2025 was really tough. As many wonderful things that happened, to me it’ll always be the year we lost Coconut. Most of the time I can revisit our memories with fondness, but sometimes the sadness still seeps through. While it’s been over half a year since his passing, I try to remind myself that there’s no timeline for these feelings. As the saying goes, “Where there is deep grief, there was great love.”

Even though nothing from last year was as life-altering to me as losing Coconut, there were still several experiences that imparted meaningful lessons: hiking in Switzerland gave me a newfound love of the outdoors. Completing Pimsleur’s German program showed me the power of consistency. Doing Lagree made me enjoy strength training. Going to Urgent Care on two separate occasions with egregiously incorrect self-diagnoses pushed me to stop preemptively spiraling: Lyme disease turned out to be Hand-Foot-Mouth; a lung tumor was actually a pulled back muscle. Hitting my yearly reading goal for the first time reminded me that a number’s just a number. My ambivalence after the successful launch of a grueling work project made me question whether I was on the right path.

All in all, it was a year of change and growth. I’m hoping to bring my learnings from last year into 2026, but before setting new goals, I want to reflect on the ones from 2025. I’d say I achieved all three!

• Become a better skater. While I didn’t do any official testing—I want to have a stable coach and rink first, so that’ll be after my digital nomad journey—my skating definitely improved this year. I finally got my one-foot upright spin after such a long period of no progress, and I even started working on new skills, like power pulls and salchows.
• Learn German. Pimsleur was a game-changer. After 5 months of daily 30-minute lessons, my pronunciation improved significantly and I got so much better at speaking on the spot. An informal placement test online indicated that I was ready to start learning B1 material!
• Cultivate healthy social relationships (applies to both family and friends). My existing relationships got deeper, and I even had positive interactions with family members whom I hadn’t spoken to in years.

I’d also made a BINGO sheet at the start of 2025. By the end of the year, I’d gotten 1 BINGO (woohoo!) and completed 15 squares total:

• Start Free Skate. I’m currently working on moves from Free Skate 2.
• Do a social read. I read The Magicians, which was recommended by my sister. I also finally read the first Wheel of Time book, which a friend had been urging me to read since middle school!
• Workout class with boyfriend. We did several classes at the Cambridge Athletic Club—BodyPump was my favorite—as well as a Lagree class in Austin.
• Try 2 weeks of no added sugar. My boyfriend and I also did this together. I had a particularly hard time since I have such a sweet tooth, whereas he decided to extend it to a whole month. This challenge also showed me how ubiquitous sugar is: in bread, Maggi, couscous packets, you name it…
• Friend group trip. My girls’ trip to Switzerland!
• Finish knitting sister’s sweater. This was my most ambitious handmade gift yet. I think it turned out great, especially given that I didn’t use a pattern. (Next time I definitely will though — not using one added hours to the project since I had to redo so many sections!) On the left is the inspo sweater; on the right is the finished product:

• Class at the Dance Complex. I did one drop-in hip-hop class. It’s a neat space, and a part of me wishes I’d made more use of it during my time in Cambridge. Another part of me feels less regret because that would’ve taken time away from skating, reading, and other hobbies…still though, an adult ballet class would’ve been cool!
• Read a series. For the first time since middle school, I read a new manga! I distinctly remember my college roommate reading Assassination Classroom during our freshman year, and I’m so glad I finally picked it up — it’s such a fun series, and the ending had me bawling like a baby. Reading manga on my laptop (thanks, Kanopy!) instead of from a physical book definitely took some getting used to.
• 50 day Duolingo streak. With no streak freezes! Hate to admit it, but enabling notifications made quite the difference.
• Eat at Jo’s Indian Kitchen with my boyfriend. This was our Valentine’s Day dinner!
• Solo trip. While I had visitors during my Austin trip, I’m still counting it since the majority of the time was spent alone.
• Closet cleanout. At the start of the year, I spent days cataloguing my entire closet on Indyx…only to never use the app again lol. However, the experience showed me that I had way more clothes than I needed, which made getting rid of items much easier.
• Do a no-buy. Completing this was incredibly tough at times, but also so satisfying. While the yearlong no-buy was restricted to clothing only, it influenced how I consumed in general. For me, this challenge was about acquiring fewer things, not saving money (though that was a nice perk!). The only pieces that were added to my closet were either gifted—a silly t-shirt from a friend’s bachelorette and a Knives Out-inspired sweater—or “shopped” from the closets in my childhood home! I loved growing my appreciation for my existing clothes and getting so much wear out of them.

• Measure the apartment. My Cambridge apartment was so small that the listing didn’t even say the square footage. Before I moved out, I finally measured it…and then re-measured it, because at first I couldn’t believe that it was only 318 square feet!
• Read 50 books. After several years of trying, I read exactly 50 books. On one hand, having this goal motivated me to read regularly, which is great. But on the other hand, I didn’t like worrying about “falling behind” when reading a longer book, and my decision to read 2 graphic novels this year—Persepolis and Are You My Mother?—was at least partially motivated by how quickly I could finish them. All in all, I’m glad to have accomplished this but will be reading at a natural pace from now on.

I really enjoyed having this BINGO sheet because it kept the momentum going throughout the year. Anytime I felt at a loss for what to do, I could choose a square and get cracking. There were, however, 10 squares that weren’t completed—some of which I wish were, others that I don’t regret skipping:

• Visit Nubian Square and Go to Union Oyster House. Both of these are places in Boston that I didn’t get around to visiting before I moved. Personally, I’m fine with that!
• Make 10 recipes from Genius Recipes. This is still my least-used cookbook.
• Run a race. I wish I’d done this; even a simple 5K would’ve been fun!
• Watch the AFI Top 100. Ohhhhh boy, this was ambitious. I vaguely remember trying to watch the original Wizard of Oz (1939) and giving up out of boredom. There are still movies on this list that I’d like to see eventually, though, like Taxi Driver and Goodfellas.
• Make a new friend. I revived a dormant friendship from high school, but I’m not counting that! New friendships require time and repeated exposure, and unfortunately that’s just hard to do when hopping around so much. I’d love for this to happen after the digital nomad journey, though.
• Volunteer. I definitely regret not doing this! My sister volunteers weekly, and I want to follow her example once I do more research.
• Do the splits. There was a period last year when I was regularly stretching, but then I fell off the wagon…
• Create a Javascript project. My only progress here was deciding what I want to create. In terms of execution, I still need to get the fundamentals of the language down.
• Digital cleanup. I’ve gotten so much better at deleting screenshots every few days, but there’s still a long way to go. The task I keep procrastinating on is transferring my old photos to a hard drive.

Aaaaand that’s my 2025 recap! I’d planned to include my 2026 goals in this post, but I need a little more time to finalize those. I’m also still deciding whether I want to do another BINGO or try a new framework entirely. We’ll have to see (and soon, since it’s already halfway through January)!

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