the energy i'm bringing into 2025

the times are hard enough without being hard on ourselves

Last week, during a rare break from the holiday chaos, I sat with my sister at her dining table engaged in one of my favorite activities: demolishing the end of a cheese plate.

As we ate, I started talking about how terrible I’ve been feeling about myself, confiding how I never feel organized enough, never consistent enough, how much I feel I fail at scheduling and showing up for all the myriad aspects of my life. “You know what?” I began, mid-cheese bite. “I think I need to become one of those people who wakes up at 4am and meditates and exercises and then after I can write for two hours before I start the morning school routine — it’s the only way I’m ever going to get this novel finished, otherwise I’ll just be too lazy!”

My sister, who is my opposite in all ways — namely, a pragmatic data scientist with abundant executive function — interrupted my rant: “What if there’s actually nothing wrong with you? Have you ever considered that? What if the issue is you have a full time job and three other jobs and a kid and a spouse and a life? What if it’s not that you can’t solve the equation but instead the math is impossible, that it’s impossible for most all of us? What if instead of beating yourself up, you started letting some things go?”

I’ve been thinking about this conversation since, about the things women take on that we needn’t carry; not just projects, but other people’s opinions and often their feelings, the self-inflicted pressure to be '“perfect” or at least unimpeachably “good,” the social and professional and familial obligations we say yes to when we really mean no.

The truth is, I don’t actually want to resolve to do more in the new year, to impose more rigid systems into my life, what I want to bring into 2025 is a sense of calm, peace and, especially, EASE.

To that end, as I was packing my office this week, a cardboard note I don’t remember ever seeing before (pictured above) fell out of a book I don’t remember reading. It appears to be part of the month’s theme, a sign from the universe, if such things exist.

“Do everything with a mind that lets go” is the energy I want in 2025. Not a million self flagellations masked as self improvements. Not adding any new impossible pressures to muscle through on my to-do list, to set myself up to fail.

Put another, less woo-woo way, as an acquaintance wrote to me recently: “WOULD IT BE OKAY WITH YOU IF THINGS WERE EASY?”

In this new year, I’d really like to find out.

Wishing you peace — and ease — in 2025.