My 2025 in Review

In 2025, I hit a few personal milestones. I turned 30. I spent the entire year with a partner who loves me. And, a less than satisfactory year in my work life caused me to turn to my hobbies for satisfaction perhaps more than I ever have before, which reinvigorated my love for many of them. I spent the year tap dancing, playing chess, watching movies, reading books, and attending events.

​So, as a little time capsule for myself, I reviewed some of my year’s highlights to compile some facts and figures, just for fun. The idea is inspired by Spotify Wrapped, except it always bothers me that Spotify Wrapped isn’t actually based on the whole year, because it comes out before the year is over. But it's still fun, so I've included a little snapshot of my Spotify Wrapped from this year.

​I turned to long form creative media a lot in 2025 for a few reasons. With all that’s going on in the country and the world, I noticed that scrolling social media was making me feel bad. This has probably been true for me for years, but this year it became hard to ignore. So, I put a limit on my scrolling, especially for mindless entertainment, and instead turned to movies and books.

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My 2025 in Books

Total books read: 59

​Books I Rated 5-Stars:

• My Time to Stand by Gypsy-Rose Blanchard
• From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough
• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Sociopath by Patric Gagne
• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
• You Wanna Be on Top?: A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America's Next Top Model by Sarah Hartshorne
• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• The Gingerbread Bakery by Laurie Gilmore
• People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

Check out my Goodreads for the comprehensive list of books I read this year.

My 2025 in Movies

Total movies watched: 113
Movies seen in theatre: 8
First-time watches: 62

Movies I Rated 5-Stars:

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• Rear Window (1954)
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023)
• Wicked: For Good (2025)
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Check out my Letterboxd for the comprehensive list of movies I watched this year.

Additionally, AI generated content is increasing so rapidly that I’m afraid to even write about it in this blog post for fear that I’ll read it back in a year or two and think, you had no idea. But still, it was a motivating factor not only for consuming more long-form traditional media, but also for seeing more live performances. Call me old fashioned, but I just don’t want to see AI-generated “art,” which I do believe is an oxymoron, because art is inherently human. When I go see live performances, not only am I putting my money where my mouth is as it pertains to supporting real art, but I also don’t have to second guess whether what I’m seeing is real, which is becoming increasingly difficult to do with anything you see on a screen.

My 2025 in Live Performances

These numbers were tricky to calculate, because I don’t have tickets from every live performance I may have viewed in the year. I may have happened upon bands playing at bars or markets, so the following is not comprehensive, but the ones I have a record of in my planner.

Concerts or music performances: 13
Stage musicals: 5
Ballets or dance performances: 4

Some highlights:

• Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, so my boyfriend surprised me with tickets to see the Broadway musical when it came through Kansas City on tour.
• Sutton Foster came through Kansas City in September and put on a great show at the Kauffman Center! The tickets were a 30th birthday gift from my boyfriend. It was our second time seeing her perform live after seeing her in Once Upon a Mattress on Broadway last November.
• Kansas City was one of just three stops on Chappell Roan’s pop-up tour, so I was so thrilled to get to see her at Liberty Memorial.
• The Kansas City Ballet put on Swan Lake in October, and despite being a lifelong fan of ballet, it was my first time seeing this classic ballet.
• I attended my first ever opera in November, when the Kansas City Lyric Opera put on Madame Butterfly.

Other live events
Author talks: 6
Comedy shows: 2
Sporting events: 2

So that's it. No big revelations or new resolutions. I had a lot of fun in 2025 and a lot of fun reflecting on it for this post. Here's to a 2026 that's just as cool.