Kate Violette

Time to read: 10 minutes.

Sure, January is more than halfway over but my illness demands that my life run on Crip Time, so, here we are: me finally writing about my 2025 goals much of the way through January. From another perspective though, taking January to really consider if your goals for the year are well-formed isn’t such a bad idea. By “well-formed” I think I mean something like: Are your resolutions resonant enough such that you’ll actually stick to them day-to-day without too much kicking and screaming? Or is it three weeks into the year and you already sense your motivation deflating? Do you have a nagging sense that there’s a different goal (or goals) that you wish you had set for yourself instead?

Anyway, all is not lost if it takes you a little ways into January to figure out how you’re going to spend your precious upcoming year. If you need someone to give you permission for that, it’s me, I’m giving you permission.

One of the things my illness has required me to hone is an appreciation for the things that take time to build. (Or maybe that’s something that happens to everyone in the back half of their 30s. Even if so, I think I’ve gotten an extra helping of it.) I’m talking about the skills or accomplishments for which there are no shortcuts, the only way to get there is the long way. Learning another language is a great example of this. Sure there are ways you can somewhat speed it up in calendar time (like immersing yourself in another country), but you’re still going to need to pick up the same number of words, listen to the same amount of other people speaking, say the same number of sentences out of your own mouth. Furthermore, there is general agreement that the most durable way to learn a language actually relies more on repetition than cramming. (Here’s a great article replete with citations if you aren’t already familiar: What is the Spacing Effect?) A little bit of learning, done repeatedly and consistently, is more effective for learned language retention than sporadic marathon cram sessions.

In spring 2024 I took and passed the B1 level DELF exam, a formal test of French as a foreign language. (A 2024 goal of mine!) When I got the email a couple months later telling me that I’d passed, I was so happy and excited that I landed in an ME/CFS crash the next day from the sheer joy. It has been a literal decades-long goal for me to become proficient in French. Of course I hadn’t been actively working on it for decades; rather, it lived in the sort of hypothetical “wouldn’t it be nice if…?” list most people keep in their heads but make insufficient time for actually doing. Maybe it’s that my illness forces me to adopt a different geometry of time, maybe it’s that I’m still riding the high of accomplishing a goal that’s been decades in the wings, but I’ve become a firm believer that: we should make time for the things we care about almost every day, even if it’s just a little bit of time.

Put another way: you are what you choose to do every day. (Or say, almost every day.) I’ve read about writers with ME/CFS who, on bad days, might only add three or four words to a poem they’re working on. That may not seem like much, but it’s the routine that matters. Three or four words a day could get you a full poem by the end of the month. In his book “On Writing”, Stephen King has a passage directed to people who want to become prolific readers but worry they don’t have the time: “The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books — of course! But so are theatre lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines.”

And so it is with most big goals worth pursuing, I think. That’s why my new year’s resolutions this year look a lot less like “accomplish big concrete thing X!” and a lot more like “do a little of each of these things every day”. (Mostly. I’ve got three traditional style goals, too.) If you’re familiar with astrology, I’m bringing big Third House energy into 2025. The Third House is the realm of, among other things, your daily routines and habits. (It also covers writing and communication, facts and language, and short-range travel such as around your neighborhood.) The more I allowed my mind to mull on what was going to be important to me this year, the more I kept coming back to two things: the importance of routines and ritual, and, the practice of making many small decisions day after day that might one day add up to something bigger.

So in that spirit, here are my to-dos and my…to-practices?…for 2025:

To Practice:

• Go to bed earlier. I’ve had an Oura ring since 2020, so I’ve got four years of data. At first I was succeeding at moving my bedtime earlier, but I really backslid in 2024. The catch is that my ability to go to sleep at an early time depends on a complex interplay of all the medications I take in a day and when I eat my meals. So this isn’t just “go to bed earlier”, this is “I need to improve at keeping my complex daily medical schedule on track”. It’s annoying and tiresome and frankly kind of oppressive. I wish I could live more serendipitously, and that my meds and mealtimes weren’t so regimented. But that’s not the body I have right now. So be it. Onward.
• Recommitting to my weekly newsletter. I had been doing a pretty good job of this before my severe health destabilization in September last year. But now that I seem to be on the mend from that (more or less), I want to get back into the habit of at least publishing a “Week in Review” every Sunday. Some of the categories may change a little—I’m not currently living in my tiny house Timbit, for example!—but overall the vibe will be similar. I hit a 49% success rate last year through August. I hope to do even better this year.
• Finding daily time for deliberate reading. I don’t mean doom-scrolling or reading whatever news articles I see linked on my Bluesky timeline each day. I mean taking time to read things from my perpetually ballooning to-read list, both articles online and books, in some sort of thoughtful and organized way. (Perhaps by topic?) This also means I’m going to have to do a massive overhaul of how I bookmark material I want to read later—I’ve already identified a service I want to use for this and am in the middle of porting bookmarks over to it. Lastly, I want my reading time this year to be much closer to 50/50 bilingual (English & French).
• “Eating the frog.” Make a habit out of doing the thing I’m most dreading on my todo list first, before doing anything else from the list. This will probably often mean I get annoying but important medical tasks done sooner. I hope.
• Making time for beauty: friends and music and knitting. By “making time” I more mean: reserving some of my still very limited (for the time being) daily energy budget for these important areas. My illness currently entails a massive amount of admin type work, and that usually eats up whatever energy I might have in a given day beyond puttering around the house and caring for myself. But for 2025, it’s likely my medical team and I already have a good sense of where my treatment plan is headed, and there will be some long arcs where hopefully there isn’t much to do beyond just maintain a regular regimen and get some bloodwork done every now and then. (Instead of: adding/removing specialists to my team, shuffling records and test results among many different offices, trialing drugs we have no idea how I’ll react to, etc.) In short, hopefully this year will be more medically boring. Even if not, I want to ask my friends if some days it’s ok if all I can do is send them a funny gif to let them know I’m thinking about them.

To Do:

• Finish my Katharine Hepburn movie watching goal from 2024! I watched 29 of her 52 movies before things went sideways in September, so I’m already over halfway there. I’ll continue to include my reviews of her movies in my newsletter!
• Pass the DELF B2 in December. This is a bit of a stretch goal. I’ll really have to be disciplined about my daily routines and making little bits of time for what I care about—chasing my goals in little sips as well as big gulps. But I really want to try, for a couple reasons. One, I’m in this middle space between B1 and B2 where sometimes I’ll read entire paragraphs of news articles effortlessly, and other times I’ll hit paragraphs where nothing seems to make sense and it’s a total slog. I’m this close to the language really feeling easier, like I’ve settled in and unpacked my bags and have kicked back on the couch. And I want it to feel that way closer to all the time. Two, if things were to really get sketchy in my home country, having formally demonstrated B2 level skills in another language could look appealing on a résumé to employers in other countries.
• Land in the same city as my beau. I’ve met someone wonderful, who I’m not in the same city as right now, and at some point this year I very much want to no longer be geographically apart from them. We’re currently all ideas and no finalized plans on how to make that happen, but I have faith that it will, and I’m going to do my part to make it so.

I think 2025 will be about discipline—not the sort of showy, grunty discipline of like unchill bros attending a yoga class and making a bunch of disruptive noise, but rather the sort of discipline that is quiet, that refuses to despair in ways both large and small, that makes a cup of tea to pause and reflect and pick ourselves back up, to steel ourselves to try something new. To try and try again. This year feels—for me anyway, but I also suspect a fair number of other people—very “I wish it need not have happened in my time”. [1] Putting in the work regardless of whether I will personally see the reward of it—that’s the job of 2025.

It’s not flowery, it’s not sensational. It’s just what my gut tells me this year has on offer. So I’m going to do my best to rise to the occasion—in little sips, as well as big gulps. Hello, 2025.

Footnotes:

1. This is a quote from The Lord of the Rings, because I am a nerd.