December 31, 2024 at 4:34PM

If I were more organized — and if everyone in my home wasn’t sick — I might write a “year in review” blog post. Instead, a half-hearted note will have to suffice.

When I did my annual performance self-evaluation at work, I found that I accomplished a ton of important things but made very little progress on some of the goals I had set in January. Many of those goals aren’t really relevant anymore, either, which maybe says more about the corporate culture of goal-setting than anything else. I’m incredibly proud of the things I did this year, they’re just mostly things I couldn’t have anticipated before they happened.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions so I don’t have any goal-setting document to compare against for my non-professional life. But I think it’s very much the same story. The things I am most proud of in 2024 are largely things I wouldn’t have been able to predict at the start of it.

I realize this isn’t an original observation, that life is unpredictable. That’s still where I’m at, cliche as it is.

This has been a difficult year for so many reasons. I expect 2025 to be even harder. But I’m so grateful to the kind and loving people in my life, and for the extraordinary place that is Chicago.