A Year In Review: 2025

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ The Little Prince

It’s been a year–and boy, it’s been a year.

I spent most of this year in a state of anxious anticipation, a buzzing beneath skin and a rattling of bones. I graduated my second master’s, a degree in International Transportation: The Business of Shipping, from SUNY Maritime (and, totally to brag, with honors), resigned from my part-time substitute job in our local school district in preparation for finding a new career, built a deck, a pond, a stone walkway (still not fully complete because turns out free stones are not that easy to come by), renovated a shower, began shipping Bobtail cochin hatching eggs, applied to a lot of jobs (and wondered if I would just remain unemployable), got solar installed, found a job, and forced myself to grow bit by bit because that’s who and what my family needs, if not what I need.

For about a third of my life, I was privileged enough to stay home with my children–precocious, clever, resilient, and independent daughters–while contributing to our household through real estate investments. I watched them grow, fed them tidbits of values and morality and rationale so they could choose to be kind but not naive, generous but with boundaries, exposed them to different cultures through culinary excursions, restrained my naturally intense personality (which I feel is the hardest part of parent-hood) to provide them enough freedom to test and experiment in the world around them, and frequently reminded both myself and Adam that our job is to shield them from the trauma we might have grown up with and give them brand new traumas to talk to their future therapists about (just kidding!)

And while I know just how lucky I am to have been able to hand raise them myself, and a choice I’d make all over again in every lifetime, I was anxious to get back into the workforce, and helping my kids step into the next phase of independence. Sophie is 12 now, a bit moody like all teenagers are, but sharply observant and very talented in anything that requires a touch of creativity. Martha at 9 is strong willed and even stronger in feelings–the definition of work hard play hard. The best illustration of this was yesterday, when we went to the local park for some fresh air (Adam calls it “touching grass”) to kick around a soccer ball (because unfortunately, when I have a full house of travelers in all the units, we don’t do sports in the backyard in case we damage someone’s vehicle), and Martha, really having thrown herself into it, got a small cut on her hand and Sophie, who I had no idea was playing attention because she was off to the side reading (she will not expend more physical energy than she has to, ever) immediately popped up with bandaids and dressed her little sister’s wounds. These are the moments, along with a million others, I must step back and let them do, so that they have confidence in their skills and actions.

I found out a lot of my anxiety was for myself, as Sophie shrugged philosophically when I said I was going to start looking for a job. Martha had concerns over who would send her to the bus stop, or to school for early music classes, and although maybe Adam is not her first choice in her total of two choices, she has adjusted easily to this new beat in our lives.

The job hunting process was not, on its own, difficult. I polished off my resume, and began applying to anything I thought would be remotely interesting and that filled my skillset–including, at one point, an aircraft assembler position where no prior experience was necessary other than knowing how basic tools worked and being small enough to fit into tight spaces (I considered briefly to simply send a picture of my deck and pond, with me standing next to them and a measuring tape as my introduction.) Along the way I analyzed hiring processes, and parsed out this interesting modern landscape of potential employment, cataloguing strengths, weaknesses, and what their particular operational standards said about them as a company.

I applied mostly to entry level positions–I didn’t want to manage anyone or anything (I really have had enough of managing in my daily life that the prospect of doing it in a 9-5 really horrified me). I wanted to be in something task oriented, where I could work by rote in a flow state. I got several interviews but none stuck, and every interviewer had the same question: With your qualifications, why do you want this job?

I answered honestly, which tends to be both a strength and a weakness depending on how you look at it: I am not looking to climb or hustle, I want to do a job where I can see what I produced quantitatively every day, and then go home at the end of said day and not take it with me. I am currently uninterested in the headache responsibility of managing people or projects and deadlines, I can do it (and do it well if required of me as evidenced by self employed roles) but I am a burnt out lead dog in the Iditarod of life.

I… suppose that isn’t the answer most employers are looking for, because weeks later I’d get a soft rejection (although one of them ended up trying to hire me after their original pick didn’t work out but I had already accepted my current job.) At one point, I stripped down my resume to some very basic skillsets but it got even less bites, and I despaired.

I ask Adam if I was just unemployable–and his response was yes, because of background and personality (he gently reminded me that grilling each company I interviewed for on their operations may come off as insane) I’m considered a flight risk but also I don’t even need an outside job so why was I working so hard to try and get into a rat race everyone else was trying to get out of?

“Because” I responded, “If I don’t, we’ll end up with a flock of miniature sheep next.”

My brain, as I was later explaining to a coworker, is like a hamster–it only does three things: eat, sleep, and run on the wheel. When it has eaten enough, slept enough, and wishes to run on a wheel, if there are no wheels to be had it will effectively go batshit crazy and start tearing apart its cage–which I don’t wish to inflict upon anyone but I could feel was slowly starting to devolve into now that my children no longer needed me the way they needed me when they were younger. I did comfort myself in the fact that this is a rite of passage, and that if I have done my job correctly, them needing me less and less is the litmus test.

I loved my life but I just had an overwhelming need to fill up the time when everyone else was gone from the house, because my days had become one of waiting for my family to get home, and that was mentally exhausting. I did a multitude of projects, but if the weather did not cooperate (and it was definitely an uncooperative one), I was left spinning my wheels waiting for the day to be done.

Then one day I got a request for an interview at large law firm for a legal assistant-esque position, and it was probably among the most bizarre one I have ever been a part of (including that time an interviewer told me he didn’t care about my technical skills, he needed me to be able to mediate people screaming at each other in the office and talk them down), where one person explained to me what the job entailed, and then what eventually ended up being my department boss jumped on the call and said they only really had one question. I braced myself because I knew what it was and my powers of foresight was on point: You are overqualified, why do you want this job?

I gave them the same response I did all the other times, that I am looking for talented leadership to leverage my skills in a position where I can quantify my contributions to the goals of the organization, and that I’d like to put on pants every day and talk to adults. They said they understood and that was that. The interview ended and I pretty much figured I didn’t get this one either. To my complete surprise (and some concern as to whether or not this would turn out to be a scam) I was offered the position that afternoon which I happily accepted.

I didn’t know anything about this law firm other than the basics, but they gave me a chance I likely wouldn’t have taken upon myself if I was in their position and found a gem–a large and very diverse (and I mean very diverse) workforce, friendly and helpful coworkers, managers that know my desired type of work and play to my strengths, great employee benefits that although I don’t utilize due to Adam’s job, recognize it as being comparatively robust. The salary is not the highest but I was unconcerned about that, I had finally found A Job. A Job where I was not the beginning and the end, one where I could be a mindless cog in the machine, where, as I explained in my answer during that fateful interview, I do not have to decide on the direction of the ship–I can just row.

Of course I am still helping manage the dojo (we got a fence and a sewer done all in one year), I still run my mid term travel units (which have become busier than ever now that the hospital next to me is a teaching one), I am still tinkering with my garden and chickens, but each day being able to wake up and have somewhere to go has, ironically, made me feel more free.

It is always through adversity where one grows the most, and the last year (well, really the last few years if I’m not lying to myself) has been about becoming more of myself. Growing, adapting, solidifying structure, and then repeat until I can feel my roots in the earth and my spirit in the skies. Some of the most important lessons I have learned are ones of love and bonds, that love feeds bonds rather than the other way around, that loving someone in their own language may feel foreign at first but creates genuine connection, that you can forgive but you don’t have to make space after, that you can empathize with people who make choices out of desperation but it doesn’t mean you have to allow them to hurt you, that sometimes no matter how hard you try the wheels of fate had been turning long before you came into the picture and nothing you could have done or not done would have changed the outcome.

Some lessons get a refresher course: that the bravest things we do are the ones that scare us the most, and the wisest are the ones where we realize we still have so much more to learn.

There is also a continuous study into the evolution of loss and grief–simultaneously simple and complex. That you can grieve the things you never had but thought you did, you can still grieve the living, you can grieve ideas and plans you wanted but never achieved, moments you wished could have lasted longer, people who you would give anything to have just one more conversation with if you could–but they’re gone and you are left with a capsule full of memories frozen in time. And throughout it all, work towards changing it into something that no longer hurts, even if it sits there with you for the rest of your life. If I could go back and tell a younger self one thing about loss, it would be that it’s not meant to hurt forever, and it won’t hurt forever. That you’ll eventually (and should eventually) take the grief and all the love that now has no where to go, and give it back to the world.

In the coming year, I have a lot of hopes–I hope my aquaponics pond will pan out and I’ll be able to harvest my first set of fish. I hope my egg shipping hobby business will be even better now that I have solidified my direction and flock. I hope to complete a couple more projects: a greenhouse, a smoker, a small plunge pool or wood fired hot tub. I hope I will thrive even more than I am in my current workspace, and that I will be grateful for the challenges I face for all they can teach me.

I hope I can provide more grace, more forgiveness, more kindness–even when it brings me pain or when I believe it is undeserved.

And throughout all this is the hope of walking, with my family by blood and by bonds, into a future we forge together.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

And sore must be the storm –

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

And on the strangest Sea –

Yet – never – in Extremity,

It asked a crumb – of me.

~ Emily Dickinson