What I’m Leaving in 2025: A Christmas Letter From the In-Between

For the quiet week when time softens and the next chapter whispers.

There’s a particular kind of silence that arrives around now:

The silence of the year loosening its grip.

The inbox slows down. The city changes its pace. People disappear into kitchens and family systems and old versions of themselves. The calendar tries to pretend it’s just another week — but we feel it, don’t we?

This isn’t just “holidays.”

This is a threshold.

And if you’re anything like me, you can feel two forces tugging at you at once:

• One part of you wants to make meaning, to wrap the year up neatly, to extract the lesson, to turn your life into a clean takeaway.

• Another part of you just wants to rest, to stop narrating, to stop improving, to stop turning every experience into material.

I’m writing this as a small permission slip:

You don’t owe anyone a perfectly packaged ending.
You’re allowed to close the year like a human being.

The truth about the last week of the year

Many of us treat this time like a staging area for performance. We call it “reset season,” “glow-up season,” “new era loading.”

But I don’t think the end of a year is meant to be optimized. I think it’s meant to be felt.

Because the real transition isn’t January 1st.
The real transition is this quieter stretch — the days where your system finally has space to tell the truth.

This is where the mind stops sprinting long enough for the body to speak.
This is where grief shows up in strange places.
This is where you realize you were holding your breath for months.
This is where you suddenly know what you can’t carry into 2026.

Not as a strategy. As a fact.

What 2025 taught me (without asking my permission)

This year kept teaching me a lesson I keep resisting:

You can’t think your way into a new chapter.
You have to release your way into it.

Just as much as we all, I also love to intellectualize reinvention — frameworks, plans, identity statements, new habits. And yes, structure matters. But the deepest shifts don’t begin with action.

They begin with truth.

A truth you don’t post, instead the kind you finally admit when you go quiet.

So instead of offering you a list of “how to plan 2026,” I want to offer you something smaller and sharper: a ritual. Not a productivity ritual. A threshold ritual.

A small threshold: quiet snow, no performance, just the next chapter whispering

The Year-End Hand-Off: 12 minutes, no performance

Grab a pen. Or open a blank note. Set a timer for 12 minutes. Move fast. Don’t make it pretty.

1) What I’m leaving behind (the honest version):
Not “negativity” or “self-doubt.” Be concrete.
What pattern, posture, or pretense can’t cross the threshold with you?

Complete this sentence:
In 2025, I kept pretending ________. I’m done with that.

2) What I’m keeping (because it’s real):
What did you do this year — quietly, imperfectly — that actually mattered?
What deserves respect, not because it went viral, but because it was true?

Complete this sentence:
In 2025, I proved to myself that I can ________.

3) What I’m carrying forward (one small vow):
Not a giant resolution. A vow your nervous system can keep.

Complete this sentence:
In 2026, I will protect ________ like it’s sacred.

Now underline the one sentence that makes you slightly uncomfortable — the one that feels like it has teeth. Why? Because that’s usually the one that’s true.

If you’re between stories right now

First, remember: A lot of people are.
Second, read the first again.

Yes, some of us are grieving. Some are divorcing. Some are starting over. Some look “fine” on the outside but privately feel like the old identity doesn’t fit anymore. Some are successful and secretly tired. Some are stable and still unsatisfied. Some are in love and still lonely in their own head.

If that’s you, here’s the part I want you to hear plainly:

Being between stories isn’t failure.
It’s the exact place where you begin to start writing the next chapter.

But it won’t be written through force.
It will be written through honesty, rest, silence, your inner knowing — and one or two brave decisions that you stop postponing.

A small invitation

If you’re reading this and you want to mark the moment, comment below in a single line. No context needed.

What are you leaving behind at the end of 2025?

Just one sentence.

Because this is my favorite part of this work (and publishing on Substack) — when I hear the moment people stop performing and start telling the truth.

A Christmas wish that isn’t sentimental

I don’t wish you a “perfect” holiday.

I wish you a holiday where you don’t abandon yourself.

Where you don’t over-explain.
Where you don’t force closeness that isn’t there.
Where you don’t turn your life into a project.
Where you let the quiet do its work.

And if the season is tender for you — if it’s complicated, if it’s lonely, if it carries grief — I’m not going to tell you to be grateful and positive. I’ll just say this:
You’re allowed to be exactly where you are.
And you’re still moving forward.

I’ll be back in January.
Until then: take the week seriously. It’s sacred.

Warmly,
Andy

P.S. If you want a clean start to 2026 without the “new year, new you” nonsense, I’m opening a small 6-week Between Stories container in January. If you want the details, reply with CONTAINER and I’ll send them.