I spent the entirety of 2024 and much of 2025 recovering from my 2023 suicidal era. As such, I’ve not been hitting traditional milestones or collecting traditional achievements these last couple of years; everything I have, both tangible and in-, has gone into surviving my own brain.

At the end of 2024, I made a list of things I did for myself over the course of the year that helped me begin climbing out of the abyss. It was a very short list of very simple things. It was also the start of a new practice. Today, I’m sharing the things I did for myself in 2025 that most improved my life. They’re still mostly small things, and many are just accommodations for my and my son’s neurodivergence.

In roughly the order in which I adopted each habit/routine:

Weekly check-ins. In early 2025, I implemented “weekly check-ins.” They’re basically rebranded family meetings for my household of two. Every Sunday morning, my 15-year-old and I sit down and review the upcoming week together using a very rudimentary agenda that we fill in throughout the preceding week. This weekly practice has helped me run our household more efficiently, and it’s helped us both better budget our time, executive functioning, spoons, and expectations for the upcoming week.

Aligned my days with my natural circadian rhythm. For better or worse, my brain is an early bird. Most days, I’m wide awake before my alarm, which is set for an hour that many people consider “the middle of the night.” At the very end of 2024, I stopped fighting against my natural circadian rhythm and began experimenting with living my life by it. By early 2025, I’d settled into a daily schedule that works incredibly well for me and my overactive autistic brain.

Without question, of everything I did for myself last year, this is the most consequential. It has been profoundly helpful in every domain of my life, and I’m eternally grateful to (finally, and at least for now) have the privilege to accommodate my needs in such a significant way.

Changed my volunteer commitment to accommodate my autism. In 2025, I left two volunteer positions that I loved but that were both too late in the day for my overactive autistic brain and required more sensory and social battery than I have. After much searching, I found a different volunteer position that’s a much better fit: it’s closer to my apartment, it’s earlier in the day, it’s quiet and still and repetitive, and there are never more than four people (me included) in the office at one time (and often there’s just two of us). Plus, the employee I’m paired with and I get along really well, I enjoy and am good at the work, and I feel valued and appreciated there.

Created a landing zone for my AuDHD teenager. My son and I live in a very small apartment. My autism cannot handle visual busyness, or things being out of place. His ADHD means that he tends to place things down wherever he is in the moment, creating small piles of stuff all over the goddamn place. To diffuse the resulting frustration and tension, I bought a large laundry basket for him to dump his stuff in (it was, thank god, on sale when I bought it). My only rules: as soon as its contents begin overflowing onto the floor, he has to move stuff into his room, and it needs to be gone through and cleaned out each week during or after our weekly check-in, regardless of whether it’s overflowing.

Amazon Sundays. To add some friction to my spending habits and to reduce my personal carbon footprint (which is negligible and a scam of a concept invented by the advertising and PR industry, I know), I decided early in the year to order from Amazon only on Sundays (excepting time-sensitive issues and extenuating circumstances).

This practice has worked remarkably well. I’m making fewer impulse purchases, which has reoriented my relationship to instant gratification in general, and, sometimes, between the time I add something to my cart and end up purchasing it, I find it locally and give my money to a small business instead of to Amazon. 10/10. Big recommend.

Bought a large carabiner for grocery bags. To corral my reusable grocery bags, I bought a carabiner large enough to clip to a grocery cart handle. No more frustration over bringing too many or too few bags into the store with me. Or over having to dig my bags out from beneath my groceries when I get to the checkout. Or over the bags being strewn all over my car. Now, they live clipped to the carabiner around the passenger seat headrest. When it’s time to grocery shop, the entire collection comes in with me, clipped to the shopping cart handle. At the end of the trip, the unused bags clip back to the headrest. After I unload my groceries, I put the empty bags on my front door’s doorknob and the next time I go out to my car they go back on the carabiner. A very small thing that’s made a very big difference.

Reduced my scrolling time with word search puzzles. A habit that’s still going strong, and that inspired one of my all-time favorite projects.

Invested in a primo portable outdoor/sunning setup. When it’s nice out, I spend a lot of time outside. Last spring, I bought myself a fancy tanning lounge chair, a large and durable outdoor-friendly bag, and new beach towels. A huge boon to my mental health. I love that the whole setup is portable: I used it basically daily in my apartment’s “front yard,” and brought it all with me to the river whenever I went.

Learned how to cook meat on the stove. It’s amazing how much less frustrating the very frustrating (for me) experience of eating is when the meat that you cook is not either completely burned on the outside and still totally raw on the inside, or perfectly cooked on the outside and super fucking dry on the inside. My current stove-top-cooked meat go-to: perfectly golden-brown, perfectly juicy breaded chicken breast.

Invested a digital meat thermometer. A life-changing, essential tool for cooking meat that is neither under- nor overcooked. It’s kind of unbelievable I lived my whole life till this last summer without one.

Started using food-safe latex gloves. A godsend for someone who both cooks meat daily and hates (HATES!) the sensory experience of touching raw meat. Cannot believe I didn’t think to invest in these gloves earlier.

Beefed up my makeshift home (apartment) gym. Once upon a time I had an actual garage gym (RIP). Once upon a time I will again. Until then, I have the walkway outside of my apartment building, and my living room.

When I relocated to Portland at the very start of the pandemic, I brought only the equipment I could fit in my car. In March 2025, I invested in additional equipment that enables me to do much more at home (so many more options for activities!), where I don’t have to wear a mask. Bonus: outdoor workouts on nice days. A dream.

Began hiking again. I’m eternally grateful to my unreliable and mentally ill brain for cooperating enough to allow me to get in six entire hikes last summer after nearly three years off the trail.

Reframed “lazy days.” I stopped calling them “lazy days” and started calling them “cozy days,” “slow days,” “restful days,” or “restorative days.” A very helpful mindset shift.

Started using a visual timer. It’s hard to overstate how helpful this small change has been for my neurodivergent household.

Added a signature that includes my “inbox hours” to my personal email. Around mid-year, I added a signature to my personal email that clearly communicates my inbox hours and boundaries around access to me/my time. A game-changer.

Swedish death cleaning. In early November, I began the unplanned project of Swedish death cleaning. I’m almost done (so close!) and will have more to share once I’ve wrapped it all up.

Adjusted a plan that wasn’t working instead of catastrophizing, spiraling, and giving up. The plan that wasn’t working? My plan to centralize and organize my digital photos and videos. This plan fell apart very quickly, and I spent most of the year stressed out about it and not working on it at all. A couple weeks into Swedish death cleaning I had a realization, and then an idea for a new plan.

The realization: I don’t need all of my digital media to be in a single place, or for it to be perfectly organized. I need it to be easily findable. What’s important to me is (1) knowing where my digital media lives, (2) what lives where, (3) how to access it, and (4) important dates. The whole point of this project is to make it easier for my kids to find the memories they’re looking for when I’m gone.

The new plan: Spending a few minutes twice a week swiping through the “on this day” photos on each of the services I store my digital media, deleting and tagging photos as needed, and capturing special events/dates in a spreadsheet as I go. It’ll take an entire year to complete, sure. It’s worth the reduced stress.

Tracked my rest between sets. In the final few weeks of the year I began carrying around a mini whiteboard at the gym to track my rest between sets, to ensure I’m not taking too much/that I stay on track with my sets. It’s also helped me learn optimal rest ranges for my body. Another game-changer.

A few bonus bits:

First, seeing this image last year was life-changing. I do realize that will sound dramatic to some (many?). Consider: autism, and its accompanying literalism. All this time, I’ve struggled to keep pace with my peers, wondering how everyone seemed to have much more energy for and much less difficulty with basically everything than I did (do). Until I saw that image, I didn’t realize that “being consistent” and “doing your best” are relative, contextual, and dynamic. I very much thought “being consistent” and “doing your best” meant showing up at your best-ever 100% every single day for every single thing, not showing up at your 100% for that day. Which…explains a lot.

Lastly, two very important things I learned about myself last year:

I don’t enjoy watching movies in the theater because the sensory and social aspects of the environment are too overwhelming and I have no brainpower or -space left to actually concentrate on and take in the movie. I wrote more about this in this post.

The same reason explains why I don’t enjoy shopping for clothing in person: the sensory and social aspects of the environment are too overwhelming, leaving me with no brainpower or -space to actually focus on how the clothing I’m trying on fits or feels. When I get home and put the clothing back on, I almost always end up hating how it fits or feels (or both!) and have to return it, which means venturing back into an extremely overwhelming and unpleasant environment. And so it goes, forever and ever. This is why when I find clothing that I like, I buy as many multiples of it that my bank account allows and hope that said clothing is never changed or discontinued so that when I eventually wear through everything I bought I can simply reorder them online (sadly, this is rarely the case).