Monday Musings: My Letter To You
This is my last Monday Musings column for 2025. It sounds so final, no? What was on top of my mind this year, just sitting in the background noise of my life, is the fact that 2025 marks my 20th year of blogging. I probably mentioned it to everyone I know already and said it in every speech I’ve made in the last 12 months. Twenty years, wow. I never dreamed I’d still be doing this for two decades.
Of course, blogging is not the only thing I do these days. I’ve started a few businesses since 2005, and I’ve been / I am on other platforms as well. But something about writing like this is meaningful to me. Where else can I write a letter like this, to you? If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’ve been part of the PV Community for a while. I am grateful for that - I say it every time I get the chance to, when people message me or when I meet them, but I don’t think anyone knows how deeply I mean it. So yes, I want to say thank you first, for reading all these years.
I hope your 2025 was kind to you. And if it wasn’t - if it was chaotic and relentless - I hope you still found something to hold on to. I hope there was a little joy between the clouds of confusion, some humor despite the sting of bitterness. If you’re at my age, then you’ll know by now that most of life is a push and pull between opposing forces. Happiness is constant effort. It’s not something we just accidentally find and keep.
As I close out 2025, I’m thinking a lot about momentum. For this new year I wish you the courage to live a life that’s aligned to what brings you joy. Most of us struggle with inertia, where things are just fine and okay. Nothing too terrible happens, but nothing too good, either. And look, okay is fine. We need okay days to survive. But if we’re not careful, this can lull us into staying small. Into thinking we don’t get to want more, and then forgetting that joy isn’t supposed to be rare. It’s not a reward for suffering, it can be something you get to experience everyday. And it takes guts to believe that and to change direction even when everything on paper looks decent.
So in 2026, I hope you feel brave enough to want more. Not in the capitalist “do more, buy more, be more” way, but in the honest way. Want more love. More peace. More creativity. More mornings that feel like a clean slate instead of drudgery. I hope you give yourself permission to chase those things, even if it means disrupting your routine. Even if it means letting go of things - or people - you thought you’d never outgrow.
If I’ve learned anything in 20 years of doing this, it’s that reinvention isn’t always a huge announcement to the world. Sometimes it’s just a quiet decision you make on a random Tuesday: I’m going to do things differently now.
So if you’ve been waiting for a sign, maybe this is it.
I hope 2026 is a year you get closer to yourself. The real you, not the one with the almost pathological need to perform, please, and endure just because she can.
See you next year!
Love,
Liz
