I Thought About Making a Vision Board

Then I Didn’t

I am not interested in turning the past year into a lesson plan. I am interested in understanding it accurately. Before any future is proposed, the record has to be examined: what I believed, what I tolerated, what I misidentified as momentum. Writing, here, is not therapeutic. It is diagnostic. The point is not to feel better about what happened, but to see it clearly enough that it cannot happen again under a different name.

I don’t think it makes much sense to set goals for the coming year without first processing what the previous one has already done to you. That’s why I’m writing this now: to correct my trajectory, to identify the core events, and to archive them before they become anecdotes. It took me ten days to get my thoughts in order; before I could write a single sentence, I had to rest, slow down, and stop performing coherence.

2025 was not the best year of my life, but it was far from the worst. It was, however, the year I grew up. The year I learned to stand straight, to look people in the eyes, and to accept, without embarrassment, that I carry light into a room when I enter it. It was the year I learned my value the inefficient way: by falling, feeling everything, standing up, and repeating the process.

The year was soaked in absurdity. Very little made sense at the time, and instead of resisting it, I let it happen: an unfamiliar strategy for someone who usually mistakes control for stability. I moved constantly, almost compulsively, without knowing what I was running from. It felt like escape without an object. Or worse: I joked about “closing the circle” with my friends and committed the ultimate offense, confusing emotional chaos with memory-making.

I suspect this had something to do with losing the feeling of home. I had many roofs over my head, but very few walls that held. There were people who felt like home, briefly, convincingly. And here is what I learned, slowly and without grace: you can lean on people, but you cannot construct yourself out of them. Individualism needs a fixed address. Otherwise, when it is built on what lies beyond your control, it collapses at the first emotional upheaval.

Even though I learned that I need very little—sometimes no one at all—for entertainment or pleasure of any kind, something was still missing. I had the courage to decide what was right and wrong within my own internal world, but I failed to create the space in which those thoughts could move freely. Autonomy, it turns out, is useless without architecture.

Virginia Woolf was being entirely literal when she argued that a woman needs a room of her own in order to write. She meant a physical room: walls, a door, a lock. I understood this far too late. Independence requires infrastructure. Without it, even the most self-sufficient mind becomes nomadic, hovering but never settling.

And yet, the constant movement of 2025 was not entirely a failure of structure. It was also the year I truly became a traveler. The year I developed a mildly problematic crush on Anthony Bourdain—and took him far too seriously. I sat at tables I never thought I would, spoke to strangers, ate food I didn’t recognize, celebrated local and religious holidays, attended weddings. If nothing else, I conducted thorough field research.

So perhaps this year was not about finding a home, but about learning how one is made. Or better: how to assemble fragments of it wherever I go—until movement stops masquerading as escape and starts behaving like architecture. It is too early to define it. But wanting to understand it better feels certain enough.

Another lesson I am taking with me is the practice of moving in silence. It is a quiet but uncompromising principle of my belief system: never disclose the first move, and never narrate the next. Sharing has its place, but only once something has become fixed—structurally sound. Otherwise, you grant premature access to a world that has not yet learned how to protect itself.

This matters to me because I have come to recognize a pattern I once mistook for openness: I am a compulsive sharer. I am excited by life, ambitious by nature, and often impatient with my own joy. Happiness wants to be shared—excitement even more so. But not everything survives early exposure.

Until the moment of sharing, communication must be constructed. I am learning to return only what is offered: to call those who call me, to text those who text me, to love those who love me. Without reciprocity, the structure weakens; without balance, the effort loses its integrity.

There were moments this year when I felt entirely naked—stripped not by others, but by my own lack of restraint. To feel both exposed and homeless at once is a condition I do not intend to recreate.

Beyond the reckoning with myself, I also encountered an overwhelming number of people—and with them, another realization. I met liars of every kind: the strategic, the pathological, and those who lie not to soften reality but because they find it entertaining. As if deception were a performance. As if you wouldn’t notice. Or worse—as if you would believe them.

This, too, demands a response. One must either confront such people or—more effectively—leave in silence, never to return to their orbit. Otherwise, the behavior repeats itself, unchecked and increasingly reckless. I have no interest in being an audience to dishonesty.

This realization did not emerge from abstraction but from a specific encounter: someone who lied about matters so brazen they would ordinarily require shame. And yet he did so with ease—and for a moment, I believed him. Not because I am naïve, but because we often assume others operate within the same internal limits we impose on ourselves. Trust, I learned, is not proof of intelligence; it is a projection of one’s own ethics.

What followed was equally important: the understanding that allowing repeated boundary crossings is not generosity, but negligence toward oneself. Self-respect requires discipline. And sometimes, the most honest response is not explanation, confrontation, or closure—but removal.

Loyalty is often framed as something we owe to others. In reality, it must first be owed to boundaries, to ethics, and to the principles that make a self coherent.

This kind of loyalty is inseparable from gratitude. The more grace and gratitude one carries, the clearer the practice of divine presence becomes—not only in moments of crisis, but especially on good days. Because gratitude disciplines attention. It keeps one vigilant, even when things are going well, when there is no obvious reason to pray, to question, or to remain careful.

Disciplined attention, I’ve learned, is not instinctive; it must be practiced. The great musician and poet Leonard Cohen once wrote, “I want your absolute attention.” A letter is perhaps the clearest proof of such devotion: time given deliberately, attention gathered fully—pen to paper, paper to postbox, postbox to another pair of hands. Which is precisely why one should write more letters. I still have the letter I once wrote to him, and perhaps I should finally send it—not because words retain their former authority, but because attention does. And in writing lies this quiet mercy: it allows us to live—in language—what would be impossible to survive in reality. Absolute attention, after all, is prayer.

The longer I sit with this, the truer it becomes. May Sarton described it with quiet precision: if one looks long enough—really looks, with absolute attention—at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, something close to revelation occurs. Not because the self is erased, but because it loosens its grip. God becomes perceptible not through force or denial, but through admiration, joy, and the rare discipline of sustained attention.

I don’t leave this year with answers so much as with stricter standards. Less urgency to explain myself, more patience to observe. Less movement for its own sake, more attention to what actually holds. What remains is a commitment to disciplined attention—to boundaries that don’t negotiate, to gratitude that sharpens rather than softens, and to silence that protects what is still under construction. If there is prayer in any of this, it is not loud or decorative. It looks more like attention sustained, words chosen carefully, and a life edited with restraint. Whatever comes next will have to meet that standard.

*I briefly entertained the idea of manifesting. It did not survive peer review.