Goodbye 2025

In preparing my annual reflection, I reread last year’s post to review my 2025 goals and dreams. It’s honestly humorous looking back. In that post, I wrote, “I want 2025 to be the year I manage my stress. It’s not enough to tell myself not to stress. I need to swap it out to trick my body to let go of it. I bought myself a pair of rollerskates a couple of weeks ago. I’m terrible at it, but they’re so pretty, exactly what I wanted. I have dreams of cruising around my basement and spinning around to some sick jams in the sticky summer sun.“

At the beginning of the year, I was on a health kick and went hardcore into vitamins and supplements. What started as an attempt to be proactive slowly tipped into excess, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. By late winter, I was taking far more vitamin B6 than my body needed, nearly 6000% the recommended daily value.

In February, I began experiencing sudden and unsettling neurological symptoms: tingling and numbness in my arms, pinprick sensations in my hands. The symptoms were persistent enough to send me to doctors, physical therapy, chiropractors, and even the ER, yet no clear structural or neurological cause was found. As the weeks went on, the symptoms intensified, and so did my anxiety, not just emotionally, but physically, in a way that felt chemically driven and outside my control.

Eventually, after reading about vitamin B6 toxicity, I stopped supplementing. Over the following weeks, the symptoms gradually faded. By mid-May, they were gone entirely. Months later, they have not returned.

I can’t say with absolute certainty that vitamin B6 was the cause. My blood levels were normal by the time they were tested, and there is limited public information about how quickly toxicity can develop or resolve. What I can say is that I was taking far more B6 than recommended, my symptoms closely matched those associated with excess B6, and they improved and ultimately disappeared after I stopped taking it.

Those months were rough, and they set me waaaayyy back in my goal towards stress management. I was suddenly experiencing near-debilitating nerve issues that kind of looked and sounded like MS. WebMD and I hashed it out many a late night, and though I was never fully convinced I wasn’t mortally diseased, my body was returning to normal after I cut out the supplements. Feeling better by May, I decided it was time to put all that behind me and live out my best life as a rollerskating diva. I did that. With my new, very cool, very stylish rollerskates. And… I broke my arm.

My two big goals: kinda disastrous. Huge flops. 0/10 would recommend again.

The break was non-displaced, at the end of the bone in my elbow, which meant I couldn’t make it worse by moving it. They took the splint off and let it heal on its own. That was its own special type of excruciating. Without the stability of a cast, any time I rotated my wrist or bumped my elbow, waves of pain shot down my arm. I slept in an armchair for the first couple of weeks, so I didn’t roll on it in my sleep. I couldn’t bend my elbow to use a fork. I couldn’t put my hair up, turn door knobs, or open a jar of pickles. That last one, golly gee, I felt helpless.

Those two major health blips had a significant impact on my year. I thought I was doing things to get healthy and manage my stress. I wasn’t. Seeing how grievously I spiraled when those two things backfired on me, it was clear they weren’t part of actual change. I was desperately lacking the innerwork necessary to live in peace with myself. That stress management needed to start from within, not without.

They say when you pray for patience, the Lord will send you opportunities to test it. I wanted this to be the year I handled stress. I suppose God turned up the existential dread to grow that ability. Didn’t love that, but… pretty effective. I’m still prone to a good spiral and WebMD session, but there’s been improvement. By the end of 2025, I found little ways to stay grounded and cultivate mental fortitude, as my husband aptly suggested. I wrote a book. That was something.

2025 humbled me. It also reignited passions I haven’t explored in a long time. I read more. I wrote more. I discovered a new poet and was so caught up in the prose that I lost track of time. How long has it been since I could say that?

Certainly, I hope 2026 brings meaning, beauty, art, and poetry. God set eternity in the heart of man, and I would love to encounter glimpses of the transcendent this year. I want to smile between pages, laugh through the absurd, and find myself insignificant in the vastness of space. I wish to understand God minutely more than I do right now and unravel a few of the mysteries that have plagued my heart. I aspire to modest growth in 2026. I desire a year of building. My theme for 2026 is “tend.” I’ve had too many stripping years. The break would be nice. But alas, I’m open. And we shall see.