Year-End Reflections

Sharing the journal prompts I answer annually

It’s the day after Christmas, which also happens to be the day before my usual Wednesday publish day, and I’m writing this as I’m about to head to bed before a flight in the morning. I wouldn’t say I’ve been procrastinating posting per se (I’ve in fact had this post idea in my head for a while), I just haven’t made the time to actually write it. The holidays caught up with me as I raced to wrap up various projects before the end of the year. I feel like my brain – if we want to stick with the racing theme – is a manual transmission and I’ve been constantly shifting gears, heading at different speeds in different directions. It’s exhilarating, scratching my itch for newness and novelty, but it is a bit exhausting. As a result, I’m going to take next week off of all things – writing on Substack, freelancing, teaching barre – and take a true vacation. However, before I go, I’ll leave you with what I will be journaling about on the plane.

I’ve journaled for years, but in an admittedly sporadic manner. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that most entries in most of my notebooks are a bit…angsty, for lack of a better word. There’s just something about scribbling out all of your frustrations onto a page that helps release some of the emotion (yet one emotion I struggle to release is the petrifying anxiety I feel at the thought of someone finding and reading these notebooks after I die, but that’s a problem for another, hopefully distant, day). I journaled a lot in 2020 as I navigated the pandemic which, like for many, brought with it wave after wave of grief, and as the year drew to a close, I found myself wanting to document the experience in a more organized way. So I found a set of questions somewhere (I can’t remember where, but if I’m being completely honest, it was probably TikTok) and have been using them every year since.

It’s been a therapeutic practice to reflect on the past year each year, as well as the one before, to see how things changed – or maybe even how they didn’t. I wrote in a recent post about how 2021 was my year of highs and 2022 my year of lows in comparison. Although it was painful to write last year’s reflection after re-reading my 2021 entry, I am grateful to have had something to look back on that can serve as a progress marker. It adds perspective, a way of zooming out to see more of the whole. I heard somewhere (again, probably TikTok) that the highs and lows of our lives are like sewing: in order to create a stitch in a piece of fabric, you need to move the needle both up and down. So in a way, they are the stitches weaving together the tapestries of our lives.

With that said, here are the annual journal prompts I answer at the end of each year that help me see more of my life’s tapestry:

• What were my favorite memories or moments?

• What were the big wins?

• What were the small wins?

• Who did I connect with the most? 

• Who supported, cared, or helped me throughout the year and how?

• What challenges did I face?

• How was my mental health? 

• How was my body image?

• What do I want to leave behind? 

• What were the lessons I learned, practices I instilled, or activities I started?

• What is my intention for next year?  

I’ll leave you and the year 2023 here with these questions. I hope they can help guide your year-end reflection like they do mine – and if you already have a set of your own and you’d like to share them, I would love to see them.

Cheers to you, my reader. I’ll see you in 2024.