Hello 2025…!
Can I still wish you a Happy New Year or are we at the point of faux pas?
My next question is… how was it for you?
2024 may be looking and feeling like a distant memory already, but I hope that however you stepped into 2025, it was the way that you wanted to. There always seems to be a social pressure to be jolly and to have fun, even if we don’t want to.
I’ve never been a big New Year fan. One year in my late teens I was persuaded to attend a friend’s house party and had a couple of glasses of Pernod (never again!). Another year I was in New Zealand and ringing in the new year with hundreds of other concert revellers. Aside from these two instances, I have happily spent New Years Eve either with family or at home alone.
The year 2000 put a big dent in how I approached New Years Eve. It was the turn of the Millennium and it seemed that everyone I knew was hosting a party to celebrate an event we would only see once in our lifetimes. It was also the time when many people were waiting to see if computers all around the world would give up and crash because they’d never had to deal with years beyond 1999. Y2K never happened and turned out to be a damp squib for those too young to remember!
Y2K wasn’t the only thing to bring a different flavour to the new year. Being a millennium year, many venues used it as an excuse to start charging people an entry fee when they hadn’t normally done so.
But this didn’t just happen in the year 2000. The following year, some businesses did the same thing again. Charging people for entry to venues started to become a regular practice. I don’t know whether this still happens because I no longer go out on New Years Eve, but I decided that if I had to pay to go into a venue on one particular night of the year when I could go there for free the night before or the night after, you could count me out!
Since then I’ve spent New Years Eve at home in my pjs, eating some picky bits, drinking a glass of red wine and watching films until I invariably fall asleep way before midnight.
It’s not just a pressure to be sociable at the end of one year and start of the next, but there is also a pressure to look at ways to improve ourselves or have goals and projects in mind. This year I haven’t been in a rush to jump into 2025 with goals, resolutions or projects. Usually I would have set myself up for the new year before the previous one ended. I’d have systems and plans put into place but this time around I’ve been lucky enough to take things super slowly and let myself ease into life again.
I know that 2025 is going to be a year of change for me even if I don’t know exactly how. The sense that my life will look different this time next year is something that feels exciting.
One thing that is for sure is that this Substack will only being going out once a week for the time being. Changes in my work situation mean that I had to make a difficult choice. Rather than put the Substack on pause, I decided to drop it down to one post a week.
So you’ll be seeing me in your inbox a little less often, but I’ll still be sharing my musings on nervous system healing, Human Design, mental health and everything in between. I hope you’ll continue to on this journey with me.
Much love,
Harmesch x