A word for 2025

Surprise! I’m here after all 😁

Last week I was all, “oh, this is the last newsletter of 2024!” and this week I decided to make myself a liar and send out another letter! Because I want to talk about 2025, actually. Well, more than I did last week. Or maybe just differently.

On Friday, I posted my 2025 ins and outs on Instagram, just a cute lil list of things I want to prioritize — and deprioritize — in the coming year.

And today I want to share the word for the year that I’ve come up with.

Now, listen — if you’ve been around for a while, you may remember that I had a year for 2024 as well: intentionality.

What you may not be aware of is that I uhhhh kinda forgot about the word within, like, a month or two. Oops. I got caught up in the weeds, is what happened. I started the year off strong with my graduation from VCFA, and then two weeks later was hospitalized for a night, and things just kind of snowballed from there.

I had some work kerfuffles and some writing issues and then suddenly it was July and then I traveled a lot and now somehow it’s December and the year just…happened? Without me being intentional about it? Rude, quite frankly.

All that said, 2024’s failure is not going to get in the way of me having a word for 2025! No sirree Bob! I am nothing if not willing to try the same things over and over again in hopes of a different outcome! So without further ado…

The word for 2025!

It’s true, folks, and you heard it here first: my relationship to my art and writing is…maybe not broken, but for sure stretched thin and fraying.

I am still full of stories I want to tell and things I want to say. But somewhere along the way, maybe as far back as middle school when I first learned that “published author” was a thing someone could be, the lines began to blur — between creation and publication, between telling stories and having my stories heard.

There has barely been a moment of my life that I haven’t wanted my stories to be read as widely as possible. I’m not fully convinced that’s a totally bad thing, either. For me, writing and storytelling is a form of connection to others. I don’t tell my stories to hide them in the dark, and I don’t think I ought to want that.

But I can recognize that things are…unhealthy…at the moment.

And so a goal of mine for 2025 is to heal my relationship to writing. To reconnect to the pure spark of joy that first led me to create a tale, then to put pen to paper to record it.

One of my friends gave me a mission that I’m not allowed to talk about to anyone — to write a story and not tell anyone — and I’ve been mulling over whether I want to do it, and what I might want to write, and oh wait I’m breaking the rules just by telling you this, aren’t I?

The point of that little aside is that…I’m trying to take steps to heal things. Trying to write stories that I want to write because I want to write them, not because I think they’ll sell or set me up for a successful writing career.

And it’s been really hard. I’ve spent so long analyzing everything through the publishing market’s gaze that I no longer really know what my gaze is. And that feels like a bit of a tragedy.

Reconnection.

In 2025, I’m going to reconnect to the heart of why I write. I can’t wait.

Alla prossima 👋

Until next year…

— Karis xoxo