constellations #115: twenty-twenty-five

Hi again.

“It feels good to want something,” I told my best friend last week, earnest and exhausted, as we were talking about our big ideas for the coming year. “And to move towards it,” my friend said in response. As I’ve turned over those words in my mind in the last couple days, I’ve come to think that interaction, that sentiment—vague and simple and perhaps corny as it is—sums up 2025 for me. It wasn’t necessarily, for me, a year of accomplishing anything, but it was a year of solidified desires: a year of laying groundwork, of finding footing.

During the recent past, I’ve felt like I tumbled off a conveyer belt, or like my momentum had ground to a halt. (“Movement rarely felt like a step forward or backward,” was how I described it a few years ago, “more like a shift to the side, stepping off the tracks and letting the world rush past.” That feeling persisted, on and off, for the few years that followed.) At first, it felt inevitable that I’d find myself swept up in a current again, but then it started to feel unlikely, and at many points it came to feel entirely impossible. But this year, I’ve felt myself getting near it again: naming my near-future, tracing its shape, closing the distance between it and me. I can see the big picture now, I think, even if I can’t name all the details. It would probably feel good to get what I want, but right now I’m grateful to even want at all, grateful for the way desire lends shape and direction to my days. I felt grateful for that this year and also for patience, for the way time passing contains its own wisdom—a lesson I now realize I resisted for a long time. The older I get, the more I see the sweet futility of attempting to assert control; the more I come to rely on the unexpected, for better or worse; the more I get to see a wider view, a deeper perspective—or maybe what I mean is, the more I come to understand the limits of my current perspective. What a gift!

My hope for next year is, of course: fruition. I feel grounded and willing and ready, wiser and slow and attuned. Even if I have to keep waiting; even if I don’t get what I want—I’m grateful to feel like moving towards it is possible, like I am shaking off the inertia of inaction, like if I get in motion I will stay in motion. That feels good.

So anyway. Each December, as my own little tradition, I make a list of things that have guided me through the year (see: 2024; 2023; 2022; 2021; 2020; 2019; 2018; 2017). Here is my accounting for 2025, plus some other miscellany.

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counting my steps: Surprisingly to even myself, I got really into tracking my steps at the beginning of this year, trying to get to 10,000 each day (or, more realistically, an average of that per day each week). I don’t know why I got obsessed with this, because I don’t really trust “step count” as an accurate indicator of my “physical” “health.” After a while of tracking a lot, I stopped, because I started to feel like I was getting too neurotic about the whole thing. And in the meantime I had started training to run a couple long-ish races, so I came to believe I was getting enough steps in during, say, a weekend long run to average out a few otherwise sedentary days. So I gave up tracking. Anyway this whole thing isn’t something I am proud of from the year; just being honest about a place my mind spent a lot of time.

friends’ dreams coming true: This year, various of my friends: fell in love, got married, got pregnant, had a baby (note: each of those things happened to different people!!! amazing), opened a bar, bought a house, got a dog ... The list goes on. It was so beautiful! As noted above, I did not really feel a lot of forward motion in my life this year, so it felt especially wonderful to watch all this happen for people I love. And mostly I didn’t really feel envy, which surprised me; it’s a feeling I am prone to. Probably if I paid very close attention to the life milestones of people I don’t love, and had to watch those people accomplish everything I want in my life while I accomplished basically nothing, I would indeed harbor bad feelings. (A hypothetical, of course.) But, be that as it may: I’m simply happy for my friends!
[But also, shoutout to those of my very dearest friends who had a year of wheel-spinning, just like me: Solidarity, beloveds; our time is coming!]

having nightmares: For a long chunk of the middle of the year I had nightmares nearly every night. Mostly in my dreams I was full of rage, really and truly pissed off and fighting with people I love (people who, in my conscious life, I was not upset with at all). The whole experience was awful and I didn’t really know what to do about it. I care a lot about getting enough sleep but for a while I started to dread going to bed and I would wake up with a pit in my stomach every morning. I think partially the nightmares came because I was taking multivitamins with melatonin in them? And they did go away eventually, but the experience made me think a lot about my relationship to anger and why my brain needed to process that much rage in my sleep.

morning walks with friends: About once a month this year I would meet up with a few friends (three women who also happen to be music journalists and live near me) and we would go for a walk around Bed-Stuy before work. A great way to start the day and it made me feel a sweet sense of belonging. I cherished it!

Music League: I played this game all year with a big group of friends. If you aren’t familiar, it’s an app where you pick a theme and then you and your friends have to submit a song on that theme and then it spits out a playlist with all the songs and then you vote on them. Rinse and repeat. My friends and I played all year, mostly just for fun (though some of us took it very seriously; Matt made gorgeous custom playlist art for each theme, for example, and then put together an awards ceremony when our first “season” concluded over the summer. And yeah, I won first place, but I won’t brag about it). I loved talking to my friends about music every week and I can’t recommend this app enough if you want to have a big group chat with people you love where you talk about songs on a regular basis.

not being so sad: I wrote about this a bit above, and in my 2024 reflections, but I have found myself on the other side of several rather dark and despondent years, and the relief it has granted me is enormous. The year was not without its setbacks, of course—personal and political and global, etc.—but on the whole I feel much more engaged in and excited about my day-to-day life and the world I get to be part of. Probably the greatest gift of this upswing has been the ability to consider my own future with curiosity and hope, which previously felt unimaginable. Maybe someday I will write about this at length but for now I will just say that I am grateful, and that gratitude defined my year.

onelook.com: The best online thesaurus. Anna Gaca introduced me to it earlier this year (thank you Anna) and I relied on it heavily while writing and editing.

rice krispies: Snack of the year, eaten two at a time before going for a run. This got me through preparing for the Falmouth Road Race over the summer and lots of pre-half-marathon speed sessions in the fall. If you are a runner and you want to switch up your fueling strategy I recommend eating rice krispies. Thank you to Elle for recommending this.

self-importance/know-it-alls: My no. 1 enemy this year. Every time I bumped into this attitude, which was often, it made me seethe. (And listen, I know: Takes one to know one! I’m not immune. I made myself seethe plenty.) The people I admire the most are rarely bragging or offering unsolicited corrections; meanwhile everyone else, seemingly all the time, needs me to know how important/impressive/correct they are. Whatever!!!! I pray for humility in 2026.

veggie burgers: I’ve been a vegetarian-sometimes-pescatarian for over a decade and I never once longed for a real-deal hamburger. I would eat a veggie burger if it was offered to me but I didn’t seek them out, and I never really wanted to mess with the style of them that mimics real meat; just wasn’t interested! But this year I found myself falling for the simple American combination of cold alcoholic drink + (veggie) burger. At a dive bar before seeing a rock show? Thrilling. On the Cape with my friends? Heavenly. With a slushy at a vegan restaurant? Of course! I’m glad to have been converted.

etc.: crop tops, tofu scrambles, the zeal of the convert, poppers, earplugs, almond butter, meetings (non-work), the Center for Fiction, crying with gratitude, the question of deserving, apéritifs, being in love

five favorite shows I saw this year: Krill at Alphaville (Jan. 17); Kim Gordon & Kassie Krut at Pioneer Works (April 2); Rilo Kiley at Red Rocks (May 14); Wednesday at Brooklyn Steel (Nov. 11); Snocaps at Bowery Ballroom (Dec. 8)

five of my favorite things I wrote: this profile of Karly Hartzman from Wednesday for The Guardian; this review of the 10th anniversary reissue of Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion; this review of Perfume Genius’ Glory; this newsletter about a pony I once loved; my officiant speech for my sister’s wedding

in for 2026 (a personal incantation): diligence; attention to detail; joint and tendon health; having a nightcap¹; productive boredom; discretion

out for 2026 (a personal wishlist): bragging; anxiety about how big your pants should be; indecision; fake freckles (stolen valor); the phrase “knows ball”; blaming things on age (good or bad)

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Thank you for reading constellations this year. It means so much to me. I hope you get everything you want next year. Until then!

xo,
M

1. This was also in my 2025 “in” list but I didn’t really accomplish it so I’m recommitting for 2026