goodbye 2024

reflecting, or something

Dec 31, 2024

I don’t know if I’ll remember 2024 as a major year in my life ten years from now. If I had to guess—if I’m lucky—next year or a few down the line, something will stick out as the moment. The year everything clicked. Because that certainly wasn’t this year. Reflecting on 2024, though, has made me realize that while it might not stand out in a decade, this will be the year that made those future ones, the shinier ones, possible.

2024 was a hard year for me. If I had to pick a singular defining word to encapsulate the experience, it would be uncertainty. I like control, need control, far too much for this to be a good thing. I graduated college in May into plans that extended as far as the end of summer. I had to answer constant queries about what was next, what the big picture looked like, and I couldn’t. That was excruciating, and I honestly felt like a major disappointment. Even though I only knew one person who graduated this year directly into a corporate job in the industry she studied, I still felt like I did it wrong. All I knew was that I didn’t want that. My fancy degree felt like a mistake. I could hardly muster any enthusiasm about graduation because, by the metrics my brain was running, I’d failed the first, and possibly most important, hurdle of adulthood. I was being denied admission at the gate, left in a gooey liminal space to bask in my should’ve’s and could’ve’s. I’m grateful that I had a summer job I’d worked the year before to go back to, one I loved. That was the glue that held me together.

I threw myself headfirst into summer. I wrote a whole essay about my “summer of try” and all the new experiences I plunged into in a bid to escape the big picture questions. I spent the summer casting around for what was next, having strong opinions that softened and making illogical 180s. I didn’t know. I needed everyone to stop asking.

Eventually, I settled into the idea that I’d stay in my hometown. If I was going to live in a small town, it might as well be this one. After being far away from any kind of support system, being with my parents again was a welcome relief. I had friends here. I had a community. That felt like too much to sacrifice in the name of other possible gains. I started looking into how to get my teaching certification, one of the better job prospects in this town. I put myself on dating apps because having a partner is one of the better survival tactics. I scrolled through Zillow and wondered if I’d ever be able to afford a condo of my own. I scrolled through the Adoption Center page looking for a dog. I wanted roots. I wanted something to hold me down, to inform the answers to all the other questions. I love this town, and I love being near family, and I wondered if I did eventually want a family of my own, an idea I dismissed long ago. This town is one of the only places I could envision doing that. But even the fantasy versions always felt a bit like a sock with a giant seam over the toes. Not quite right. I didn’t interrogate the feeling because that would be hard, and life was confusing enough without poking holes in the latest escape hatch.

And then I watched my co-worker look up flights for every outlandish destination we could think of. The Google flight mapper returned answer that weren’t as bleak as I expected. I went home and clicked around some more. A possibility formed. An off season trip. I asked my friend if she wanted to go to Ireland and the UK for two weeks at the end of October. The departure date was a month away. I booked the tickets.

And those two weeks at the end of the year changed my life. It gave me the answers I spent all year searching for. Thank you to Sam, Cassie, Sally Rooney, and my parents for their various roles in this coming to fruition.

The trip taught me that there are other places that make me feel as at peace as my hometown. That there are places that make my heart absolutely sing and anxiety go quiet, where I feel surrounded by people that share my interests. That I am a city girl at heart; LA was just the wrong city. That I can handle hard, confusing things and untangle problems that feel daunting. That I could live on my own again without crumbling; I was older and smarter and better equipped for life. The trip made me realize how much I learned living in LA, even though I deeply begrudged it.

I came back with the knowledge that my future was in London and that the answer to “what are you going to do with you life” is be a writer. That being a writer is enough of an answer, one that I will proudly own and thusly properly prioritize in my life. Back home, I applied to and got into grad school in London. I stopped telling myself it would be too hard. I decided it would be harder to live the wrong life than the complicated one.

Looking back at 2024, I realize that I knew many of these things long before that trip to Europe. I just refused to admit them to myself. I wrote an entire book proposal as my senior capstone when I could’ve chosen a much lower effort project. One of the writers I interviewed gave me the confidence to start pitching publications, and I secured three paid articles this year writing about movies, books, and food. Sure, I wasn’t making enough money for it to be my job, but I’d thought about freelancing for years and always been too intimidated to do it. Imagine if I put consistent effort into it? I enrolled in a creative writing workshop my final semester of college and started regularly writing short stories. I sent them to new literary magazines I discovered online. I got plenty of rejections, but I also got told yes a surprising five times. I’m a published author in more than one sense already. I wrote and re-wrote and edited a novel that I’m going to query in the new year. Again, I’m not supporting myself on that, but I was making the steps quietly, my heart propelling me forward when my brain didn’t know enough to drive the ship. I was making progress even when I didn’t know how to acknowledge it. The universe was saying yes in whatever small voiced ways it could. And now I’m in a position to appreciate that.

I spent so much of this gift of a year my parents have given me at home worrying. I wasted so much time trying to do the right thing or the best thing or the logical thing. I let a lot of outside noise crowd out what I knew all along. I’ve realized that my intuition is very quiet. I had to be sitting on a rugby field on another continent to finally hear it, but I’m so glad that I did. I didn’t need to stress and worry so much, but I’m glad that I did try out these other lives in my head, that I let myself explore the options, do the research, and come to a conclusion. It adds confidence to the gut feeling.

I don’t have all the answers about the next few years of my life. I don’t even have a fraction of them. The things I want aren’t directly achievable. I could do everything right and still never reach them. Systems that are bigger than I can fathom will determine the outcomes. I’ve already told you I’m not good with that. But I also have to wonder if this is the path I’m drawn to because I need to learn a lesson about the beauty of living life rather than thinking about it. To finally get through my head that I can control what’s directly in front of me, and that’s it. I can do the next thing. Edit the piece, send the submission, complete the application, meet the person, do the work. Hope. I can hope, but I can’t worry. I can’t let the anxiety stop the next thing. I no longer have a right to living in the big picture. It never works out how you think it will anyway.

I want to be twelve steps ahead, playing four dimensional chess. Even this future that makes me utterly giddy is months away. Through the spring, I’ll lay the groundwork. This summer, I want to get every last drop out of my beloved Jackson summers. I want to close this Wyoming chapter with no regrets, nothing left undone. And then there will be London. But I hope that I don’t miss out on all these months before then trying to live in the imagined future. Two feet on the ground for all of 2025.

My wish for myself in 2025 is that I will be fearless, open hearted, accepting of what comes. I want to courageously try, keep my ear to my intuition, and get quiet enough to hear it speak. I’ll learn to manage my future anxiety, harness it into the next step. I’ll do the thing. I’ll build on everything I’ve learned. I’ll have fun and take what comes.

Unfortunately, I don’t think 2025 will be easier for any of us, but I hope you find what you’re looking for, that you realize your own intuition. If nothing else, we’ve made it through another year. That’s something to celebrate.

Let me know your word from 2025 in the comments <3