My 2024 Wrapped

Exactly one year ago today, my girlfriend of almost four years and I broke up. Not exactly the ending to 2023 I’d anticipated. I entered 2024 in a strange space. My mind was busy processing, grieving, and looking for new opportunities. In many ways, I felt I had the most blank slate I’d ever had.

Blank slates and new seasons are a complex mixture of excitement and fear. On one hand, so much stability and comfort that existed suddenly vanished. On the other, I gained a significant amount of time and freedom that I now had to decide how to spend. I was back to making decisions by myself again. All this to say, I really had no idea what 2024 would look like.

Now 2024 is rapidly coming to a close, and wow, what a year it has been. It’s hard finding the words to describe it succinctly. I guess I’ll go with this.

When I look back, I see 2024 as a year centered around having a dream and slowly building towards turning that dream into a reality. When I look forward, I see 2024 as a pivotal year of transition that I genuinely believe will impact the rest of my life.

That dream was leaving my job and Seattle and traveling for the foreseeable future. (I’ve covered a lot of the details surrounding that decision in a previous post, so I’m going to leave a lot out here. If you need extra context, you can read that one here.)

Now 2025 is right around the corner, and I feel even less certain about what this year is going to hold than I did a year ago. I have a new sense of perspective, and I’ve never quite felt like I could take a step in a million different directions as I do today. All I can say right now about 2025 is I’m hopeful and expectant for more change both internally and externally.

Awkward Interlude

Here’s the deal. This isn’t quite going in the direction I had planned it to. I was initially going to run through a series of reflection questions with my own answers and share it as an example for you to do the same. But I think that there’s some other form this needs to take so I’m abandoning the initial idea and going somewhere completely different.

Okay, now that we’ve got that really smooth transition out of the way, let’s continue.

Post-Awkward Interlude

There’s a lot of emotion coming up as I reflect on 2024. That tells me there’s some crucial moments and lessons that I’ve had over the past year, and I want to spend the rest of this hitting on some of the big ones. These have had a significant impact on me this year, and I share them with the hope that they might have the same for you. The three lessons that stand out most from this year are:

  • It’s easy to keep dreams at arms-length, and that’s why they stay that way.
  • Comfort is overrated and conflict is inevitable.
  • Sometimes things are about you. Most of the time, they aren’t. It’s important to know the difference.

Distancing Your Dreams

Most of my life, I’ve been really good at getting excited about things just to shut them down moments later. I get caught up in an idea just to abandon it because “it doesn’t make sense” or “I don’t know how I would do that” or “it’s not feasible because of X, Y or Z”.

When I think about why I do this, there are two primary reasons that come to mind.

First, the idea is too abstract. With too much ambiguity, dreams can feel overwhelming. They simply stay at arms length because I don’t take the time to break them down into bite size pieces to make it more approachable.

Second, (and more potent) I don’t want to be disappointed if it doesn’t turn out the way I want it to. It’s easier to shut it down quickly. Shutting an idea down, or explaining it away, guarantees a disappointment, but a muted one. It’s significantly less disappointing to shut something down early on than it is to invest a significant amount of time or energy into something just to have it go sideways.

Two things come with this.

  • This assumes things will go sideways and eliminates the possibility of a best-case scenario. I fail to consider the best case, or even an 80% best case scenario. And time and time again, my brain has proven to me that it often thinks things are going to go a lot worse than they do.
  • A muted life cannot be selective. When we start muting things, everything becomes more dull. We cut off the bottom, but we also cut off the top. Alternatively, when we open ourselves up to the fullness of experience, we may feel more extreme pain and sorrow, but in return we may also experience joy and peace at depths we didn’t know we could.

There’s also a third aspect that can also come into play. I don’t notice it all the time, but I have before and think that others do as well. There’s a sneaky lie that comes in that says that we shouldn’t dream, or that we don’t deserve our dreams. That we should be grateful for what we have and we must stay in the same spot we have always been. I simply don’t believe that’s true. This is not to say we are entitled to all dreams we have, but rather to say we shouldn’t stop ourselves from at least exploring them.

It’s one thing to process through a dream and make an intentional choice to not pursue it. It’s a completely different thing to shut it down before you’re afraid of what might happen if you get close enough for it to actually have an impact on you. I’m trying to move closer to the former.

Comfort & Conflict

When I was processing my dream to leave my job and travel, I eventually realized the scariest part of the entire situation was quitting my job. I had no fear around not having a job. This fear was specifically around initiating a conversation with my managers telling them that I wanted to leave. As soon as I discovered this, something shifted.

I was going to let that stop me from chasing the dream? No. That’s a stupid reason. What a small cost to pay relative to the return.

Yet far too often in the past, I have inflated costs internally to a point where they feel too high. I’ve stayed stagnant. The situation I find myself desiring change in remains the same because I am unwilling to rock the boat for fear that it will capsize completely.

For two years I was strangely excited about the thought of being laid off. In some ways it served as an alternate route to the same destination with the bonus that the rental car was free. I wouldn’t even have to pay for gas, I’d just need to figure out where I wanted to drive.

The thing is, no one is waiting around to give you a free rental. Is it a possibility? Technically. But it’s nowhere remotely close to guaranteed. And even if it does, it might come in the middle of winter when the roads are covered in ice and you don’t even want to drive.

Waiting on the world to change might be a great song, but it’s not so much a reliable or effective approach to a fulfilling life.

Initiating change, especially when unpracticed, is daunting. Change nearly always has a wider scope of impact than just yourself. Many of these external impacts you have little to no control over. You might hurt people. You might make them angry. You might disappoint them.

But there’s a secret I’ve learned over the past few years – this is the nature of being in relationship with people. There is no other way. Stepping into any genuine relationship is an invitation for potential conflict. (There’s a whole other direction I could go here about how this amplifies the beauty and power of forgiveness and grace, but I think that’s for another time.)

It’s still challenging for me to step towards discomfort and conflict, but the perceived gravity of those situations is starting to lessen. I want to keep practicing to the point where I’m comfortable with all kinds of discomfort, and the way to do that is to do more and more uncomfortable things. How fun.

Is it really about you?

We’ve all been caught in a conversation with someone where it’s pulling teeth one question after another. They manage to answer all your best open-ended questions with single-word answers. You’re asking all the questions, and eventually it’s clear that the conversation isn’t going much further.

When I used to leave these conversations, I used to think that a part of it was my fault. Maybe I didn’t ask the right questions. Maybe my body language was closed off. Maybe I looked in the mirror afterward and found something stuck in my teeth. Yeah, that’s obviously got to be the reason why that conversation was dry.

Here’s another one.

You wake up, and no matter how hard you try you don’t feel put together walking out the door. You feel sloppy, gross, far less than your best from a presentation perspective. You get on the train. Two people across from you mutter to each other and begin chuckling to themselves. There’s only one possible thing they could be laughing about like that, and it’s how ridiculous your outfit is. How you could have possibly walked out the door looking like that.

I’ve found life is a whole lot less anxiety filled when I remember that most things have nothing to do with me. We’re all so caught up in our own world and think that others are caught up in ours as well, when in reality they’re as inwardly turned as we are. I’m all for owning the things that are mine to own, but once I start coming up with convoluted reasoning as to how something could be my responsibility, that’s when I know it’s time to let go of it.

A Common Thread

Across these three things I’ve been learning this year, I find an underlying thread of fear manifesting itself in different contexts.

  • A fear of disappointment and situations not being what I built them up to be in my head
  • A fear of conflict and ruffling feathers
  • A fear that other people are analyzing me and that problems are always mine to fix

Those fears probably started somewhere, and I genuinely believe there’s value in digging into what the root might be. However, at a certain point, that only gets you so far.

Time to Jump

Having an understanding of the nature of the fear is like standing on a diving board and knowing exactly how high it is. Without the right perspective, 15 feet might feel like a hundred. Ain’t no way I’m jumping from 100 feet. But 15 feet? It might still feel high, but I can rationally understand jumping isn’t going to kill me. At the same time, as much as I might understand that, I still have to jump off the diving board.

You might know that getting rejected by a potential hot date doesn’t mean that you’re unattractive, unintelligent or say anything else remotely related to your value or identity as an individual. Go make it a point to get rejected. Then you’ll actually experience what it feels like and realize that you’re okay on the other side.

You might know that people aren’t analyzing what you wear every single day and that your identity isn’t found in your appearance. Go make it a point to put zero effort into what you wear (a bit oxymoronic, I know). Then you’ll find that people won’t notice nearly as much as you fear they will. You’re still the same person whether you’re wearing sweats and a t-shirt or dressed to the nines.

You might know that no one cares how poorly you sing at karaoke. Go sing your lungs out without trying to be good. Once again, you’ll find that absolutely no one cares, and your identity isn’t dependent on whether you’re good at something or downright embarrassingly bad at it.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that the only way to start overcoming fear is to do the thing I’m scared of. This sums up what I see as the primary opportunity for me to step into in 2025 – jump more.

I don’t know the full impact of being able to consistently and quickly bridge the gap between knowing something and acting on that said something. But I know how I feel after jumping out of my job to pursue my dream of traveling. I can tell is that it’s a fundamental shift that has near infinite applications. It’s going to be a journey. It’s going to suck. It’s going to result in some great stories. And the more I do it, the more I believe I will experience freedom in a way we were designed to experience freedom.

So there you go. That’s my wrap on 2024 and what I’m stepping into 2025 with. Hopefully something in here stood out to you to take and play with. As always, if you know anyone that you think would get value from this, I’d ask that you consider sharing with them. Thanks for reading.

– Trevor

Additional Resources

If you want more on the motivational side, or other perspectives on similar ideas, I’ve found value from all the following resources. I’ll caveat by saying most of these lean towards the “productivity” and “success” world. I have my own set of qualms with over-indexing in that direction, but I still think there are some good ideas in each that have wider applications.