To complete my look back at 2024 (see my year in review post and my stuff I really liked post), I wanted to revisit my 2024 nudge word: hungry. I spent the year reminding myself that it’s good to be ambitious. That it’s better to take risks and fail than to preemptively not go for stuff simply because I might not get it.
This is probably not a lesson that most people need to learn, but graduate school and some career bumps drummed the audacity clean out of me. So I spent a year trying to get it back.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be a truly bold person–though it was fun to spend a year writing Scarlett, the protagonist of Bold Moves, who has enough courage for a half dozen people. But I would settle for being less afraid of failure.
One thing that does scare me about the coming year is falling back into the malaise in which I found myself in during the previous Trump administration. So my nudge word for this year is balance.
I need to find that calm center where my day job and my writing and my life serve as counterweights to each other, in equal and correct proportion. Where I give myself time to rest and relax, where I don’t consumed by every news story and scandal, and where I don’t lose hope. That’s my aspiration for 2025.
Emma Barry 