My 2025 Word of the Year

Last year, I started doing a word of the year and have LOVED centering my whole world in a given year around one word. In 2024 (here), my word of the year was joy. And, truly I strived to bring SO MUCH JOY into 2024 with me and into 2025. 2024 taught me how to bring joy into all aspects of life, whether good or bad and to indeed find joy in everyday life. At the end of the 2024 year, like many of us, I found myself doing lots of reflection on how I wanted to shift my focus into 2025. Since I LOVED picking a word of the year for 2024, I decided to do the same thing again for 2025!

SO, with that all being said, my 2025 word of the year is … FORWARD!

One of the biggest themes I noticed in myself throughout 2024 was dwelling on things that happened in the past, whether great or not-so great. I found myself when tough things happened dwelling on them a lot longer than I should have. I found myself getting into my head wayyyyy too much than I should have. I found myself getting reminders of what happened in the past and thinking that what happened in the past will be a repeat trend in the future (which by the way isn’t true folks!). While it’s great to look to our past for fun memories, lessons learned, and even inspiration, we must move forward on a regular basis. In my reflections on 2024, I realized that I wanted to focus on moving forward in 2025 and decided to make it my word of the year and center my entire world around moving forward.

In practically all aspects of my daily life, I have been brainstorming ways in which I wanted to and am in the process of implementing when it comes to forward-thinking in 2025. While I won’t be sharing all of those ways here with y’all, I will note that it has been beneficial allll around for me to center the year 2025 around the word forward. For example, I am focusing on growing my newsletter over on Substack (let’s be friends @thepinkchickadee) that I created in December 2024. On all of my social media platforms aka Instagram (let’s be friends @_thepinkchickadee), Substack, Threads, and most recently YouTube (let’s be friends @thepinkchickadee) as well as my website that you are currently reading this post on, I am striving to create consistent content and build relationships with YOU aka my lovely community and friends while doing so. I am focusing on creating a structured environment for me to create and share content with y’all via this overall happy place of mine on the internet. At the same time, I am focusing on finding community locally by continuing to attend church more regularly and when able with my Mom and Papa and continuing to engage more locally with those that I already know and love, including with Daughters of the American Revolution. To tie it all up with a bow, I will also be striving to make more time to see those that I love both near and far. In 2024, I didn’t spend much time in real life with my dear college friends that have been there for me through the ups and downs of life who all reside in North Carolina and I want to make more of an effort to see them as well as other long distance friends and family members while achieving some of my both local and further away travel goals. This platform, community, and friendships are truly just a sample of the many ways that I am paving the way forward for myself into 2025 and beyond!

When 2024 ended, my mental state was not in the best of spirits and I left the year feeling severely burned out and run down. Via reflection in therapy (which I am a full supporter of EVERYONE doing at some point in their lifetime!), I realized that dwelling on the past and putting too much energy into the things that I cannot control whether they happened in the past and are wayyyyy behind me or I simply cannot control somebody else and how they act and react is simply not a productive way to move forward in 2025. I have been focusing on facing my personal fears and truly changing my mindset to not dwell on the negative but rather focus on the positive and make adjustments accordingly to focus on the positive, too. Recently, I have been applying Mel Robbins’s “let them” theory into my daily life and it has been groundbreaking for my own personal and mental wellbeing (I plan to share more about this in a future blog post, too!). All this to say, going forward into 2025, I feel so much more rejuvenated given the changes that I’ve already made!

At the end of the day, the only things that we can control are how we act and react to things and our pathway forward in this world. We cannot go backwards, but we are always going forward into 2025 (and beyond!). I wish you all the best in 2025 and moving forward from there!

XOXO – Katie <3