grad-school by spontaneously road tripped to Wisconsin to meet up with some dear friends who were traveling up from Chicago for a cousin's wedding. And I released music into the world for the first time, starting with a song I'd been sitting on for over a decade.
• October saw us taking a day trip to Duluth (an annual tradition); I reconnected with an old friend over coffee and started taking a songwriting class at the music school in our neighborhood.
• In November, I made a new friend. I played at an open mic for the first time since moving back to Minnesota (my first time playing out anywhere in well over a year). My husband and I celebrated 15 years as a couple. I went to Chicago twice, once alone to help a friend, and then again with my partner to celebrate Thanksgiving with dear friends. We spun out on the highway on the way home, and I wound up with a mild concussion. I ended the month with the showcase performance for my songwriting class, where my parents saw me perform live for the first time.
• December saw me back in Chicago for the third time in six weeks for a work holiday party and a lovely weekend with friends. I ran a game for the first time for some of my favorite people to play games with. I had my first paid session as a spiritual companion. And we hosted my family's Christmas celebrations at our house—our first time ever hosting a holiday.

So many things happened last year, some of which were terribly painful, and some of which were among the most joyous moments of my life. And some have been both—I love our house so much, and, as is to be expected, home ownership has been incredibly stressful in some ways. I made new friends and deepened existing relationships while having to let go of others than I had previously believed would be around more or less forever.

Overall, I'm not sorry to say goodbye to the wild ride that was 2025. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for 2026, but it's here, and I'm choosing to approach this new chapter with curiosity and an open heart.

For the last few years I've chosen a word as a sort of yearly theme, a touch point to check in with as the months pass. My word for 2026 is Stability. After all of the ups and downs and changes and completed cycles of 2025, I'm feeling ready to really put down roots. I don't know how it's going to play out, but I am tentatively optimistic that this will prove to be the theme of the year.

And that, dear readers, is where I'll leave you for now. I am hoping to write more this year, as well, but we'll see how and where that happens as time progresses. Until next time, I am wishing you all a gentle start to 2026, and hope that the year brings you what you need.