Year in Review 2025: Change, Chaos & Coming Home
I feel like usually I start these year-in-review blogs a little mystified that another year is ending so soon. In general, our time abroad flew by, which I’m sure I’ll get to dissecting at some point. See, that’s the thing about this past year. Instead of walking along with the year as usual, I feel like I was, for lack of better phrasing, ridden hard and put away wet by the progression of the calendar. Not to say that this year was awful and that there aren’t people who had it worse. But by and large, I’m not overly heartbroken to bid 2025 adieu.
Before we get into the play-by-play, I will say that things are looking better already. If the Chinese zodiac is to be believed, which at this point I’m more than willing to do, the purpose of the Year of the Snake (2025) was to shed all that doesn’t fit our lives anymore.
Anyway, that was a rather long-winded way to say I am most excited for 2026 and the Year of the Horse, when the pendulum should start swinging in the other direction. Before moving on, here’s a look back at the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of 2025 in a (hopefully) easy to digest manner. If I was scarce in your life this year, maybe you’ll understand why by the end of this.
January: Winter Running & a Copenhagen Getaway
If you’ve been cruising my blog for some time, then you already know January is when I’m most motivated. One of my big goals for 2025, as outlined in The 25 for 2025 List, was to run all of the U-Bahn lines in Stuttgart. Since there were 14 lines to cover before we moved in the summer (date obviously TBD at this point), I knew we needed to move quickly on it. So through the bitter cold, we chipped off a couple of the shorter lines since Mark was recovering from an illness.
Over the MLK four-day weekend, we took what would end up being the last of our European excursions to Copenhagen, Denmark. Prior to visiting, we had no clue that this city was such a foodie hotspot. We had a great time trying both traditional and seafood dishes while trying to stay warm. Pretty sure I wore my same knit fit every day of the trip since it was made with 100% alpaca, aka one of the warmest fibers.
February: Teddy Swims, Weddings & House Hunting in Las Vegas
February truly marked the beginning of the end to our second time living overseas. We kept up with our U-Bahn running challenge and even made time to head up to Düsseldorf for a Teddy Swims concert. I cannot put into words the utter chokehold he has on our household, and seeing him on the first night of his tour was incredible.
At the end of the month, we flew to Las Vegas for the bestie’s wedding. It marked the first time I had stepped foot on American soil since picking up the dogs from my parents at the end of October in 2021! After a weekend of photog duties (we were both so nervous since it was our first time shooting a wedding), we spent the week house hunting. As we relaxed in the Amex lounge before our flight back to Germany, our realtor told us that our offer was accepted and that we were officially entering the homebuying process.
March: Moving Prep & Getting Ready to Say Goodbye to Germany
Our days of house camping started in March. To distract ourselves from the sadness of this chapter closing, we stopped by one last castle in a small town near ours and continued on our U-Bahn run quest. Should we have been prepping for the movers instead? Perhaps. Ready or not, the movers arrived and we watched all of our stuff get loaded into crates, knowing we wouldn’t see it again for three or four months. I desperately tried to find good homes for my plant collection. Our upstairs neighbors took a few and the rest were donated to passersby on our street. One woman even thanked me, so I hope my parlor palm is living its best life under her care.
April: Lasts in Germany & Becoming First-Time Homeowners
This was a monster month for us. In addition to banging away on our U-Bahn run challenge, we closed on our house! There were many frantic late nights as we sorted through paperwork and deadlines that were not overly friendly to wet ink signatures and transatlantic shipping. Alas, everything went through and we officially became first-time homeowners! We had many “lasts” this month as well. We attended our last Frühlingsfest (the spring version of Oktoberfest) and went to our last Stuttgart Fußball match. We said goodbye to our cozy little apartment in the city center that we called home for the past four years and I ran one final half marathon in Heidelberg, one of the first cities we visited when we arrived in Germany. I can’t lie; I was a little emotional crossing that finish line.
May: Murphy’s Law & The International Move from Hell
If I can live my whole life and never repeat a month like May, it wouldn’t be too soon. Anything that could go wrong went wrong this month. On a positive note, we completed our U-Bahn running project the last weekend before we flew out with a crushing 19.5 miler spanning the entire city!
We spent most of this month in various hotel rooms in Germany and across the United States as we uprooted our whole lives. I think I’ve shared some of what happened this month in various social media posts, but essentially there was a point that we got kicked off our flight back to the states and thought that we were going to have to put down our male dog, Jackson. He hates flying and has a fight reaction to fear, which the Germans have zero tolerance for. Through a lot of tears and contingency plans, our boy finally got in line enough for us to make the flight from Frankfurt to Baltimore. I’ve never been so relieved to see cargo loaded onto a plane.
We spent the weekend in the DMV eating far too many crabs with one of the besties. Our plan was to pick up the car that we had shipped in April from the port and drive from the East Coast to Las Vegas over the course of a week. Mark woke up bright and early, only to discover that they hadn’t properly prepared our car when it shipped and had killed both batteries, which grounded us for a week. Since we were running out of time to take possession of our house, we made the decision to fly me to Vegas solo and Mark plus pups would join me once the car was ready. I try not to complain too much about moving, but not having each other through the chaos and mess was the worst.
June: Unpacking, Home Projects & Reunited with Friends
Slowly but surely, we started working on the house in June. Everything that we packed up in March arrived this month mostly intact. One of the first projects we embarked on as owners was putting ceiling speakers into the kitchen. Having tunes throughout the entire house definitely made the rest of the work more enjoyable.
In between settling in, our friend J surprised us with a visit. We spent a few days training together for the marathon we planned on running in October and also hitting the trails in Mt. Charleston, one of my favorite places in Las Vegas. I’m so glad that we live a short road trip apart again!
July: Pool time, Barbeques & A Memorable 40th Birthday
What an utter dumpster fire of a month! We kicked it off with another visit; this time my brother, Grant, and his wife, Liane, stopped by for Fourth of July weekend with their dogs. We had a blast grilling out and swimming in the pool.
As part of the settling process, I started to rebuild my plant collection in July with a little help from Costco. Seriously, they have wildly cheap and huge plants! In between building our new life at home, I spent my days blasting out my resume to a whole host of jobs. The grind paid off and I accepted a new job at a digital advertising agency near the end of the month.
Before starting the new job, we had plans to celebrate Mark’s 40th birthday with champagne and a lobster dinner. The morning of his birthday, I sliced off my finger tip while preparing his lunch. It was so bad that he had to cancel his morning meetings to take me into the doctor’s office. They ended up cauterizing my finger to stop the bleeding. Needless to say, when I built my 25 for 2025 list and had “do something special for milestone birthdays” this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. The bestie says it still counts though because it was indeed memorable.
August: Returning to Full-time work & Tough Decisions
More change was in the air during August, as I reentered the workforce after nearly four years of light contracting and freelance. It also marked the first time I had to go into an office since 2018. By the month’s end, I received an additional offer to host middays at my former radio station. I ended up turning down this opportunity due to time constraints. At the time, I was gutted to finally have a chance to do my thing in prime time and still needing to walk away. It was hard to accept that something I loved still didn’t fit into the life I was actively building, even if the opportunity felt like everything I had wanted for so long.
September: Marathon Peak Training, Burnout & a Sedona Escape
September proved to be equally challenging as I hit peak mileage for my marathon training while also discovering my new full-time job wasn’t a great fit. Much of the month was spent going through the motions while feeling utterly depleted. I was keeping up on paper, but everything felt harder than it should have, and most of my free time was spent mindlessly scrolling, trying to find equilibrium. The brightest part of the churn was spending four heart-filling days with the bestie in Sedona. We did a bunch of hikes (including a completely empty Devil’s Bridge!), ate all the good food, did an aura reading, and acquired some crystals to help us manifest better days.
October: Las Vegas Marathon Recap & a Hard-Fought PR
I didn’t realize it at the time, but October was the beginning of the end of a hard year. Maybe the crystals worked after all! VGK hockey returned to the ice and we caught one of the preseason games. At the end of the month, J and I ran the LV Marathon. This race got me. The course changed three weeks before race day to a major downhill run. While this sounds like it would be easier on paper, the reality is that your legs are basically braking with each step. Out of all the miles I’ve run and the marathons I’ve done before, my legs have never hurt like that at the finish line, much less the halfway point. I considered DNFing (did not finish) most of the race, but since the course was fairly remote, there wasn’t really a way to do it without taking emergency services. I was hurt, but I wasn’t injured, so I pressed on. Somehow I ended up getting a PR (personal record) even though I missed my goal time. I was pretty bummed for weeks following the race since I had followed my training plan more closely than ever before, despite chopping my fingertip off in July and getting hit by a car during a long run!
November: New Job Offer, Zion Hiking & a Siblings Thanksgiving
This was probably the best month I had all year! It started with an unfortunate canceling of our annual girls’ trip. We had planned to do Las Vegas, so instead of amending my PTO, I just took the days to myself to workout and do other things that fill my soul. The bestie had already purchased tickets for all of us to see The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere, so Mark and I made a day date out of it.
During the middle of the month, I snagged reservations for us to do the Subway hike in Zion with our friend J and his partner. This was one of the first hikes I ever did almost a decade ago so it was fun to revisit with more skill and in much better shape than the first time around.
Right before Thanksgiving, I received a new job offer to work in healthcare marketing again (also fully remote)! We celebrated all weekend in Phoenix with my brother, his wife, and a couple of their friends. It was the most at peace I had felt since March.
December: Healing, Therapy & Closing out a Challenging Year
By the end of the year, I felt like I had slowly started to find myself again. I started my new job at the beginning of the month and it’s like a breath of fresh air. It’s a much better fit and I’m excited to see what next year brings! I also started EMDR therapy, which has helped me get unstuck in a relatively short amount of time. My old hobbies started to make their way back into my life after months of neglect. I started reading again for long periods of time. I cast on a new sweater pattern. I started cooking elaborate meals again. Everything felt lighter.
We had my whole family here for Christmas, so in between cooking decadent holiday meals, we took them on a tour of the best of the best of Las Vegas. We went to Meow Wolf at Area 15, brushed up on Vegas history at the Neon Museum, and watched our VGK take on my brother’s team (The Wild) at The Fortress. Unfortunately, the VGK got spanked, but we all had a great time. I’ve wanted to take my brother to a game in Vegas for years now.
If there was ever a character-building year, I feel like 2025 was it. I knew it may be difficult with an international move in the cards, but to be honest, it hit harder than predicted. There were many months this year where my mental health wasn’t great and I often found myself going through the motions. Through a lot of unknowns, I feel like the year ended with the light at the end of all the darkness. Everything out of balance slowly started to realign. Was it all of the magic crystals, faithfully charged every month under the full moonlight? Or was it merely the world righting itself? Either way, I find myself ready for 2026 and what is to come in the new year.
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Looking back on 2025, the year brought international moves, marathon miles, career changes, and the slow process of finding balance again. Read on for a candid year-in-review reflecting on relocation, burnout, resilience, and coming home.