A year ago today, a blizzard hit New Orleans for the first time since the 1800s. Chewie and I were staying alone Uptown in a stranger’s house that I was subletting month-to-month. I wandered outside for hours, watching snowballs fights on Magazine Street, taking pictures of the buried streetcar tracks, and admiring the creativity of the dozens and dozens of New Orleans themed snowmen. Chewie ate the ice from my shoes and wore her coat while she peed in tire tracks. The whole city shut down, and it was 3 days of magic and wonder and collective joy. No one had snow supplies, so we were all stuck at home, improvising how to leave the house and share the excitement with others. A year later, it still doesn’t feel real.
Just 3 weeks earlier, I woke up on January 1st to the news of a terrorist attack that killed 14 people on Bourbon Street. A year later, this also doesn’t feel real.
The year ended with the shooting at Brown University, one of my favorite places on Earth. And then right before New Year’s, my uncle passed away.
That’s what all of 2025 felt like to me—moments of unexpected, surreal joy interspersed with events too hard to process.
I looked back at the recap blog I wrote about 2024 today. I wrote about how the year looked nothing like the hopes I had for it. How in blow after blow, it felt like so many things in my life fell apart. 2025 was about dealing with the aftermath. I avoided having expectations at all because there was so much I had no control over. The outcome was better than what I would have come up with if I’d tried to orchestrate it.
In the first half of the year, I lived in a temporary sublet in New Orleans, and then as my 18.5-year-old soul dog, Chewie, got sicker, I moved back in with my parents in Mississippi. For a year of being stationary, she’d given me a routine and purpose, and because she couldn’t safely be alone, she came everywhere with me. She got to see the historic snow in New Orleans, ride in her second Barkus Mardi Gras Parade, and we even got to go on a solo trip together. I was heartbroken when she died at the beginning of May. Leaving for a while felt important.
In June, I left for what I intended to be a month and a half of travel: two weeks of traveling up the East Coast of the US and Quebec and then a month-long stay in Montreal. The month-long stay in Montreal turned into two months. Then when I came home, I wished I hadn’t, so I went back for two more. It was the reset I needed.
This year I published another article in one of my dream travel publications and was offered my second media stay for my blog. I wrote far less than I wanted to, but it was a result of being perhaps more social than I’ve ever been—a trade-off that is probably important sometimes. I spent 180 hours on trains and am still not tired of it. I read 52 books.
This year I lived with 36 strangers from 27 countries across four cumulative months who made me feel more like myself than I have in a long time. Some of my favorite people today are people I didn’t know existed eight months ago. People tell you that it’s hard to make friends as an adult. As an anxious introvert, I’m here to tell you that you get more chances than you think.
2025 was leaving a city I love that I wasn’t sure still loved me back. It was feeling excluded in spaces I once felt I belonged. It was a New Orleans none of us recognized on display for the Superbowl and a country that’s becoming unrecognizable. It was gut-wrenching goodbyes and loss and collective anxiety that I think all of us in the US are feeling more and more every day.
But 2025 was also the circus festival and circus shows and taking advanced aerial classes in a gym where the beginner classes initially intimidated me. It was tango dancing with strangers and finding joy in it again, 9:00pm sunsets in the summer, fireworks competitions, the first snow in November before the yellow leaves had fallen. It was a lot of hours of painting, a lot of fancy chocolates from Les Chocolates de Chloe, a lot of tea from Café Le Loup Bleu, a lot of hours in a lot of bookstores, and a lot of rolls of 35mm film. It was whales off the coast of Tadoussac and marmots in Baie St. Paul and the wolves in Parc Omega. It was Christmas markets with borrowed coats and toes so numb they burned.
It was pet-sitting in a stranger’s house and cramming every spooky activity I could fit in three days in Sleepy Hollow and then convincing BBC Travel to let me write about it. It was field trips to mountains and villages and animal parks and Christmas Markets and friends who were always up for adventures. It was more late-night kitchen chats and TV nights than I can count.
It was committing to writing every day, just for myself, and actually doing it. I think I filled four journals this year.
It was new jobs and stray opportunities and ill-advised risks that paid off. It was caring less than ever about anyone else’s opinion.
2025 was also about growing my travel business. This time last year, I had the goal to triple my business from the previous year. It felt far out of reach but worth trying anyway. I ended up more than doubling that goal. I was able to help people with all different budgets make memories that mattered to them in 16 different countries this year. Nothing brings me more joy.
The daily news this year has felt increasingly dystopian. It feels more important than ever to find the things that bring you joy and hang onto them as hard as you can.
