Poetry Friday: Overthinking my 2025 Word of the Year

Photo by Markus Spiske

When it's time to choose a guiding/inspiring/motivational/comforting/perfect (aye, there's the rub) word to take me through the upcoming year, I do what I do with everything: Overthink it and paralyze myself.  (Do you think that little "perfect" requirement has anything to do with that? Naaaaah.) 

For 2024, I chose "Hope" but also stre-e-e-etched Hope out, seeking maximum mileage: 

Healing
Overcome
Patience
Emerge 

Hope, healing, overcoming, patience, emerging: it was good advice to myself. I needed all that and more in and from 2024. 2023 and 2024 were rough. After a couple years of intense caregiving and the deaths of both of my parents six months apart, I felt like an abandoned shell of myself. Time to reclaim ... something? I headed down that Hope road and it's been helping. (True, I have often felt derailed, especially since November 6th, but that's another subject and another post, a different kind of rough time to come.) 

For my 2025 word, I did an online quiz to see if I was inspired by the word it gave me. I took the quiz three times and every time it gave me Create. I was tempted to fight it, as I often do with that kind of thing. I'm a Gretchen Rubin Questioner/tipping-to-Rebel and I thought: 

"Why should I trust a random online quiz? Shouldn't I find my own word? Wouldn't that be more authentic? Am I lazy to use a quiz? But some quizzes are great, like the Four Tendencies. After all, 'Questioner' nails it. But this is different. Or is it?" 

And then I thought: 

"Shut up and just adopt the word, Karen. Create feels just right after the healing, the overcoming, the patience, and the emergence. JUST USE THE WORD." 

So I will. But I wasn't done (over)thinking it. 

I stre-e-e-etched the potential of Create a little further, and here's what I came up with: 

Conceive
Realize
Envision
Actualize
Truthfulness
Express

I like what it invites me to and I have all kinds of ideas about all kinds of writing I want to create going forward. 

Overthinking, apparently, isn't all bad. 🤔 I even decided it was worth writing an acrostic poem in its honor: 

On January first, I 

Veer into it, the inevitable

Everlasting, maddening 

Routine of it.

Turning to words for direction, to guide me

Hoping one little word can transform twelve months

Into a new creation. 

Nothing, though, not even an all-encompassing word, can 

Know what's to come. Still, I try. 

It's in our bones, in our blood, we can't help it. We

Try. One little word that can transform a year. 

~~~~~~~~~~

Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up this week.