25 Things for 2025

25 things I'm thinking about as 2025 draws to a close:

1. I realized I could stop trying to explain myself as a writer. For example: “I write health and parenting articles for a living, but I’m also a poet with a few books and I sometimes write personal essays and memoir.” Instead, I’m trying to just call myself a writer, because as different as some of the things I write are, they are all coming from me, require many of the same skills, and also, why do I need to explain? I’m a writer. (Shout-out to the writer Sarah Manguso, who said something to this effect on a podcast I was listening to a few months ago.)

2. To that end, I’ve been writing lots of poems this year, and have a new manuscript making the rounds, but I’m also working on some very tiny little essays that can maybe be strung together about my nomadic childhood years spent moving from place to place in California. It’s also about memory itself, the 80s, and how we remember/forget/distort. Plus other things.

3. This year I submitted packets of poems to 106 literary journals, received 84 rejections (so far) and had 17 poems accepted for publication.

4. I wrote and submitted 261 articles for work.

5. Despite #1, #3, & #4, I still have trouble calling myself a writer when people ask me what I do for a living.

6. Before I had kids, I was told in more than one way that it was not possible to be a mother and a writer at the same time, at least not the kind of writer I wanted to be. (This same advice didn’t apply to potential fathers, as far as I know.) Now, officially out of the years where my children need me constantly—in the urgent way/bodily way that younger children need you—I can say this is true, at least when it comes to my creative writing. I also think my writing is richer because of my experiences as a mother (though, obviously, one absolutely doesn’t have to become a parent to have rich life experiences).

7. I have been writing and publishing for 25 years (more on the writing part, if you start counting from childhood). I’m starting to think that what makes me a writer is endurance more than anything else.

8. I thought this list would be about things other than writing, and maybe it will be, but this year I have started to give myself space again to be the writer I was before kids, and I guess I’m owning that here, in this list.

9. If I had something else to say about this year, it’s that caretaking for an elderly parent still proves to be the most demanding, painful, and taxing thing I have ever had to do. And it’s constant. No breaks.

10. Caring for someone with dementia is similar in ways as caring for a child (and dissimilar in many ways too), but one thing that consistently happens is that people tell you to try to enjoy every minute, because before you know it, you won’t have them anymore/they won’t recognize you (much like how children will move away/become grownups). I love my mother dearly but I will say that this is terrible advice and I can’t do it.

11. Another piece of dementia advice that doesn’t work for me is to just “go along with what the person says” and just “exist in their world.” This makes sense to some extent, but when the person is literally saying things that may endanger them in some way or that are angry/aggressive, you can’t just “go with it.” I guess these people are talking about when the person with dementia starts calling you the wrong name or thinks it’s 1958 again, not people whose dementia mainly consists of nonsensical behaviors. I would happily exist in a fantastical, made-up world with my mom, but that’s not what my experience of dementia has been.

12. The thing is, most cases of dementia do consist of strange and nonsensical behaviors, which is not how dementia is usually portrayed in movies or TV. This irks me to no end. Media mostly just depicts an older person who is forgetful, not one who floods their kitchen repeatedly because they keep clogging the kitchen sink with potato peels or who orders DoorDash seven times a day.

13. I think the reason why I’ve been writing as much as I have lately is that I am acutely aware of my mortality lately, and specifically of my brain’s mortality. My mom started showing signs in her mid-70s (and more subtly in the decade before that). I’m turning fifty in two years. How much time do I have left to write all the books I want to write?

14. Is this the “good part” of my mom’s dementia? The silver lining? Oh yeah, that’s another thing that people say about things like dementia—that eventually, you may be able to find the good in it, somewhere. Like, they’ll say that the experience taught them to be gentler with their loved one, and really slow down value their time together. I abhor silver lining type of advice when it comes to dementia because I would never wish this on my mother, or anyone.

15. Social media is terrible for me, as a person and as a writer. I’ve been staying off it as much as I can. I read 50 books this year, which is something I haven’t done in many, many years, certainly since I had kids. Reading is very, very good for me as a person and as a writer.

16. I also do see the value of social media, blah blah blah. I mean, I’m using it now. It’s a wonderful way to connect with people I know and love, and with communities I value. I just need to use it much, much less.

17. AND there is no point in engaging in political discourse on social media AND the proliferation of AI on social media and elsewhere is so disturbing and I actually can’t believe how many level-headed people seem to use ChatGPT for everything.

18. Probably the biggest regret I have as a writer is that I wasn’t more picky about who would publish my books when I was younger. I just took what I could get. I didn’t wait long enough. There were tons of red flags when it came to the publisher of my first two books, and I was just desperate to get them published, after a string of excellent finalist nods and personal rejections. If I had just waited, I could have done better. I totally understood why I didn’t want to wait, and why other young writers don’t want to wait. In the poetry world, you can spend years getting rejected before your book gets taken by a publisher you can feel proud of.

19. I love having a young adult child and a teenager. Actually, the teen years have been some of my favorite years of raising children. I found the pre-teen years much harder both times.

20. There is nothing that brings me more joy than sitting on the couch with my kids and listening to their favorite music and playing them my faves from the 90s. Apparently, 90s alt music is back and my kids are into it. How lucky am I?

21. I am itching to have a writing room of my own again. Now, I write in a corner of our bedroom. This is fine for my paid writing work, but not for the other stuff, especially when anyone is home and breathing in this apartment. I am going to try to make myself a writing nook in my walk-in closet. Is that crazy? No, I don’t think so.

22. I have been thinking about my poetry mentors and teachers from when I was young, and I have such admiration and appreciation for them.

23. Feeling lots of love also for the new poetry friends and mentors I’ve made over the past few years. I’m remembering how important community is when writing, because it’s mostly a very solitary thing, and can get lonely.

24. I’m at the point in my writing life that I think I would write even if no one reads it. I don’t think writing is “therapy” exactly and its therapeutic qualities are not its main purpose. And also, I have seen the precise way that writing has carried me through the past two years of my life, and I don’t know if I would have survived without it.

25. As I was working this list, I cleaned out a corner in my walk-in closet, ordered a very small desk, a small chair, and a battery operated lamp. It’s a work-in-progress, but here’s what I have so far. It feels cozy and intimate and I kind of like the idea of being enclosed in this small space with my shoes, clothes, a mirror, and (you can’t see this in these pics) tons of storage items (papers and letters and old writing and memorabilia).