2025 resolutions
life is change
I know it’s nearly February, but I’m a firm believer that you can make resolutions anytime. N and I were in Argentina over the winter holidays, so we didn’t get around to distilling our intentions for 2025 until a week ago. Argentina involved a lot of walking—it houses a large part of Patagonia, after all—so we had many hours to talk about our goals for this year but far fewer hours to actually write them down (until now).
Looking back on my 2024 resolutions, it’s embarrassing how much I fell short of them. My original plan was to finish my book by July 2024. July. And then spend the latter half of the year—which I cheekily called A.B. for After Book—socializing with friends again and working on other creative projects like a stand-up routine and a screenplay/novel.
Clearly, none of that happened. The only A.B. in 2024 was All Book. I ended up hating my first draft, scrapping the entire thing, and rewriting it all over again. It added many months to my publishing timeline and delayed my ambitious plans to come out of social hibernation. And perform a stand-up routine? Ha!
I was initially looking forward to an A.B. period this year, but I’ve hit a snag in my publishing journey that may extend my writing time. (I’ll write about it when I am able—I’m still in the thick of it.) It’s disheartening to see my best-laid plans go astray, no matter how hard I try, but I’m trying to reframe my perspective around resolutions. Resolutions are, after all, about resolve more so than results. The direction of the vector is more salient than the length, even if we as a society tend to be more impressed with magnitude and quantity. (There are multiple balls of twine competing to be the largest, but none advertising themselves as the most thoughtfully constructed.)
So! The directions of some of this year’s vectors:
Learn more Chinese
Chinese was my first language, but in a classic feat of cultural assimilation, my parents stopped speaking Chinese to me when I immigrated. They were determined for me to learn English without an accent, determined for me to be chameleonic. And they succeeded.
When I was in China last fall, I surprised myself. I’d imagined I would be near-mute, my verbalizations tangling like the gold jewelry customarily gifted to newlyweds, but instead I asked for directions, phoned hotel receptionists about more water, conversed with my grandmothers in elementary but still understandable Chinese. Even one of my grandmothers—who is my harshest critic, by far—was impressed by my fluency.
The only explanation I could come up with for my unexpectedly conversant Chinese: speech is an inherently creative endeavor, and I’d been exercising my creative muscles lately. Creative writing, then, incidentally improved my Chinese fluency. I came back to the U.S. inspired to learn more Chinese vocabulary so I can have more substantial WeChat conversations with my relatives.
Making space for creativity
Writing is inherently lonely, and the co-writing and authors groups I’ve been a part of have been lifesavers for my mental health. I’d like to solidify these groups more so that even if I have to return to being a W-2 employee, I have recurring accountability blocked out in my life for creative writing. For so long, I built my life around work; now and going forward, I’d like to build work around my life.
This includes writing for pleasure. My default orientation towards the world—bolstered by my years in Biglaw—is that of economic productivity. If it doesn’t make me money, I won’t spend time on it. But that misses a whole swath of life’s pleasures—a walk on a nice day, reading a book in the bathtub, connecting with a friend.
For many years now, I have resisted the idea of being creative. I wasn’t creative; I couldn’t possibly be—that’s why I was a lawyer. But as I worked on my manuscript, my editor pushed me to creative and emotional swards I’d forgotten I even had. As my creative freedom grew, so did my creative ambitions. I started my publishing journey ready to write one book and then go back to work. Now, I’d like to so much more—I have so many books in me, screenplays to write, the world to explore. The world feels big again, in a way I’d forgotten when I was only cycling between my beautiful office to a beautiful fitness studio to my beautiful apartment—all beautiful, but so, so empty-feeling.1
Freeze embryos
When I was 29, I remember wondering if I should freeze my eggs before turning thirty. Nah, I thought, I’ll be ready to have kids in a few years. Every year since, I’ve thought to myself, Maybe in two years. It’s always in two years. It’s happened enough times now that I’ve developed a healthy dose of self-skepticism when it comes to family planning. I just can’t trust myself on this.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and look into embryo freezing. I’m still not 100% convinced on children, for a host of ethical and personal reasons, but I’m also not 100% sure I want to be child-free. I just know I’m not emotionally ready to have kids yet.
People always say you’re never ready to have kids, so any time is as good as another, but I find that argument unconvincing. There are still degrees of readiness even if one can’t be 100% ready. And I know the consequences of childrearing before readiness: I’m still processing the traumas resulting from growing up in a household with two people who weren’t super ready to have me. I love my parents—they did their best—but I can’t imagine choosing to perpetuate those pains on a human being who didn’t ask to be born simply because “it’s normal to not feel ready.”
In terms of accountability, N and I are setting aside an hour on Sundays to plan out the upcoming few weeks. Look at the events and workshops and friends’ birthdays we’ve been invited to, put them on our calendars. Look at the array and figure out if something is missing—too many dinners with friends one week, maybe we should add in something funky like community mural-painting or a lecture about people’s biggest failures. This helps us holistically evaluate the direction our lives are taking and ensure our activities are best calculated to create full, connective experiences with the greater world. By forcing ourselves to take a bird’s eye view of our lives every week, we’ve even planned for events and workshops in the fall (!!). (Don’t let weddings be the only events you plan ahead in life for!)
Especially in what can be challenging times, connecting with your local environment instead of doom-scrolling about the national or global environment helps with emotional burnout. You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. And you can’t help yourself without taking a step back from your own life.⬥
I know this isn’t a sympathetic outlook, and I’m not looking for sympathy here, just telling the truth about my outwardly beautiful life.