Wrapping Up 2025: Living the Paradox

Here we are, saying goodbye to a year that didn’t even sound real—a year that once felt like the title of a futuristic novel. And yet, here it is behind me now, made up not of spectacle, but of ordinary days, quiet reckonings, and a growing willingness to stay present with what I didn’t yet know how to resolve.

For well over a decade—since around 2011—I’ve chosen a word to guide me through each year. It isn’t a goal or a resolution so much as a companion, a lens through which I notice what’s happening and how I’m responding. Last year, I’ve added another practice alongside it: looking back at the year just lived and naming what it asked of me.

Last year, that word was create.
This year, the word was paradox.

2025: A Year of Paradox

Paradox isn’t a tidy word. It doesn’t promise clarity or closure. It asks us to hold two things that seem to contradict each other—and to resist the urge to collapse one in favor of the other.

In 2025, paradox showed up everywhere.

I wanted rest and meaning.
Freedom and structure.
Certainty and listening.

I found myself learning how to live in the both/and instead of reaching for quick resolution. How to let tension exist without interpreting it as failure. How to notice that opposing truths could share the same space in my body, my work, and my relationships.

This was especially true in my ongoing relationship with my body and with diet culture. I spent more time outside the trance of fixing, shrinking, or optimizing—and more time noticing how deeply those habits had once promised safety. Letting go didn’t happen all at once. It came alongside grief, relief, trust, fear, and a growing respect for the body as a collaborator rather than a problem to solve.

Paradox, it turns out, isn’t something to overcome.
It’s something to learn how to live with.

When I step back and look at the arc, the words line up in a way that feels less like planning and more like timing:

2024 asked me to create.
2025 asked me to tolerate paradox.
And the word already waiting for 2026 is integration.

Integration couldn’t have come first. It needed the year of paradox—the year of staying, of not rushing, of letting competing truths speak—before it could arrive honestly.

As this year is ending and a new one is upon us, I find myself returning to poetry. I am writing some poetry, but I am reading some as well, especially Emily Dickinson, whose work has long reminded me that clarity doesn’t always come from explanation. Sometimes it comes from companionship. From standing at the threshold and refusing to be hurried across it.

Standing at the Threshold

As this year closes, I don’t feel resolved. I feel oriented.

I’m standing at the edge between what has been and what is forming—grateful for what loosened, respectful of what remains unfinished, and more willing than before to trust that I don’t have to force coherence too soon.

If you’re ending this year with contradictions intact, you’re not doing it wrong. If you’re holding grief alongside relief, fatigue alongside hope, clarity in one area and uncertainty in another—you’re in good company.

Paradox doesn’t ask us to choose.
It asks us to stay.

As we step into the next year, may we let ourselves linger at the threshold just long enough to notice what’s here—without rushing to name it, fix it, or make it smaller.

That, at least, is what this year taught me.