Intention Setting
a letter from my end of 2025 self
Dear End-of-2024 Shenai,
I miss you. I’m very proud of you. I’m excited for you. 2025 has been an incredible year. I would tell you all about it, I really would, but I don’t want to spoil it for you—I want you to experience it for yourself. But if I were to share a few highlights:
I do work I’m proud of, and which I love. I am working on interesting and meaningful projects that I think are good for the world. I doubt myself professionally sometimes, but less than I thought I would. I got a cool new tattoo, traveled to a couple of new cities, and found an exercise hobby I love. I saw a really good sunrise. I kind of figured out what I want to do with my hair, at least for now. I remember to brush my teeth every morning and night, not because I particularly enjoy it, but because it’s just part of my daily routine.
I have a daily routine now! I know you think routines are kind of lame and arbitrary and frustrating, and I feel you, I really do, but I like my routine. I didn’t fully understand until this year that sometimes you need a ritual to ground you so you can take serious creative and professional risks. Like anchors in a roiling sea. I’m excited for you to find that calm in the storm. I am still very much figuring this out, but choosing the uncertain but promising thing has changed my life, and none of these choices would have been possible without the people and rituals that ground me. You will find you are so much smarter and braver and tougher than you know.
I nurtured my creative self. I read and told lots of stories. I wrote essays, drew pictures, made music. I connected deeply with others over my work and theirs. I saw a movie in theaters that made me cry. Alecto the Ninth finally came out and dude you can’t even begin to anticipate what goes down in it. I watched the new season of Interview With the Vampire and it wasn’t as good as the second season but it was still pretty damn good. I understand a little better now what it means to share humanity with everyone else on this planet.
I’m not always perfect about it, and sometimes I still hurt the people I love, but I’ve tried to be better about not letting my own emotional problems affect others. I’m better at recognizing when I’m feeling particularly irritable, or egotistical, or insecure. I don’t lie to myself as much, whether in favor of myself, or in disfavor of myself. I see myself and my loved ones more clearly. I try to be generous when all I want to do is hoard and tuck myself away and turn my face from the world. I’m honest even when it causes friction, but I always share feelings in full awareness of how they make others feel, too. I let things go, but don’t shut things out.
I ate dozens of meals that nearly brought me to tears. I found a wine pairing that I still occasionally dream about, months later, and wake up sad that it wasn’t real. I still occasionally have weird feelings about my body but they’re much less frequent now. I finally found a good physical therapist and feel agile and strong in my body most of the time. I’m a little better about not giving into all my weird OCD cleansing rituals. Some bad things happened, but they were nothing I couldn’t handle. I made sure to spend a lot of time with the people I love, even though I’m scared all the time about messing things up at the start of my career and sometimes just want to work non-stop to compensate for this.
I went on long walks and people-watched and came up with stories for all of them and fell in love with their imagined interiorities. Actually, I fell in love a lot, probably too much, like embarrassingly so, and will probably keep doing so for the foreseeable future. I made some new friends. The list of people I would drop everything for is getting longer and longer. I’m allowing myself to be weighed down by the force of obligation and commitment; I rest and breathe as I sink under its weight. Did you know that there is even more beauty in the world than you ever could have imagined? Sometimes things don’t turn out as planned; sometimes they’re worse; but also sometimes they’re better. Way better.
Lots of love,
End-of-2025 Shenai