2025 was weird
I feel like I spent an entire year being tired.
It probably has a lot to do with the current administration both being generally terrible and specifically doing terrible things in the city I call home (Chicago). I won't get into that much in this post, but just know that like a huge number of people in the US, it all weighed on me heavily all year.
I will say though, that the way Chicago came together to fight back against all the heinous shit was really inspiring and beautiful. It helped to give me some hope for humanity.
And that all kind of fits with what I think about when I look back at 2025. A slew of weird, messy, and sometimes outright bad things happening, but with some real moments of resilience and hope mixed in.
I'm not going to do the thing where I list the major happenings of my year. I don't know if that'd be boring for you to read or not, but I do know it would be boring for me to write.
And that's the biggest way I've grown this year, I think. This feels so obvious, but I think this is the year that it's really sunk in that as long as I'm not harming anyone, it's okay to just do things in the way that make most sense for me. I think throughtout my life, I've generally felt a lot of pressure to do things "right," especially if it's something where I was going against societal norms.
There are some examples of this in my personal life that I don't particularly want to get into, but this definitely showed up with my composing work. I think there was a part of me that felt like it was only okay for me to be pursuing composing as a career if I was constantly grinding, focusing the vast majority of my time and energy on trying to build my career. It's part of a specific performance of "passion" that society at large seems to expect from working artists, and deep down, I hated it. So I stopped all that and started rethinking my approach to the way I was building my career, in a way that would make me happier.
That's one of the big things, but I've noticed it showing up in smaller ways too. There was one day when I took an Uber home from a particularly stressful day at my day job, and I really just wanted to stare out the window and listen to music. But I wondered if it was rude to just put in earbuds after I'd said hi to the driver.
Then a new thought popped into my mind: "do I care if it's rude?" So obvious in hindsight, but at the time it felt like a revelation. If it's true that the driver thought I was rude for having earbuds in, did it really matter? I still tipped him nicely! So after saying hi, I popped my AirPods in, zoned out, and listened to angry metal music instead of making small talk with this random stranger. And it was exactly what I needed to decompress from a stressful workday.
If you had asked me before if I let people's potential opinions of me have a strong influence on how I acted, I would have said of course not! I'm pursuing music as a career, I'm childfree, I have a somewhat "alt" look (idk how else to describe it), and there are some things in my personal life that I won't get into here but are definitely outside of the norm. But it's like I said before: I put a lot of pressure on myself to perform each of these things in what I thought most people would deem to be the correct way.
Being childfree meant I was doing something wrong if I squandered away my free time, since I inevitably have more of it than most parents. I had a lot of (and still have a bit of, honestly) anxiety over the fact that my tattoos aren't all the same art style, that I didn't give much thought to the colors I was getting beyond "I like these ones for this particular tattoo," that they don't all necessarily go together. I'm a bad vegetarian if I don't particularly care that something at a restauarant was made with chicken stock. That sort of thing.
And to all that I now say, who cares? The world's on fire. Might as well make the things I can actually control as enjoyable as I possibly can.
And now, contrary to what I said earlier, I'm going to end this by listing some things that I do think were good about 2025.
- I have such an amazingly strong, solid, and loving marriage. I love getting to hang out with my favorite person every day.
- Honestly, just all the people in my life are lovely. Friends, family, etc. I think I've done a good job building a great support system for myself.
- I've been a bit hard on myself about my lack of music output, but I can honestly say that some of the music I did make was really good. And I got to work on some really fun projects.
- I got really into a new hobby: writing!
- I did something scary that I've been wanting to do for a long time: I signed up for a singing group class. I've now sang in front of like 12 other people! I signed up for another one starting next week! I can hear a real improvement in my voice already!
- I somehow managed to finally find a part-time day job that is actually a really good fit for my freelance career and for me in general, rather than something I just tolerate because I need money.
- My husband and I got AMC A-List subscriptions, so we've been seeing a lot more movies in theater, which has been really cool.
- Ramona (pictured below) is still the best.
Thanks for reading. However 2025 was for you, I hope 2026 is even better.