note to self: slow down and dream small

Jan 29, 2025

My husband and I have an annual tradition: Every year around New Year’s we sit down with a bottle of wine, review our goals from the previous year, and write down goals for the new one.  We don’t call them resolutions, because we don’t like how constricting that word feels.  Instead, we think of them as intentions we’re putting out into the world.  We often forget about most of them after writing, and are usually pleasantly surprised when we come back to check them at the end of the year.

When I sat down this past New Year’s, I realized that what I wanted in 2025 was to take it slow, dream small, and let the big pieces that I set up in 2024 settle firmly into place.

That’s much easier said than done.  I was raised to value hyper-productivity (yay capitalism!) and I have a hard time not filling my year to the point of overflow.  Which is why, despite my goals, I still found myself feeling restless and uneasy during the first few weeks of the year.  I kept thinking to myself, “Is this all? Is it ok for the New Year to start off so underwhelming?”

In 2024, I did a lot of Big Life Things: My husband and I finally had our pandemic-delayed wedding, I started a company in Tokyo, we moved from New York back to San Francisco, and we established (and furnished!) a second home base in Tokyo.  Last year was so action packed and so filled with excitement, that the (cozy but uneventful) start of the year felt gray and bland in comparison.  That’s when I realized that I was fully addicted to the huge and the new and the exciting.

So my 2025 theme is to dream small, to find color and wonder in the routine day to day.  After all, we can’t make massive, life-altering moves every single year, lol. We need the quiet years in between, too.

Small dreams that lead to big dreams

On New Year’s Eve, I decided to make a reel of my 2024 highlights, something to remember an exciting year by.  But as I went through my photo album, I came across images that captured some of those small moments in between the big ones: sitting outside a cafe and enjoying the light filtering through the leaves, watching the breeze rustle the curtains in our new apartment, meeting my friends’ kids for the first time, having girl talk while splayed out on a rug on a studio floor.  Moments that I had already forgotten because they were overshadowed by all the big ones.  And I wondered what kind of person I could become if I celebrated those small moments.  Would I feel fuller, less anxious, more content in the quiet?

The super cute A6 planner that I'm using for my daily journaling this year. I used to only journal when I was upset, stressed, or needed to work through something.  But because with this planner I’m limited to one small page a day, it’s just enough to jot down a few minutes’ worth of thoughts—and it’s been perfect for clearing my thoughts in the morning and recording the small things.  It’s only been a few weeks but I’m hoping I’ll keep it going the entire year.  Wish me luck!

I’ve always been bad at living in the present.  I used to joke that I’m always dreaming about the future: the next trip, the next project, the next step in my career.  And that’s not been entirely a bad thing.  My 20s were filled with great client projects, international trips to speak at conferences, making and learning from brilliant friends.  All very exciting.  But it also meant that I never slowed down to look back, much less acknowledge myself for all that I’ve done.  (My husband used to have to remind me that I co-published a book, haha.)

Then, the pandemic happened, and we couldn’t travel or meet in person.  All of the exciting clients I’d been talking to had budget freezes, so I decided to move cross-country to attend grad school in New York.  Those few years passed in a blur because I didn’t feel like I was doing anything “big” enough to celebrate or acknowledge.  But the reality was that I was overcoming small challenges daily.  I was taking classes outside my comfort zone—hardware, digital fabrication, art writing—gaining new skills, and experimenting with new styles and mediums.  And that deserves celebrating.

So when I say that 2025 is about dreaming small, what I mean is: I want to be a person that celebrates the process just as much as the outcome.

Among the many "smaller" moments of 2024 is this photoshoot I gifted myself when we made the decision to move from New York back to San Francisco. I wanted a way to archive my three years in New York, and I was ecstatic to work with the brilliant Sasha Israel because I adored her portraits of powerful women in their work spaces.

Reborn

Which brings me to today. It’s Lunar New Year, and it also happens to be my 本命年 (zodiac year), the Year of the Snake. Coincidentally, there is a Chinese superstition that we’re not supposed to do “big life things” during our 本命年. I’m not actually sure how true this is (I’ve only verified it with two friends, haha), but I’ve decided to lean into it.  It feels oddly validating to be reminded not to make major moves, as if the superstition is affirming my decision to take it slow this year.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how Year of the Snake is about shedding skin and being “reborn.”

In 2023, I gave a talk about taking up space.  In it, I recounted how my identity as a Chinese girl and later as a Chinese-American woman, and my first experiences as a female software engineer in Silicon Valley caused me to subconsciously belittle myself and shy away from dreaming big dreams. I ended the talk with a promise: that even if everyone else thought my dreams were out of reach, that I’d never be the one stopping myself ever again.

I fully took that mantra to heart in 2024.  I’m glad that I ended my previous cycle on such a high: I was able to prove to myself that not only can I dream big dreams, I can achieve them too.  Sitting in this feeling of self-assurance, it feels like the perfect place to be reborn.

As I look beyond my 2025 goals and into this next twelve-year cycle, I’m being intentional with what I’m bringing with me and what I’m leaving behind.  I’m shedding the self-doubt and keeping the self-assurance, the self-encouragement, the steadfast belief that I’ll be able to figure it out.  Because I know I’ll relapse, but in this new cycle I’m determined to never be the one stopping myself from dreaming—big or small—ever again.

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P.S. I’ve been largely away from social media for the past year, but in working through this post I realized how much I miss “old” Twitter, when I used to unapologetically share “ugly” works in progress.  So if you’re interested, I’m on Bluesky now, where I share random snippets of work and thoughts about coding nobody asked for.