January 10, 2025
378 days without you
Happy New Year, Dad.
2025—can you believe it? Do you even recognize that it’s a new year up there? Does time even exist in Heaven? These questions make my brain hurt, so I’m not going to think about them.
I’ve been wanting to write to you about the new year for a while now, but I kept “giving it more time” to see if my feelings toward the new year will change. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. Normally I really buy in to all of the new year activities and prompts like making a vision board, setting goals, starting new habits, etc. And, normally, it brings me joy to think about what I want my next year of life to look like. I like to day dream about the person I’ll be in a year from now and think about all the action steps I can take to get there. But this year was different. For obvious reasons.
Last New Years Day was your visitation, and your funeral was on January 2. That timing was extremely ironic because as everyone was ringing in a new year and celebrating with new goals and visions, we were laying you to rest. It was the ultimate contradiction—a painful ending during what’s supposed to be a joyful beginning. Even with all of the heaviness of last New Years, I still found time to print out pictures and paste them into my journal for a small vision board. I still found energy to set intentions for the year and lay out what books I wanted to read. This year, a whole year after you’ve passed, I don’t have any motivation or want to set goals, make a vision board, or even think more than a few months ahead of time. Why was I able to set goals and visions for myself last year, in the midst of the deepest pain I’ve ever felt, but not this year?
I was talking about this with my small group the other day, (Have I told you about them yet? I meet up with three other women from my church on Wednesday mornings, and they have quickly become some of my best friends. You would love them.) and one of the women, Kristen, pointed something out that I hadn’t thought of. “Are you afraid of being disappointed again?” she asked me. Her question hit me and left me quiet for a few seconds because yes, that was obviously what was making me feel this way. A fear of disappointment. A fear of being let down. A fear of trying as hard as I can to be happy and have a good year but it never being enough. That’s exactly how I feel about 2024, and I don’t think I could handle it if I had the same expectations for 2025.
While there were great milestones and moments last year (finishing college, moving, making best friends, getting my DREAM job), last year was undoubtedly the worst year of my life. (All of these things can be true by the way. I could still have great moments, but be in pain) And the thing is, I checked off nearly every goal I made for myself in 2024. I traveled to new places, read plenty of books, hosted dinner parties, played lots of pickleball, and I wrote…a lot. But did any of these things make me have the greatest year of my life? No, not even close. While I don’t regret making a vision board or setting goals for myself last year, I think the only reason I did it was to distract myself from what was going on around me in my personal life. No amount of books or dinner parties or games of pickleball could ever do that.
So when New Years rolled around this year, I just didn’t want to do it all, all of the dreaming and journaling and goal setting. What God wants to happen will happen, and there’s nothing I can do to change that. Am I setting myself up to have another hard year? No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think and hope we all will have a much lighter, happier year, but I’m not going to put those expectations on myself. This year will be what it will be, and I’m holding my plans very loosely in my hands, knowing God can shape, change, and mold them into whatever he wants them to be. I’m just going to make it through the days and the weeks, and maybe put some things on the calendar to look forward to within a few months. Other than that, I’m just here, and I think right here is a much better place to be than where I was last year.
