A beginner’s guide to 2025

Starting from scratch in the new year

Dec 03, 2024

The new year is on the horizon

Obviously I’m neck-deep in the proverbial festive sand at the moment, and loving every second of it. I’m obsessively reading gift guides, channeling my holiday Fancy Girl, breaking out the wax seals for my Christmas cards, and updating my holiday movie list. I’m in the thick of things and that’s exactly where I want to be.

And yet. The new year is defrosting. Underneath the caroling I can hear the Jumanji-style beat of 2025 drums.

This year I’m determined not to drift amicably through the lead-up to the holidays. The trajectory of my life is cosmic: I want every year to be better than the ones that came before, which means that it’s time to start laying the groundwork that will define my life for the next twelve months.

Starting with emptying the 2024 scrap bucket.

The 2024 Scrap Bucket

To make room for the new, we must rid ourselves of the old

— is a bold blanket statement. It definitely doesn’t work for everything (hello grandparents and sourdough starters), but it’s a good place to begin.

I’m a present person. I stopped being ashamed of having ‘gifts’ as a top love language a long time ago. I fucking love being given stuff. Sue me. Equally, I love making an art out of curating other people’s gifts, and finding the perfect book or trinket or knickknack to light up someone’s day. My hunter-gatherer instinct is finely honed and — as long as I’m not using it as an excuse to lean into consumerism — there’s nothing wrong with that. On the flip side, stuff accumulates, especially when you have a bad habit of impulse purchasing and a magpie’s affinity for bric-a-brac. The end result is a pile of things I simply had to have at the time and which have since lost my interest. To put it even more simply, I’ve changed. I have stuff that no longer fits with who I am and who I want to be, and as such the first step to preparing for the new year is the Grand Declutter.

Make a day of it. Make a playlist. Clean out your shit. Find what sparks joy. Get rid of the things that no longer fit with your life, and find new homes for them (Depop is my go-to for reselling clothes, otherwise your local thrift store would always appreciate the donation).

This approach also works for old habits that are no longer serving you. Too much screentime? Bad relationship? Non-existent sleep hygiene? Clean your todo list, make time for a digital detox, schedule some life admin, and free yourself of the bad to make space for the good.

The Art of Drafting

It’s the end of the year and my holiday brain is kicking in so of course we’re going to talk about Pinterest.

I won’t spend long on this – my toxic trait is assuming that everyone uses Pinterest as much as I do – but Pinterest really is the best way of drafting your life. It helps you articulate what you want the year to look and feel like, and then compile it into one neat folder. I will never get bored of this.

In the past, I’ve been in the habit of making myself a new vison board for each of my birthdays, to visualize what I want the year to be like. They’ve always been exquisite but it’s been a very vague resource. This is the aesthetic I want. This is the vibe. But when the vibe includes a photo of the ocean next to a reinterpretation of Matisse’s Dance (with cows instead of people) next to a punnet full of cherry tomatoes, it can be difficult to realize. So this year, I’m modifying my approach.

My birthday is in April (Aries sun / Pisces moon / Aries rising — feel free to read into it). That means I have three and a half months between the start of the new year and my birthday. This year, I’ll be making my pinterest board at the start of the year and giving myself that time to cement my goals and resolutions before April hits. The only way I can ever make myself do anything is by romanticising the hell out of it, so this plan’s looking good.

Welcome in the New Year!

It’s bright! It’s beautiful! It’s 2025!

We may be mildly(?) hungover, but that’s not going to stop us from busting out our new journals and getting to resolutions and goals for the year.

In my mind, resolutions and goals are two sides of the same coin: Resolutions are the broad concepts that will lay the foundation for the year ahead. Things like invest more in my friendships and chosen family or become more chic. Goals, on the other hand, are what we build on top of that foundation. For instance, organise a roadtrip or read one new non-fiction book every month. I hate to say ‘actionable statements’, but you get the gist.

Now I won’t lie, I’ve been mulling over my 2025 goals for a while and this coming year I’ll be splitting them into four categories:

Cultural
Financial
Authorial
Personal

My cultural goals will include things like hitting a new milestone in my target languages, or going to see a certain number of plays in a year. Financially, my goals this year include building up my emergency fund and learning how to invest. My main authorial goal is to finish my next manuscript, while keeping up weekly posts on Substack and eventually launching a newsletter for paid subscribers. And my personal goal… This is going to sound like weak sauce, but I haven’t won a medal since I was a child. At the same time, an unfortunate yet expected number of my friends have recently participated in half-marathons (needless to say, we’re in our mid-twenties). While I won’t be participating in any marathons, half or otherwise, in any version of the predictable future, I am committing myself to a fun run next March. Participation medal and quarterlife crisis snapped up in one fell swoop. Thoughts and prayers would be appreciated.

Until then, however, it’s the thick of the festive season and there’s a beautiful new year on the horizon. I can’t wait to see what we’ll make of it.