2025 Unwrapped

The year I got so good at seeing myself that I forgot how to be myself

If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is a bit of a cross-genre essay around writing and life!

I’ve tried to write this end-of-year essay three times now.

First with tarot cards… I thought I’d let the archetypes tell you what happened. Second with my journaling app’s compiled insights, 145 patterns extracted and organized to “show” you the shifts I went through. Then, finally, in a fit of frustration, a timely and cute “Wrapped” version of an essay that was smart and sexy and stupid, stupid, stupid.

None of them are right. None of them capture anything important.

Because here’s the truth: There is SO MUCH I want to say about this year and I don’t know how to say it.

Which is absurd. I’m a writer. I teach people how to write their unspeakable experiences. But when it comes to my own 2025… collapse awareness, writing strides, mother wounds, community revival, a novel I’m struggling to finish, insights I can’t integrate — I’m standing in front of this enormous pile of HAPPENED and I don’t know how to make it into words.

That feels important to admit. Because it’s the same problem I’ve had all year.

The pattern everyone called me out on: I can see myself with brutal clarity but I can’t BE myself. I externalize. I compile holograms. I’m brilliant at analysis as a form of avoiding embodiment.

• My writing friend: “Goddammit. Stop protecting your writing and let it out.” [Lungs meet air]

• My husband: “You know you find other shit to get worried about to avoid dealing with your novel.” [Gut meet punch]

• My journaling app: “You can write ABOUT avoidance all day. But you can’t write Riley until you stop writing about the thing and write the thing.” [Head meet hammer]

• My writing mentor: “You have been playing it safe for way too long in your writing. Seduce your story!” [Chest meet elephant]

2025 was the year I got so good at seeing myself that I forgot how to be myself.

2025 Unwrapped

2025 was monumental. I can list some of what happened [for posterity’s sake of course]:

• I became a certified Comparative Mythologist

• I wrote and serialized 30,000 words of The Archive (a post-apocalyptic story about a woman trying to survive post-collapse)

• I experimented with several different forms of storytelling like Campfire Tales and pop-up live streams

• I published Until They Burn (my original Writing Fiction to Heal novel)

• I created Oracle of an Authored Heart — an oracle deck based on all my published books

• I coached clients and had a few who got accepted into publications or journals

• Launched the Healing Lab to much success

• Nurtured and built out my Rebel MFA Sanctuary community

Listing these things out — I know this year mattered. I know I changed. I know things shifted in ways I can’t quite articulate.

And for someone who lives by articulation, who teaches articulation, who believes in the healing power of putting experience into words — not being able to find the words feels like failing at my own method.

And yet… I feel like there is something big bubbling beneath the surface. Something I can’t yet name. Something that is waiting patiently for me to uncover it.

2026 at a glance

My word for 2026 is IMMERSE.

Which terrifies me. Because immersion requires being inside the experience instead of watching it from outside. It requires feeling instead of mapping. It requires the very thing I’ve been avoiding.

But here’s what I’m learning: You can’t write your way out of disconnection by staying disconnected.

You can’t think your way into embodiment.

You can’t analyze your way to feeling.

You have to go in. You have to immerse.

And that’s where fairy tales come in.

The 2026 Healing Lab

For 2026’s Healing Lab, you might have guessed that we’re working with fairy tales BUT here’s the twist…

We’re doing it all through Taylor Swift’s music.

More specifically, through the lens of Kate Bernheimer’s four techniques: flatness, abstraction, normalized magic, and intuitive logic.

And here’s why this matters for me (and maybe for you):

Fairy tales are a form designed to hold difficult truths when you can’t access them directly.

Which is exactly what we need right now.

I spent 2025 becoming exquisitely good at watching myself. I can name every pattern, every avoidance, every place I’m stuck.

But in 2026, I’m learning to work WITH my limitations instead of trying to fix them first.

I’m learning forms that allow for disconnection, for flatness, for mapping externally what I can’t yet feel internally. I’m learning that my characters and I are walking through this dark room together, discovering the wound simultaneously — and that’s not a failure of craft. That’s the actual work.

I’m learning that sometimes the most honest thing you can write is: “I know this truth exists but I can’t feel my way to it yet.”

And I’m learning that fairy tale form, the same form Taylor Swift has been using to help millions of people feel seen in their unspeakable experiences — might be exactly the container we all need in this new year.

Not to bypass the wounds.

But to hold it while we figure out how to live with it.

Looking Forward

I still don’t know how to capture what 2025 was. The monumental shifts, the internal earthquakes, the things that happened that I know mattered but can’t quite name.

Maybe that’s okay. Maybe not everything needs to be articulated to be real.

Maybe 2026 is about trusting the immersion into the work, into the body, into the not-knowing, without needing to watch myself do it.

So.

The Healing Lab starts January 12th, 2026. Are you ready for it…?