10 Things I Learned In 2025
It was a year I'll never forget
I usually put together my annual What I’ve Learned post or episode in the final week of the year, when I’m reflecting, journaling, and just generally wrapping up the season. But I have procrastinated this exercise for 2025, because it was such a brutal year, and, honestly, I didn’t want to look too closely at what I learned, since some of those lessons broke me all the way open.
But, I’m a stickler for tradition, and I find enormous value in categorizing these lessons each year, and what I’ve found in writing this over the last few hours has surprised me a little. While generally hard in ways that are difficult to capture, 2025 also held some of the most profound and important moments of my life, with personal revelations that will linger for a long time. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that these things go hand in hand.
NOTE: I do not want to be overly cryptic or vague about what was hard about 2025 and I want to emphasize that our family unit is healthy and fine. It’s tricky to write about big picture pain when it didn’t happen to you directly and is not your story to tell. But our immediate community in Los Angeles has gone through so much loss in the last year, including the fires, the deaths of multiple young people, military occupation and ICE raids, and the shifting entertainment industry that affects so many. I wrote more about this HERE.
I hope this also inspires you to pick up your own journal and take a good, hard, look at 2025, if you haven’t already. One thing that was helpful to me was pulling up my google calendar and browsing through everything I did - this brought a few things to mind (especially from earlier in the year) that I had almost completely forgotten about. This is also helpful if you still want to go through the end-of-year questions:
Reminder that it’s never too late for inner reflection.
In (mostly) chronological order, these are the most prominent things I learned in 2025:
We grabbed less stuff in a fire than I would have guessed
When we had to evacuate our home during the LA Fires, we had (blessedly) several hours to prepare before the final orders were given, and in the end we brought very little with us. I gathered my fine jewelry and journals, we packed practical clothes and passports, and we loaded the dogs into the minivan and left.
Later, when the danger had passed and we were less stressed, Jeff and I talked about what we would have done differently. Should we have tried to salvage some art? (Maybe) Should we have a list of things to grab and do next time since it’s very hard to make those decisions under pressure? (Definitely) But ultimately, it was a lesson in understanding our relationship to our stuff.
Now, I am no stranger to the argument that “things are just things,” because this well-intentioned line of thinking infuriated me after our home invasion in 2018, where I was robbed of items that meant a lot to me. Sometimes stuff is way more than just stuff. It is your history, it is your memories, it is part of your identity. And, obviously, I would be writing about this lesson quite differently if we had lost our home.
But one of the largest looming moments of 2025 was our family of four plus our two dogs sitting on the bed in the hotel where we’d evacuated, eating chipotle and watching the coverage of the fires as they crept through the Hollywood hills, and knowing, in that moment, we had everything we needed.
Being right is rarely a triumph
I’ve learned this a few times in a few ways, and yet it still surprises me that being right about something doesn’t bring the satisfaction you expect.
Last winter, in a complex team situation, I turned out to be very, very right about an problematic dynamic that affected a lot of people. This was after some heated email exchanges that I regret and multiple people telling me I was overreacting and overstepping my bounds.
When the events unfolded as I knew they would, and I turned out to be correct about how damaging it was and how poorly it was handled, I felt about three seconds of justice. That was it. The situation was still bad and I had hurt some relationships in the process of screaming about it.
The lesson for me here isn’t to shut up, it’s just to temper my expectation that there will be a reward or even changed result for calling something out first or most loudly. There was no trophy for my foresight. There was only resentment all around.
I’m still not totally sure how I would do it differently if I could. Should I have caused more of a stink or less? I acted in ways I’m not proud of, but it also cemented my own intuition, so it’s a balance to figure out how to bring change in a situation without losing your integrity and priorities.
There is a point when you are no longer satisfied with crumbs
I’m 46 now and I’ve been learning this lesson in earnest since I hit about 40, but it only gets stronger and more definitive.
This stands out for me most when I’m in a diminutive position. When I’m lonely, I gobble up crumbs of connection. In a freelance (and artistic) career, I often crave recognition by someone in a position to hand out opportunities. But suddenly I was done with this desperation.
This lesson manifested in several tangible ways. Once, I found myself at a professional lunch where someone acted like they were doing me a favor by meeting with me (they had initiated the meeting!) and another time I sat in a zoom meeting where someone tried to tell me they understood more about my podcast audience than I did. In both of these scenarios in the past, I might have capitulated to someone else’s “professional” expertise, since I still battle with imposter syndrome even after all these years.
But whether it’s age or professional success, I hit a tipping point on this in 2025. I not only don’t want your crumbs, I will reject them. I’m just not that hungry.
Fix the thing that needs fixing
In 2025, we (finally!) finished our home renovation projects that included the primary bathroom, the kitchen and dining room, and a fairly major backyard refresh. It looks awesome, and we’re so pleased with the results, and also living in a house in the middle of construction wreaks havoc.
The original structure of our house was built in 1950, but over the decades it has become kind of a Frankenstein. That is to say, it’s been added on to and expanded and renovated enough times (and in different styles) enough to make it the wild, quirky thing that it is. This was one of the things that appealed to us about it, but of course it comes with some real drawbacks, like how impossible it is to make certain parts cohesive to a whole.
For example, the driveway is this…unusual…stamped concrete meant to mimic cobblestones. And it’s not even the length of the driveway, it’s just one section. It’s a small area that in the scheme of everything we have dreamed for the house, isn’t that big of a deal design-wise. However, changing it would be a huge, expensive, deal. You’d have to jackhammer it all out and it would be a mess and very pricey for something most people don’t even notice.
AND YET I kept exploring options and getting quotes to fix this patch of driveway and kept telling myself that if the driveway didn’t look like that, the rest of the exterior would also look better. Because what really bothered me about the outside of the house wasn’t the driveway. It was the color.
From the moment we bought the house, I hated the pea-green paint color of the exterior. It goes with the neighborhood and the overall vibe, but it was dreary. Earthy in a way that I am not. It emphasized the patchwork quilt design, which my husband thought was charming but I thought was tired and dull. However, painting the whole house seemed out of the question. What a project! It was too much.
But then midway through the backyard remodel I got a bee in my bonnet about it. We created images with the house a different color just to see how it felt. And eventually we pulled the trigger. Our pea green house became a luxurious cream. Guess what happened then? You barely notice the fake cobblestone.
It was not a small decision or job, but painting the house eliminated tons of other decisions and projects because suddenly when the whole space was a fresh, bright color, little else mattered. We would have spent years and lots of dollars trying to make everything else around the house look better when really we needed a fresh coat of paint. Tackling the big problem “magically” solved a bunch of little ones.
You can run in circles trying to stop the bleeding, the leaks, slapping on bandaids, pick your metaphor. But if you don’t fix the main issue, you’ll just keep feeling like something isn’t right. You’ll never really feel content with the small changes when the big thing looms.
This is about more than just the house.
Join the book club! (Or do more of what makes you YOU instead of searching out novelty)
I joined TWO new book clubs last year and started Slow Read. This is in addition to my real life book club, and the Secret Stuff book club.
I’ll be honest with you, I was not looking for more assigned reading in my life. In fact, I had actively avoided it. But after some stops and starts in the friendship department in the last few years, I was craving more in-person connection. And you know what I’m good at? Reading.
Now, I actively thought about (and even tried) picking up a new hobby or joining another type of organization to meet people. The novelty felt like it would be good. Variety seems nice. But honestly…I don’t have a lot of space for taking up a whole new thing right now. I needed some connection quickly and without a learning curve and I know books. I love books. Bookworms are my people. So despite my growing TBR, I joined these in-person book clubs and it has been SO GOOD. The conversations, the laughter, the twice+ monthly meetups (which has been the best part - to have these social things on my calendar), it has been good for me in a lot of ways.
So I learned that when I’m lonely, it’s too big a hill for me to climb to start something new. You gotta start with who you already are.
Grief changes everything
I don’t know what to say about this. It’s too big. But I think you might know.
Grief changes your whole world. A fog descends but also some things have never been clearer.
It reshuffles priorities. It makes you both harder and softer.
It changes the landscape of a year, of a lifetime.
You can quit things…again
I started my podcast 10 Things To Tell You in 2019 and I closed it at the end of 2021. I kept it closed for the whole of 2022 while I wrote The Life Council with no plans to bring it back.
Until I missed the microphone, missed the community, missed the built-in weekly deadline. And so I brought it back at the end of 2022 for another 2.5 years. Several months into 2025, I began to understand that it was time to bring it to a close…again.
I wrestled with the perception of this. I didn’t want anyone to think I was flaky. Like I couldn’t make up my mind (although doing anything for years at a time is hardly wishy-washy behavior). Also I had a full working team and wasn’t sure how it was going to work financially not to have the podcast.
But I knew in my gut that that particular project was finished. And since I’d closed it before (and learned a whole set of lessons that time), I also knew that life is a series of decisions that can be revisited. Closing 10TTTY didn’t mean I was stepping away from all podcast mics forever. Closing 10TTTY didn’t mean it was a failure. (Far from it.)
Truthfully it didn’t MEAN anything that deep. The project had run its course, I had other things I wanted to focus on, it didn’t require a ton of overthinking.
I often find myself waiting for permission to start or stop things. Permission from whom, I don’t always know. But turns out you can start and stop things (and then maybe start and stop them again).
Connection points are not static
When Jeff and I got married, I was conservative and he was liberal and we didn’t like the same foods and our main bonding point was making our house a home.
Nearly 20 years later and we’ve both moved towards the middle to be aligned in our politics, we greatly favor the same type of restaurants and travel, and in our recent aforementioned home renovations, I let him take the reins on almost all of it.
My kids and I are also bonding in totally different ways than we used to, and this seems natural as they age but also there’s a push/pull as a parent of letting one connection you have together fade while nurturing something else to flourish.
It feels like everywhere I turned in 2025, I was noticing that connection points had changed a little. Maybe they had grown or evolved, maybe they were loosening with time and circumstances. I tried to hold it all loosely, knowing that a past version of myself would have clung tightly to a connection’s original strength.
But I’ve learned that when you hang on too tightly, you can strangle something good. That’s actually been one of the biggest lessons of my adulthood. And this extends to connections as well. Let them change.
Do good work and let things fall where they may
This is an ever-evolving lesson that I keep learning.
Every other creator I know will joke about how we have no idea what words will land. You can put hours, weeks, days into making something that falls flat with an audience and then dash off something dumb in the carpool line that goes viral.
While this has happened to me throughout my career, it felt especially apt in 2025. I had some very weird online moments last year, including some viral posts, threatening trolls, and various acquaintances and extended family members being totally crazy towards me online in a way that was a major headache. Over twelve months on various platforms I both lost and gained thousands of followers and subscribers (and this is a very unusual turnover for me, and came with its own existential crisis about the nature of working on the internet).
There were also some unexpected successes like moving Secret Stuff from Patreon to Substack, leading a group through The Artist’s Way this fall and launching Slow Read. At this time last year, I couldn’t have predicted any of this. And so I learned in a very real way that since I generally have no idea how most things are gonna go, I just need to keep my head down, do good work - work that I’m proud of - and let everything else land where it lands.
This may seem a little obvious, but it’s not. There are so many books, podcasts, and gurus telling me that I can control all the things: the algorithm, the trends, the technology. That if we just use the right marketing copy we’ll make millions of dollars. That if we just stick to the basics or find a groove or disrupt what’s stale that we’ll finally hook that elusive big fish.
And let me just tell you I have tried gimmicks and I have tried randomness and they have about the same success rate. So I’m learning to ignore that little voice that tells me I’m doing everything wrong, or that if I just tweak one more thing, I’ll be on my way!
Focusing on the work - the good work that I know I’m capable of doing - brings so much more contentment.
Do not doubt in the darkness what you knew in the light
In the hardest moments of 2025, I abandoned everything I thought I knew. Prayer, energy, astrology, ancient texts, everything I’ve ever claimed as truth fell away and there was just…nothing.
I had the distinctive thought that everything I have believed is bullshit. That there is no answer or comfort in crying out to God or the Universe. That nothing or no one will save us. That we are all alone, in the void, forever.
This is dark. These are not the things you’re supposed to let yourself think, let alone write. And yet in my most fearful moments, this is where I was. I have spun around and around in this, wondering if that was a truth revealing itself to me (that there is nothing - a conclusion I know many have arrived at) or if that was just fear, trauma, shock.
I don’t have any answers. I cannot tie this up in a bow. What I know is that in the darkness, I have to cling to what I knew in the light. I have to trust the light more than I trust the dark. It’s the only way.
And so, in the moments of light - and there have been so many lately - I will build up my arsenal of hope, of knowledge, of truth, and of ritual, that I want to sustain me for the inevitable moments of darkness.
This may not feel like the perfect place to end, but for me, it is. Learning in the light what I will cling to in the dark is the most important gift I can give myself and those around me.
Do you have a great lesson(s) from 2025? I’d love to hear it. Sharing what we’ve learned is a form of advice, nostalgia, and collective wisdom.
May 2026 be full of the change, steadiness, weight, or levity we’re craving,
Thanks for sharing, Laura. The part about crumbs resonated with me. It’s along the lines of this Anne Lamott quote I love, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.” It’s nice to feel more sure of ourselves and our worth as we get older, isn’t it?! All the best to you in 2026!
This feels like ten chapters in a really good book I would like to read.