Slow Notes 07

December 2025 in review—and a few recommendations and prompts for you.

Rachel Schwartzmann

Dec 31, 2025

🙂 In case the full email doesn’t show up in your inbox, be sure to check it out on a web browser.

👋 Notes on December

This year, I felt unmoored. It’s a different terrain than anxiety. Smoother, almost soft.
Each season has reinforced what I need to let go of to get a grip on the big picture.
From my conversation with Gloria Noto: “I don’t want to try to have control because there’s no point to that. It’s just not real. [While] awareness isn’t control, it is a reflection.”
A physical reflection: I don’t entirely recognize the woman staring back at me in the mirror. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A creative reflection: I have to consider my limitations. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
A general reflection: I still haven’t arrived at a place of understanding. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Luckily winter is grounding. You feel every bit of it until you’re red and numb. It’s only when you acknowledge that bit of pain—your own humanity—you start moving again. Slowly. Warming up to something like possibility as the days go dark and your eyes grow wide.
From my conversation with Caleb Femi: “I’ll ask myself: How do you want to dress? What else is possible? What else would you love to pull off? In every aspect of what I'm directly involved in on an artistic level—or just the mundanity of life—that question is what keeps me excited about existing. What is possible? That question is the first step you take in yielding magic.”
What I would love to ask myself: When does acceptance turn into embrace?
What I would love to pull off: Swallowing the alphabet and spitting out sentences that make my heart race.
What I believe is possible: Everything. Truly.
Yielding magic starts with asking questions. Good ones.
From my conversation with Pico Iyer: “How awake are you? Everything is always alive with possibility. It's just that I'm sometimes too distracted or blurry, or tired, or lost to see it. … So I hope that more or less everything is alive with that—if only I can see it.”
I love a season you can see.
I like winter, but more than that, I respect it.
I write forward and think backward.
I try to just be—and I think that’s a good place to be. At least for now.
From my conversation with Maggie Smith: “It's funny how sometimes some of the things that might have been framed as negatives—that we might even still think of as not wholly positive traits—actually serve us really well when we're making things. Frankly, I think stubbornness—a balance between stubbornness and openness—is really important.”
Opening a window and slamming a door are more similar than we think.
Opening a book and slamming a laptop ignite shared feeling of relief.
From my conversation with Kate Baer: “We all are capable of talking to ourselves gently. It really does change the home we have inside ourselves and allows an openness that, at least for me, was difficult to access before.”
The voice inside and in my journal: Another year lost to history—but our pasts never really leave us. We revive them again in unexpected ways. In unexpected people.
What fuels you doesn’t always fix you.
I like saying the word cliché, which might just make me one.
A final sentence/cliché/reflection/possibility for the year: We forget that sometimes starting over is really just starting again.