Hi,
My word(s) for 2025 are feral chaos. When I decided on them, I had no idea what they meant. What I knew was that I wanted to stop focusing so much on controlling my life, and more on learning how to thrive in the chaos of the universe.
I have, historically, tried to hold success tightly, and it was driving me crazy. I don’t use the term crazy lightly, either. I know it’s a loaded word bandied about meaninglessly, but in this case I do mean it was driving me to have a mental breakdown.
No, that’s not right either. It wasn’t driving me to have a mental breakdown. It drove me to have more than one mental breakdown in my life, and I needed it to stop.
While I would love the universe to become less chaotic, I know that is a futile pursuit.
The universe is gonna chaos as surely as we breathe air and drink water.
Yes, I could have run away, shut down social media, and crawled into a cave, but I also love attention way too much to live in a yurt. I am not an introvert or an extrovert. I am a me-trovert. I only gain energy when the attention is on me. Small group, big crowd, it doesn’t matter.
The only thing that truly feeds me is your attention.
It’s not my least favorite thing about me, but it is the thing I like least about myself that I’m willing to publicly declare. While I don’t love this about myself, I have accepted it in the same way I accept that chaos will exist whether we like it or not.
The fun thing about chaos (and by fun, I mean the kind of fun that makes you question every life choice you’ve ever made) is that the more success we have, the more chaos exists around us.
It’s not linear, either. It’s exponential.
When I had 100 people on my email list, I knew every one of them. When I had 1,000, knowing each one became impossible. The more I tried to hold onto each one, the more stressed I became as names slipped through my fingers. I had to let go of that to find peace in that version of normal.
It wasn’t okay, but it was true. So, I had to construct a new version of okay that could coexist with my new reality.
Now, with 45,000 people and counting on my list, it’s hard to even keep track of my close collaborators and my consulting clients, let alone casual readers. And yet, there are more opportunities around me than ever before. In fact, the fewer people I seem to know by name, the more people want to get my attention.
It doesn’t make logical sense, and yet it is true all the same. The less attention I have to give, the more people want it.
That’s because success doesn’t eliminate chaos, it multiplies it.
Every achievement opens three new doors, each with their own swirling vortex of decisions, opportunities, and problems you never knew existed. Every connection spawns five more connections. Every project births ten more ideas. Every solution reveals two new complications you didn’t see coming.
It’s like being rewarded for surviving a thunderstorm by being handed the keys to a tornado.
The hilarious irony of it all is that the very things we work so hard to achieve become the sources of our overwhelm. That book deal you fought for? Now you have deadlines, editors, marketing teams, and publicity schedules. That speaking engagement you landed? Now there are contracts, travel logistics, presentation prep, and follow-up obligations. That business partnership that felt like a dream come true? Now there are meetings, negotiations, shared calendars, and a whole other person’s chaos mixing with your own.
Those obligations carry forward for months or years, and compound with every new partnership you forge and relationship you make.
I used to think people who had three assistants were just vain, but now I wonder how anyone doesn’t have a team of people working for them because the chaos is overwhelming.
I know it overwhelmed me, which forced me to choose between embracing my inner control freak (again, not a term I use loosely or lightly) or learn how to thrive in chaos.
I chose the latter.
I couldn’t know when I chose this path that I would lose my biggest contract in January, shut down my most visible company in June, or live through one of the most chaotic years in human history, but I have to say that right now my mental health is better than it’s ever been, and my life is more chaotic than ever.
That’s no accident. After spending an entire year letting chaos guide me, what I learned is what manifesting experts have known for ages.
Namely, the more you allow chaos to lead you, the stronger your vision needs to be to guide you.
I must have read 100 books tackling this idea every which way but loose, from the highly scientific to the highly magical, and the consistency is staggering.
Hold what you want tightly, and the how, why, and when loosely.
It’s probably the reason I love portal fantasy so much, like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
Dorothy Gale wants to go home. She has no idea how, so she’s willing to follow a yellow brick road, talk to a wizard, kill a witch, befriend a tin can, pass out in a field, or whatever else it takes to get there.
Alice wants to go home. She’s willing to run around killing oysters, have a tea party with a mad hatter, paint roses red, play croquet with a queen, eat a mushroom, get high with a caterpillar, or just about any other wild thing to get there.
These are people who hold their desire close and their method loosely, and I think it’s the most important thing I can say about thriving in chaos aside from…
…it’s hard, y’all.
It’s hard because in order to have success you need to find a strategy that works and hold it so tightly that it lifts you above the torrent of chaos into success…
…but then you have to let it go.
It’s like being hurled into a tornado. Pure, unbridled chaos tosses you like a ragdoll as you spin end over end, your limbs flailing as you undeulate through the wreckage.
You claw at the air, desperate for something solid, anything to anchor you in the madness. Just when you’re certain the storm will swallow you whole, your hand closes around a floating doorframe, and for a brief moment you can breathe again.
Then, just as your pulse starts to slow, the doorframe catches an updraft. In an instant, it yanks you from the churning spiral below and flings you skyward out of the storm, into the thin, silent stillness above the clouds.
For a moment, you’re flying. You’ve made it above the chaos, carried by this one solid thing that saved you.
But that debris won’t stay above the fray for long. It’s going to break apart, or get sucked back down, or just become part of the swirling mess again. If you keep white-knuckling it, refusing to let go, it’s going to drag you right back down into the destructive spiral where you started.
If you hold onto it too long, the same thing that saved you once will start to kill you.
The only way to stay above the maelstrom is to let go of that one piece and let the force of the entire tornado hold you up instead. This doesn’t make any sense. It goes against every fiber of your being and natural survival instinct, which is why nobody does it.
That doesn’t change the fact that the best way to thrive in chaos is to trust that the same chaotic forces that were trying to destroy you can actually keep you aloft…
…and they will, but only if you stop fighting them and start working with them.
That doesn’t mean you just go limp and hope for the best. You’re still navigating. You’re still looking for home, still watching for the signs that tell you which way the wind is blowing. When you spot something you think moves you in the right direction, you grab onto it just long enough to let it guide you closer to where you want to be.
Then you let go again and readjust based on what you learned.
Most of the debris you grab will be useless. Most of the currents will take you sideways or backwards. Most of it is failure, and that’s okay.
Dorothy had no idea when she stole those ruby slippers that eventually, after learning all she needed to learn, they would be the thing that brought her home. It was just a pretty plot contrivance set up in the first act that paid off in the third.
It didn’t stop her from yeeting those shoes right off that dead witch’s body, though. I’m not saying you should resort to grave robbing. I’m just saying when the universe tells you to take an opportunity that appears, maybe you should listen, especially when it’s particularly shiny.
What do you think?
Are you comfortable in chaos?
Do you find yourself getting lost in the maelstrom?
Let us know in the comments.
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One of my writing coaches told me to "Embrace the chaos" when it came to my writing process. I suspect that advice might apply to my writing career as well.
I'll start with, I'm not a paid subscriber, but I did back How To Thrive As A Writer. It did resonate with me. I'm older now and find myself letting go more often than not because it seems the only thing I have the patience and nerve left to do is let go. Do I still get unnerved nonetheless during the letting go? Of course, but it just seems a survival reaction. Was I always like this, like when I was younger, to have the capacity to let go in the chaos? Couldn't say, don't remember, but probably not.
Than you \m/