2025: A Year in Review
Years ago, I kept journals to mark the passage of time. To hold in my hands the evidence that I had lived, struggled, hoped, failed, tried again. Those records have been lost to the chaos of changing mediums and insufficient storage, scattered like seeds across platforms that no longer exist or hard drives that have long since failed. But perhaps this year deserves to be remembered differently. Perhaps this year deserves words that might last, a testament to God’s faithfulness in a season where His presence felt more like absence, His voice more like silence.
This is my attempt to mark the year, to say: I was here, bloodied and confused, and somehow still putting God first.
On Friendship and the Relief of Solitude
There was a brief relationship this year that began and ended from a distance. Looking back, proximity might have revealed too much, too soon. It was less a relationship than an idea of one….the comfort of possibility without the inconvenience of reality. It was particularly telling when it ended, as I felt not grief but relief…as though I’ve been holding my breath and can finally exhale.
I have spent years as the architect of other people’s joy. Planning activity nights, organizing events, creating spaces for connection. I thought this was love, this constant giving. I thought generosity required the complete emptying of self, that hospitality meant the exhaustion of every resource until there was nothing left. But this year taught me what happens when the well runs dry and no one notices because they were never really looking at you…. only at what you provided.
There was a party I spent weeks preparing, weeks carved out of a life that has no surplus time. People arrived, consumed what I had offered, and left. … barely staying, barely engaging, certainly not participating in the activities I had planned with such careful attention to what I thought they would enjoy. When the space emptied and I found myself alone among the decorations and untouched games, I collapsed. Not dramatically, but the way a structure collapses when the weight finally exceeds what it was built to bear.
I have been re-learning the lesson we first encounter in childhood but somehow need to learn again in adulthood: that sometimes the people you call friends are simply people who have accepted a title as payment for their participation in your life. That friendship requires something more than proximity or convenience or the willingness to show up when it costs them nothing. Some people are meant for seasons, not lifetimes. Some are meant for specific contexts, limited capacities. This is not cynicism; this is recognition. I am entering 2026 with a question: What do I actually need from friendship? For years I have measured relationships by what I could give, how much I could offer, whether I was useful enough to be kept. But need is a different grammar than giving, and I amjust beginning to learn its vocabulary.
On Beauty and the Mathematics of Decline
This year I looked in the mirror and saw time beginning its work.
The cheeks I hated in adolescence–too round, too full, immune to the sculpting effects of blush that seemed to work miracles for everyone else–are deflating. I am watching the face I grew into start the long process of becoming something else, and I am unprepared for the grief this brings.
We are told, as women, that we grow more beautiful with age, that there is dignity in aging, that beauty is not only youth. But society’s treatment of aging women tells a different story, and I am afraid. Afraid of becoming invisible, afraid of losing whatever currency beauty provides, afraid that the things I offer beyond appearance will not be enough to justify my space in the world. And yet….paradoxically, frustratingly…I am also in the best shape I have ever been. I look in the mirror and see strength, see a body that has learned what it can do. Perhaps I was a late bloomer.
Perhaps this is what it means to finally grow into yourself just as time begins erasing what you’ve built.
There is a feeling of melancholy in reaching your peak and knowing it is, by definition, the beginning of descent. Not if, but when. And not knowing when feels worse than knowing would.
I am trying to hold both truths: that God is bigger than my fears about aging, and that my fears about aging are real and reasonable in a world that discards women whose beauty has an expiration date. I am trying to trust that the God who numbers the hairs on my head also sees me when those hairs turn gray, when the mirror reflects time’s passage rather than youth’s promise.
On Faith and the Desert Without Maps
I went on a hike where the trail ended abruptly and left me standing at the base of a mountain with no clear path forward. All I could see was desert, cactus, the sprawling incline of terrain that looked nothing like a marked trail. I tried anyway…. stumbling through sand and thorns, falling more than climbing, losing my sense of direction with each step. I never made it to the top. When the sun began setting I turned back, my legs beat up, knowing only that I had tried and failed and would have to try again another day.
This is what 2025 felt like.
I have struggled with faith this year in ways I have not experienced before. Not struggling with whether faith is true, but struggling with what it means to believe in a God who remains silent when you are desperate for direction, who permits suffering you cannot understand, who seems absent even as theology insists He is ever-present.
I am ending this year confused about direction but not confused about faith. I know this sounds like a contradiction. How can you be certain of God while uncertain of His voice? How can you trust Someone who won’t tell you where you’re going?
I don’t have good answers. But I have this: the knowledge that confusion about direction is not the same as abandonment. That sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is keep walking even when the trail has ended. That turning back before dark and trying again later is not the same as giving up. Maybe this is what the psalmists meant when they wrote about walking through the valley of the shadow of death and fearing no evil—not that they weren’t afraid, but that they kept walking anyway.
On Adventures and the Worlds We Inhabit
I was going to call this section “Travels,” as if distance covered were the measure of a year well-lived. But I am learning that adventure is not about geography but about the quality of attention we bring to wherever we are. This year’s adventures happened around tables covered in dice and character sheets, in campaigns I ran for women who are engineers and managers and healthcare workers during the day but become rogues and wizards and clerics for a few hours each week. I watched them discover what I had already learned: that there is something profoundly freeing about being heroic in fictional worlds when the real world offers no clear victories, no obvious villains, no guaranteed resolutions.
I discovered Daggerheart this year and fell into a noir campaign where I play “The Tinker,” a character whose eccentricity and chaos feel like permission to inhabit parts of myself that everyday life rarely accommodates. There is something sacred about collaborative storytelling, about creating narratives where choices matter and heroes can actually save people and evil can be defeated with enough cleverness and courage.
Perhaps this is why I read so voraciously this year….. as if other people’s stories could teach me how to navigate my own. Speaking of…
On Stories and the Hunger for Meaning
I consumed books this year the way desperate people consume hope: looking for something I could not name but would recognize if I found it.
I read the Stormlight Archive and learned about honor in broken people, about choosing to do right things even when right action does not guarantee right outcomes. I read Mistborn’s meditation on power and sacrifice. I read The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies for their celebration of friendship that endures through impossible odds and their reminder that cleverness matters when you have nothing else.
I read Kings of the Wyld and found unexpected comfort in middle-aged adventurers reuniting for one more quest: the acknowledgment that heroes age, that glory fades, that sometimes the most courageous thing is trying again when you know better than to believe it will be easy.
I read books meant for children. The Wild Robot, The One and Only Ivan, Redwall, Inside Out and Back Again…. because sometimes stories written for young readers are more honest about pain and resilience than stories written for adults who have learned to dress suffering in prettier language.
I read the Encyclopedia of Faeries because knowing the taxonomy of magical creatures felt important in ways I could not articulate but somehow needed anyway.
And I probably read many more whose titles are buried in my bookcase somewhere.
On What Remains Unfinished
I am ending this year with more questions than answers, more uncertainty than clarity. Custody situation uncertain. Friendships are in transition. I do not know what I need from relationships or whether I will learn to ask for it. I do not know when the physical decline I dread will begin in earnest or how I will navigate it when it does.
But I am also ending this year with clearer boundaries than I began with, with better understanding of my limitations, with the hard-won knowledge that sometimes being faithful looks like stumbling through desert without making it to the mountaintop, then turning back before dark and deciding to try again later.
On the Year Ahead
I do not know what 2026 holds. I cannot see the trail ahead and cannot even take a guess that next year will be easier or clearer or less exhausting than this one.
But I know this: that God is sovereign even when He is silent. That sometimes the most spiritual discipline is admitting you do not know where you are going while continuing to put one foot in front of the other anyway. That confusion about direction is not the same as confusion about faith. That the trail may have ended, but the God who sees me in the wilderness has not looked away.
Here’s to 2026, and to whatever stumbling through the desert it brings.
Here’s to the hope that when I look back on this year from some future vantage point, I will see not only the wounds and the failed summit attempt, but the faithfulness of continuing to walk even when the path was unclear.
Here’s to the God who meets us in the wilderness and somehow, inexplicably, calls that meeting grace.
