This Year Wasn't Meant for a Christmas Card

The best (and worst) of 2025 recapped, and prayers for an abundant, growth-oriented 2026

Let’s start with a highlight. Many of you recently found me through a story I shared about a former student.

I couldn’t have anticipated the outpouring of kindness from the Substack community, not to mention the inspiring stories about your own teachers and former students. I’m still making my way through the comments, verklempt as I go.

After a year that undid me in so many ways, this dedication was perhaps the most meaningful gift I could receive — validation of my impact as an educator, and moreover, as a lover of writing.

For those of you who are new here (hello, I’m so glad we found each other!), Beyond the Classroom is a community of lifelong learners. Many years ago, after my husband suffered a near-fatal brain injury, the concept of neuroplasticity changed my life. It gave me hope in his brain’s ability to recover, and in my ability to become someone new in the face of unimaginable circumstances.

I love learning. My mom used to call me a “school monster,” a term of endearment for those of us with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and information. And yet, when it comes to life, I’m also just a dumb human, subjecting myself to the same lessons time and again.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I’m not sure I’ve ever made as many mistakes in a single year as I did in 2025. Hopeful to shake things up in life and carve out a new, truer path, I set myself on an anxiety-riddled journey of repetitive mistake-making. As a result, I learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Many of those lessons I’d confronted before, but this chapter felt different. The branches of middle age shook around me, insistent that I resolve my deep-seated bullshit once and for all, and enter the second half of life unburdened by the conditioning that served me in the first half.

It was a full-out reckoning.

The kindnesses I’d long denied myself — namely, boundaries, privacy, and time to write — came marching forward this year, demanding acknowledgment. I’d been giving myself all away, exerting every ounce of cellular energy trying to be the perfect teacher, daughter, co-worker, neighbor, and friend. I’d been stewing in resentment over my own people-pleasing choices for so long, I couldn’t even detect the stench of it.

After years of teaching, caregiving, parenting, and eldest daughtering, I had no idea how to go about claiming something that was just mine. So, I threw a grenade into our lives and uprooted us to someplace new. I’d love to say, “No regrets!” but moving was one expensive, painful, and wildly ungraceful rollercoaster ride, so indeed I harbor a few regrets. Some lessons demand to be learned; I just wish I’d reckoned with them gently.

2025 was also a year of acute grieving. There were the notable losses of poet Andrea Gibson and humanitarian Jane Goodall, both idols and messengers of beauty and hope, whose words I leaned on to connect with what matters. Thrown off-kilter by a dear friend’s cancer diagnosis, I stumbled through the summer months trying to make sense of senselessness, wishing to freeze the hands of time. In a new setting, in a new house, I was in transition — perhaps, I still am — shedding one identity, one version of “home” while trying to establish another.

There was also joy. And pride.

I don’t believe 365 days of living can be characterized as all “good” or all “bad"; likewise, these final days of 2025 find me in a much softer place than where I began. I find joy in my many deep friendships (some of the wisest, proudest investments of my adult life), and in the strength of my family. My two children are navigating the conditions of this loony world better than I could have dreamed, including the months of uncertainty about our family’s next steps (please see my How Not to Parent manual, out next year). They are the best of friends to one another, and my ever-present sunshine.

All in all, this year was far too messy and nuanced for a Christmas card (also, we didn’t get a single family photo until yesterday), but I’ve been busy revisiting snapshots of small tender moments — dancing in the kitchen, reading together, dressing up the dog — and that’s the stuff I’m carrying into 2026. The magic of our ordinary lives.

With that said, I offer you my prayers for an abundant and growth-filled 2026. May some lessons not need repeating. May these words serve you, too.

• I pray to remember my impact and the value of my time and attention.

• I pray not to measure myself by anyone else’s metrics.

• I pray for health and to act as my body’s fastidious gatekeeper.

• I pray for simple luxuries (such as 9pm bedtimes, 5am morning pages, daily walks with my husband, and the perfect morning espresso).

• I pray for the wisdom to remember that the only choices I control are my own.

• I pray to conspire with the universe, accepting uncertainty as a natural feature, and working in conjunction to manifest my dreams.

• I pray not to abandon myself, to recognize that my loveability is not dependent on giving myself away to others.

Lastly, I pray to remain hopeful. History is a collection of stories we are writing as we go - you, me, all of us. We can choose to write it with kindness, laughter, humility, and forgiveness. We can choose to use our voices.

First (and last) family photo of the year.

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