My Word for 2025

Every year, I pick a word as a mental homebase. A reminder, a guide post, a mantra that keeps me on track. 

Last year’s word was mountain. And boy, was 2024 a climb. 

It wasn’t my most joyful year, though not my most sorrowful either. It was a year where I was anticipating a lot of change and struggling with immense self-doubt: 

• Is my writing keeping me from being a successful book coach? 

• Is my coaching keeping me from being a successful writer? 

Ah, circular questions that center me as always being in my own way. Good times. 

Without another plan, I just kept doing the work. Kept querying. Kept drafting. Kept revising. Kept putting myself out there as a coach. Kept working with amazing writers. 

It often felt like a straight upward climb and other times I felt like I was stuck at a trail washout.

In November, I attended a meeting with some amazing women. Before diving into the conversation, the leader of the group asked us to go around and share one word to describe where we were that day. Words like excited, relieved, and hopeful were shared about new jobs, finding a lost item, and surviving a tough day. 

Then they got to me. 

(You already know I went for the metaphor don’t you? Sure did.)

“You know when caterpillars go into their cocoon and essentially melt into goo before rebuilding into butterflies? I’m in the goo.” 

I went on to explain that I felt like my writing and my business were in the in-between. Both going along, but not quite where I want them to be yet. My oldest had just finished submitting all his college applications and our family is about to change as he navigates leaving home. My youngest is now in high school and suddenly out and about more often, too, meaning there is more to manage and yet also more free time for me (such a weird dichotomy). 2025 will by my last year in my 40s. 

There is change a-coming, whether I’m ready for it or not. 

It was a queasy place to be, honestly, both being in the goo and admitting to it. 

The goo isn’t pleasant. It’s a little painful, to be honest. Growing a new skeleton and wings isn’t easy when you started out as a fuzzy little tube of a creature. But I held onto faith it would all be worth it. 

Which is why I admitted to being in the goo–it felt like I was on the cusp of something, I just wasn’t sure which way it would go. 

And then, just after Thanksgiving, I got the email in response to a query requesting “The Call.” An agent loved my manuscript and during our conversation, offered me representation. 

During the latter half of December and the first two weeks of January, some professional opportunities also came my way. Opportunities that are the result of the work I did while climbing Mount 2024. 

Over the holiday break, as I sat with all that happened in 2024 and all the work yet to come in 2025, I wallowed in my goo. The amorphous in between. I tried to breathe into this midpoint. 

Then I asked myself: What does this mean for 2025?

It means a new word. A word worthy of the changes to come.  

And this year, I’m going with BUTTERFLY. 

I toyed with metamorphosis, transformation, emergence, and becoming. 

But butterfly just felt right. 

Butterflies are soft, sweet, delicate, but born of hearty stuff. The process of metamorphosis is no easy journey. Caterpillars start as one thing and become another. And yet the butterfly is still made up of all the same DNA as the caterpillar. 

Different, but the same. 

In 2025, I want to emerge into the light. I want to enter this new phase of my writing and my coaching and my parenting and my relationships lighter and with more color, but fundamentally still me. 

Lofty goals? 

Maybe. 

But it’s time I took a different perspective. I’ve seen the caterpillar view from the ground, and I’ve been locked up in a cocoon for a bit. It’s time to give myself permission to emerge back into the sunshine and see the world from a new angle. 

It’s time to fly. 

How about you? Do you pick a word for the year?

Feel free to share it in the comments so we can cheer each other on!