Back in 2019, I wrote a reflective piece about all the things I would do if I was younger. If I had less responsibility in my life. I honestly forgot I had written it.

It read a bit morose.

My goal was to encourage young women to go do all the things while they were young. To take on every opportunity. As a woman who had felt so much obligation and responsibility in her youth, I hoped just one person would read it and take control of their own priorities before the ‘heavier’ responsibilities of later adulthood kicked in.

Reprise: You Are Never Too Old

Stumbling upon this piece again was quite the surprise. In the years that followed, we’d all live through an exhausting course of ‘unprecedented’ events. For me, these events served as a catalyst. Things got really difficult during the early pandemic years, but I harnessed those difficulties to achieve impossible things – financially and otherwise. Eventually, after some time of struggle, hope showed up again. My story was rewritten.

As I sit here seven years later, my life looks completely different than it did in 2019. Don’t get me wrong – 2019 wasn’t necessarily all doom and gloom.

But relying on the ghosts of my own words, I had a lot of unfulfilled dreams. Apparently, I also felt the very real weight of my responsibilities meant that these dreams were lost to me. My nontraditional path in life left me feeling some remorse for opportunities that had skipped me over.

Apparently.

As I reread these words, I was shocked to see that many of the things that I had on my 2019 list – that list I had forgotten about with the passage of the million words I had written since – had come true. In one way or another.

Seven years later, I have received opportunities to newly study things that excite me. To contribute to the world in new realms. To see places I had only dreamed of.

In that spirit, I’m rewriting this piece with a new message. Not to younger women, but to women of any age:

You are never too old.

White Whales & Albatrosses

The me of 2019 had accepted certain limitations on my life. My plate was full, and I was grateful for the abundance – if not exhausted by certain aspects of it at times. There simply wasn’t any give for the things I thought were reserved for the young.

Goodness gracious, my plate got fuller when the world shut down. Much as so many other women, I became the embodiment of the safety net my country was lacking. I wasn’t happy about it. But I did learn that I was capable of handling more.

If I was to handle more, then, why not attempt to restructure my life in radical ways? So that the ‘more’ was actually serving me rather than crushing me?

It was this act of allowing myself to imagine radical change that enabled everything that came next. I was no longer putting limitations on myself because I thought certain aspects of life had simply passed me by. My age was no longer an albatross. My dreams no longer a white whale.

No matter your age, no matter your responsibilities, this act of imagining is hopeful. Things don’t always turn out exactly how we dream them. They don’t always happen exactly when we want them to.

I am, afterall, sitting here seven whole years later. None of this happened overnight.

But, with the support of others, it did happen.

Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of meeting other women who have made radical shifts well into their lives’ journeys. They’ve set goals and not let anything stop them from achieving success – least of all their age.

Which makes me think that my experience isn’t an isolated phenomenon. Starting something new can be intimidating. There will be financials to figure out. But if it’s something you truly want for yourself and those around you, you are never too old.

Relearning Old Lessons

If I dig back further into the archives of my writing, I realize that this is not the first time I’ve learned this lesson. One of the first reflective pieces I wrote was on this very topic. It’s one that got audiences talking, and helped cement this writing thing into a career.

THE PIECE: Regrets In Life

We are never too old to reach for new dreams. But we are also never too old to learn the same lesson twice.

As we make our way through the world, many learn that when they muster up the courage to request what they need, they’ll be met with crickets — or worse, with extreme resistance.

While this can be true in interpersonal relationships, I think even in those interpersonal spheres, the phenomenon is informed and even enforced by the larger systems that surround us.

When you run into these roadblocks often enough, you eventually start to think it’s easier to do everything on your own. To not be that guy who asks for an assist. To not rock the boat.

This experience is particularly common for women, likely because of the cultural norms around gender which we’ve absorbed over the course of our lifetimes. For women in particular, we know that this self-silencing type of behavior can negatively impact not just our financial or mental health, but our physical health to boot.

It can feel overwhelming to express ourselves. Awkward to adjust to being anything other than a vessel of sustenance for others. But the more you at least give it a shot, the more likely it is that voicing your needs will improve your well-being.

Self-silencing can limit your ability to take care of yourself

Failing to express your needs not only cuts you off from the assistance of others. It can also hamper your ability to provide for yourself.

Here’s an example from Lessons in Chemistry:

We’ll put the conflicts of fame versus personal life aside for a moment, and focus solely on the sister’s raise.

The sister probably needed a raise. But a lifetime of conditioning led her to believe that if she
went to her boss, she’d experience a negative outcome.

Now, systemically, we know that her fear was justified. Women ask for raises just as often as men, but they’re rejected 25% more often. And these stats are relatively recent  — we can assume they’re better than when the show was set in the 1950s.

The sister probably had visceral, like experiences in the past. The threat of negative consequences for voicing her needs was real.

TIP: It turns out women have to request a raise differently to accommodate gender norms – but that’s a conversation for another time.

The thing is…if you don’t ask, you’re definitely not going to get it. She likely needed that money
to care for herself and/or her family. Had she continued to let that neurochemical reaction rule,
she wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that task. The risk was necessary.

While the anxiety was there for a reason, she had to push through it. Because what she needed
was on the other side.

It’s okay to pause in fear. But try not to freeze.

In ‘A Healthy State of Panic,’ Farnoosh Torabi delves deeper into this topic, encouraging us to
have a conversation with our fear or anxiety. She notes that when fear pops up, there might be
something you need to do before moving forward. Something you need to prepare or reflect on
before taking further action.

Let’s extend our analogy of the waitress’ sister. To get her raise, she might need to get a pulse on what the industry was currently paying for her role. Perhaps before she burst through the door of her boss’s office, she needed to make a list of her accomplishments and contributions to the organization to justify her ask.

Maybe she needed to brainstorm some things she really appreciated about the company or
management’s leadership, so she could cushion her asks between flattery.

All of these would be smart moves before requesting a raise as a woman. But if the fear hadn’t
been there to make her pause, she might have skipped over them.

That’s not to say fear should freeze you – stop you from moving forward until you’ve reached
some unobtainable level of perfectionism. That’s by no means Torabi’s conceit.

But when you take a second to pause and ask what you might need to do to feel less anxious
before moving forward, you can find some valuable information.

RECOMMENDED READING

The the wall of anxiety

You don’t have to be a lady to feel fear about expressing your needs. We all come across
instances in our lives that cause us to stop in our tracks. A wall of anxiety that prevents us from
moving forward. That tells us it’s easier to deny ourselves a voice than to push through to the
other side.

But what’s on the other side of that wall? From here, it looks a whole lot like getting your basic
needs met.

Addressing and then pushing through the discomfort can be beneficial for your financial life. Your mental health. Your physical health. Be sure to be respectful of the ‘no’s you hear along
the way, but don’t give up hope that you’ll eventually hear a “yes” — if you ask the right person.

Because here’s the thing: Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually do want to help you. Depending on where you work, your boss might not always be super excited to dig into the coffers to give you a raise, but your friends and neighbors are another story.

People are likely to help you – but only if you ask.

We all need help to get through this thing called life. Yet often, we’re afraid to ask for it. We
wonder why people don’t just offer it spontaneously – especially when they can clearly see that
you’re fighting an uphill battle.

And the answer is…it’s complicated. Sometimes people are self-interested and oblivious.
There’s no way around that. But even for the would-be helpers, there’s a lot of social norms to
navigate.

If you remind that new mother you can babysit or go grocery shopping for her after she hasn’t
taken you up on your first offer, are you being too pushy?

If you give money to someone who is struggling to get back on their feet, will they take it as an
insult to their dignity?

It can be embarrassing to ask for help, but many times, people just don’t know what you need
from them, and it feels too invasive to try and guess. When you can identify your needs and
make a clear ask, they’re actually way more likely to help than you give them credit for.

It’s a phenomenon that has been studied and affirmed by social psychologists.

You won’t hear ‘yes’ 100% of the time. But that’s still more helpful than the effective ‘no’
you’re left with when you don’t put yourself out there. The ‘no’s may also inform you of where there are imbalanced relationships in your life in some circumstances.

Plus every time one of those ‘yes’s rolls through, it will build your faith in humanity a little
stronger. It’s like building a muscle – the more you do it, the easier it gets.

It’s about that time, friends.

One year is closing. Another is opening.

I promised I’d update you all on my gratitude journal practices for the year. I added some new columns. Implemented some new routines.

And I’m happy to let you know how 2025 went.

Join me and get started with your own gratitude journal.

We’re all just walking each other home.

As each year closes, I make some type of art project with my gratitude journal. I’ve referred to it before as a “reverse vision board.”

Typically, I use the most common or most exciting words from my journal, transforming the written text into some type of image with letters and sentences.

This year, I did something a little different. I gathered up a bunch of images and printed out physical photos. Analog is the new digital, afterall.

I started out by using this pattern, but I had ordered a whole ton of photos. I ended up adjusting the pattern to make it bigger:

These images embodied magical moments found in the text of my gratitude journal. They displayed people and places I was grateful towards. They represented joy and opportunities I don’t want to forget.

While in most years, the text evokes an image, this year the images evoked a words. As I stood back and took in the finished product, a phrase washed over me. The Ram Dass quote:

We’re all just walking each other home.

I am supremely grateful for the ways in which people have shown up for me in love and compassion. I feel at most peace in the moments where I do the same for others.

Moving into 2026, I think this quote may be my guiding force. I think it would be beautiful if we all acted in a way that ensured the safety, peace and protection of others as we walk through this thing called life together. In moments of overwhelm, I’ll do my best to pause and ensure this is the place I’m acting from. To allow gratitude to produce more of itself.

The Things I Wanted

One of the new-ish columns I promised to update you on was the ‘I want…’ column. The idea was to see if writing these things down produced results, either through reinforcement or magical manifestation.

Learn more about the structure of my gratitude journal.

Overall, I wrote down about 30 unique things I wanted through the year. Sometimes I phrased each ‘thing’ differently, but they all fit into 30 distinct categories. Obviously a lot of them were repeats.

Of these 30 things, here are the results at the end of 2025:

• Twelve of the things I wanted definitively came true.
• Eight of the things I wanted definitively did not.
• I have five things tallied as “not yet.” I’m staying optimistic that they’re in my future. The door isn’t closed. They just haven’t shown up yet at the time of writing.
• I had two opportunities for one of my ‘wants’ this year. Once I succeeded. Once I failed. So it’s a half-and-half outcome on that one.
• Four of the wants I wanted were impossible, and not in the ‘you should still swing for it‘ type of way. Things like perpetual health and happiness for the people I love. I can’t put them in the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ column, as these things ebb and flow as a part of the human condition. But I am extremely grateful for every time they swung into the ‘yes’ area — even if they can’t be perpetual.

So overall? I’d call this experiment a success. Miraculous outcomes on a lot of fronts. The want column stays.

It was interesting because some of these things I had completely forgotten writing down in this wish-like column. To see that they had been fulfilled was pretty amazing.

But for most of them, I was an active participant.

Lessons from wanting

There were two big lessons I took away from this exercise this year. One I have had experiential  knowledge of for a long time:

If you want something, you’ve got to show up and try.

Some of these things I wanted were very big, very difficult things. It would have been super easy to write them off as unachievable.

Yet when I showed up, opportunity opened. Not every time — there were still eight hard ‘no’s. We can’t always get what we want.

But there’s no way I would have gotten to 12 in the ‘yes’ column without acting on the dream. Sometimes they happened in ways I had foreseen. Other times, my actions led to windows opening in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

Manifestation may happen every once in a while happenstancely, but by-and-large getting the things I wanted required me to participate. To try. Even when the outcome wasn’t assured.

The other lesson is something that I wrote in a paid-subscriber newsletter back in the day. I may publish it here in the coming weeks. UPDATE: It has been published.

I’ve known it to be true for quite some time, but in 2025, it showed up in a magnitude I don’t know that I’ve experienced before.

It is this:

Trust that if you ask, people will show up.

I recently talked on the Vibe with Ky podcast about how in the past, I’ve been reluctant to ask for help. It’s something I’ve been working on. In 2025, I expressed my needs (and wants) to others in a way I don’t think I have in the past. I plowed through the shame and guilt — which we shouldn’t feel when voicing such things, but we often do.

Wouldn’t you know it?

People showed up in big ways.

Ways I couldn’t have imagined. Ways I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

So while a part of getting the things I wanted or needed in 2025 was showing up myself, it was also made possible by the strong village of people behind me. We are not alone in this world.

We are all just walking each other home.

The ‘No’ column

My ‘no’ column was sparse. I didn’t want to focus on the negative, so I didn’t write down three things a day.

I think this was the right move.

See how the ‘no’ section is structured here.

However, it wasn’t as successful as the other three columns in my gratitude journal.

A big part of that is that a lot of the things I want to say ‘no’ to are necessary parts of daily life.

Like dealing with telecom companies, for example.

Nightmare every time.

Get it out of my life.

Please.

But alas, in 2025, I still needed the internet to function. As much as I wish I could remove myself, it’s something I have to engage with.

Another part of it is that I need to work this muscle more. There were a few things I wanted to eject from my life that weren’t absolute necessities. I made some progress in this rite, but I could stand to make some more.

I don’t think the solution is to up it to three line items daily. But I do think I need to flip to the back of the book and remind myself why things are in this ‘no’ column more often.

Happy 2026

I don’t want to sugarcoat things. There were difficult moments this year. Seasons of profound loss. Transitions I went into kicking and screaming.

Life is never static. There is no mountain peak where everything is perfect.

But in this imperfect experience we call life, we do have the power to write (and rewrite) our own narratives. To use those narratives towards empowerment — financial or otherwise. Even if the world around us feels bleak at times.

Over the years, this has been a really helpful exercise to help me do just that. If you’d like to engage in it, too, here’s where you can get a copy of your own gratitude journal for the year ahead.

Wishing you and yours a beautiful, peaceful 2026. And if it is none of those things, I hope you at least get 12 of the 30 things you want amidst all the mess.