it's 2025 already?
10th January 2025
We’re now ten days into 2025 and I have been majorly slacking on writing quite literally anything at the moment if I’m being honest. So this post might be very late to the game but my Christmas was hectic, and my new year was bought in by the tranquil sounds of Chase and Status' Baddadan (not a particularly fruitful environment to brainstorm blog posts in.) Still, I've been doing a lot of reflection on what happened in 2024 and how I'm going into 2025 - so let's talk about it.
2024 - let's brief it down
2024 - you were... a lot.
I feel like so much has, and simultaneously hasn't, happened.
Every year I always write a list of what I’ve achieved and learnt in that year whilst setting out my goals for the coming one. So:
In 2024, I stopped biting my nails (ngl this is maybe my biggest achievement to date), I went to Indonesia for a month, visited Tasmania, moved to a new city entirely on my own without a plan, lived with my best friends for ten months, started this blog, read 20 books and saw a lot of incredible music.
I've also finished another year living on the other side of the world (as if I've been here for over two years now), which is a huge achievement in of itself.
The main things I've learned this year: that I need to chill the fuck out, that every single thing really doesn't need to be perfect and that it's okay if the narrative I've created in my head goes off track. I've learned to prioritise my mind - always, that change is terrifying but necessary and to not stifle my passions by getting consumed into the everyday.
I've been reflecting - what's new?
I think there's such a fine line between having drive and setting goals for yourself versus developing a toxic relationship to them - this is something I am absolutely guilty of. I have such an issue with being productive all the damn time that it ends up being more of a detriment than a strength.
So whilst going through my list and seeing that I had in fact achieved the majority of the goals I had set out for 2024, I’ve repeatedly said to several people that for the first half of this year I achieved nothing, and everything that I did that was worthy of note was from July onwards. And whilst granted I wasn't doing anything grand and exciting in those first five months of the year, it doesn’t correspond to them being a waste.
As we all know, comparison is the thief of joy, particularly self comparison. So, when I sat down with my two achievement lists: 2023 and 2024, and saw the difference quantifiably between the two, I felt immediately disappointed. The amount of things I had so called ‘achieved’ the previous year was double as long, double as exciting and therefore in my mind, double as impressive.
It’s so hard for me to take myself out of this mindset and understand that I didn't have a shit year because of this. Instead, I’m proud of so many things I did this year and I’ve learned A LOT about myself. So I know that going into 2025, the intention has to shift.
So 2025 is going to be the year of?
I did enter this year in the exact way as 2024, at the same festival - full circle moment. But this time around I, at least, wasn't as violently hungover, actually have somewhere to live and I'm not going back to work in a job that I hate! A win is a win.
In my mind, the primary reason I moved to Melbourne in October, I was telling myself, was to finally get a corporate job. After actually moving here and doing a lot of self reflection I’ve discovered that’s probably the antithesis of what I actually need. Sitting at a desk doing a 9-5 being truly stuck within the rat race of a big city is genuinely my idea of fresh living hell.
I was, and still am, craving the opportunity to utlitise my mind, I felt like my brain was rotting for a good part of last year and I wasn’t using or pursuing anything that felt of worth to me. I think what I was really craving was a change of scenery and pace.
So, 2025 is not going to be the year of corporate life - at least I don't think.
There are still so many places that I want to travel to and as my sister repeatedly keeps drilling into my head: you can't just fuck off to the Philippines for a month at a time, I don't think this is the year for job and career commitment.
Instead, I want to travel to the Philippines, Fiji, do a WA road trip. I want to pursue the creativity that I felt was so stifled in the past year. And I want to do A LOT of self development.
We can only be better than the version of ourselves from yesterday, last week or last year. But it’s also okay if you slip behind, it’s okay if you didn’t do as well - or whatever the fuck that means - as last week or last year.
There’s such a balance between ambition and drive and pushing yourself to achieve the things you want to versus belittling yourself for the things you might have fallen short at.
I'm going into 2025 with the drive instead to give myself grace and maybe be nice to myself, just every once in a while?
Mainly, I think I need to cut myself some slack. And hopefully a lot of people will resonate with that.
So happy fucking new year, let it be a good one - in whatever way that looks like for you.