End of the year, everyone's getting retrospective.

Whew. Some of the earlier stuff, I'm like "that was just THIS year? The one we're still in??"

Considering the state of the world at the end of 2024, we all knew we were in for a doozy with this one. We also knew 2025 was a 9 year (2+0+2+5=9) with the energy of completion, and that it would be followed by 2026 (2+0+2+6=10 1+0=1) with the energy of new beginnings, so. I went into it hanging onto my butt, as Samuel L. Jackson says in Jurassic Park.

Within the first 5 months of the year, I had learned something pretty important about my dad's family ancestry, started a recipe blog to record the food I was making myself that was allergy safe, quit social media, and failed Wegovy to start Contrave.

Summer was brutal. Between the SCI robbing me of the heat tolerance I used to have, the perimenopause cranking up the sweat machine, and the slightest sunburn coming with a major migraine, I spent the majority of the season inside, hiding in the AC. I've always been a summer girl, so this is a rough switch for me. There was a lot of money drama over the summer, too, that definitely needed to be dealt with before I could move on with anything at all. For the record, that is definitely how to feel extra worthless.

It also took the first eight months of the year to figure out the combination of fully unprocessed hair and hair products that work for me and don't have any nut or soy oil in the recipe. I discovered scalp oiling in 2024, 2025 was when I figured out how to retain all the new length from the oiling with homemade chebe butter and steam treatments.

Fall was a test of boundaries in a lot of ways, including boundaries I have to set between myself and my own creative and empathic ideas and impulses. That all culminated in the surgery getting scheduled.

And then I started this blog. Which has me chattier about myself than I have been in awhile.

All written out like that, it was a pretty monumental year, all told. But everything seemed so very close and personal that it felt very slow and stale, while still somehow cruising by at a blessedly fast pace.

And for stats, here's the highlights from my Spotify Wrapped: