2025 was a year of loss and a practice of presence

This episode reflects on 2025 as a year of loss — grief, burnout, political devastation, small joys, and the complicated work of staying human inside it all. No toxic optimism. No shiny “new year” reinvention. Just honesty, presence, and gentleness.

This episode is for you if you’re ready to close the book on 2025 — which we describe (lovingly, accurately) as a “shit show” and a year of loss, involving death, financial struggle, and business stagnation — and you want a grounded way to move into the next season without demanding perfection from yourself.

As 2025 winds down, Becky and Taina sit with the mess — grief, burnout, political devastation, small joys, and the complicated work of staying human inside it all. This isn’t an episode about toxic optimism or shiny New Year’s resolutions. It’s about telling the truth: some years are brutal. Some losses are enormous. And still, we have to find ways to keep living.

We talk candidly about personal and collective loss, fluctuating capacity, negativity bias, and the practice of holding multiple truths at once. We explore what it means to scale expectations down (way down), to let “10% better” be enough, and to build rituals that help us remember that not everything is awful — even when the world feels like it is.

This episode is an invitation to stop demanding perfection from yourself, to release the fantasy of static capacity, and to enter the new year with honesty, presence, and gentleness.

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In this episode, we talk about:

• Why 2025 felt like a year of loss — personally, politically, and collectively
• Grief, privilege, and the discomfort of holding both at the same time
• The myth of static capacity and why fluctuating energy is deeply human
• Spoon theory, disability wisdom, and why you can’t “borrow” energy from the future
• Negativity bias and why our brains remember the worst moments most clearly
• Micro vs. macro living: how daily life is different from the headlines
• Practices for tracking how days actually feel (not how we assume they felt)
• Holding multiple emotions at once — anger and love, grief and joy
• Why “10% better” might be the most radical New Year’s intention available
• Creating spaciousness during the holidays without disappearing entirely