2025 Wrapped

Welcome to my first blog! The last blog I will post this year, and the first one on this here website, PageCarver.com.

Normally, this blog will include monthly recaps, but it’s the end of the year, which means it’s time for my Spotify-style “Andie Wrapped,” involving:

• The Tea of 2025
• What I Watched in 2025
• What I Read in 2025
• What I Worked On in 2025
• Big Thoughts I Thought in 2025

The Tea of 2025

This year was a whirlwind.

Quick facts:

• I still work at Prism Health North Texas as the Content Manager, noiiiice.
• I still do book editing on the side through Reedsy, and I loved the books I worked on this year (more under “What I Read in 2025”).
• My boyfriend and I started dating in March, and we are in love.
• I moved to Dallas, in the Oak Cliff/Bishop Arts area, and I am loving it. I divided my commute to work by FOUR, and there is so much cool and fun stuff around me.
• Young Bernie Sanders is still a good and special little kitty.
• My mom is still with us, though she is in hospice.

My mom was diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer in February, after having emergency surgery in January, and her prognosis date was in August. But she’s still here! She just celebrated her 64th birthday on the 4th of December. Her back pain has increased, likely due to the tumor on her spine, so she has started taking morphine daily, but after some trial and error, we’ve found a good mix: If she takes her morphine at night only and muscle relaxers during the day, then she can be awake and coherent enough to visit with her friends and do her puzzles and paint her paintings. She’s still here, and we’re grateful.

If you’re not caught up on this Tea, you can look at the GoFundMe page I made for my mom’s bucket list and read the updates there. I also wrote more about her diagnosis in a blog for my job at Prism Health North Texas.

I started dating Christopher in March, two days after my six-year sober-versary from alcohol. I didn’t expect anything from that first date, but here we are, nine months later, in love and planning a future together. Christopher has been an actual angel (CHRIS ANGEL!). He has made space for my complicated and sometimes conflicting feelings about Serious Things, including my mom’s health journey. He has inspired me to play and create more. He is giving me vital oxytocin, and I am using it to sustain me like a succubus. I am youthful because he is in my life.

Also, you know, I got four new tattoos and one new piercing this year, and I started taking allergy shots, so I can stop being allergic to my own cat.

What I Watched in 2025

Each year, Dallas Social Queer Organization (DSQO—pronounced “disco”) hosts a Powerpoint Night, and if you’re a queer homie in Dallas, you can present a PPT on any subject you’d like. Last year, I gave a presentation on The Best and Worst Horror Movies of 2024 (So Far), and I’m runnin’ it back, baby. Who’s ready for round 2?

The 3 worst horror movies of 2025:

• House of Eden
• Megan 2.0
• The Conjuring: Last Rites

Neither bad nor good horror movies (though there is a range):

• 28 Years Later
• Black Phone 2
• Clown in a Cornfield
• Death of a Unicorn
• Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
• I Know What You Did Last Summer
• Opus
• Shelby Oaks
• The Strangers: Chapter 2
• The Woman in Cabin 10
• The Woman in the Yard

Honorable mentions for best horror movies of 2025:

• Bring Her Back
• Companion
• Final Destination: Bloodlines
• Good Boy
• Heart Eyes
• It Feeds
• Keeper
• Predator: Killer of Killers
• Sinners
• The Monkey
• Weapons
• Until Dawn
• Wolf Man

The 3 BEST horror movies of 2025:

• The Long Walk
• Predator: Badlands
• Together

Note 1: I didn’t watch ALL the horror movies that came out this year (there is only so much time! And I am a versatile human with varied interests and drives!), so if you read this listicle like, WHAT ABOUT XYZ?! I didn’t watch it. Sorry.

Note 2: I know many of these are horror adjacent. I reviewed this list of horror movies released in 2025, so the genre-grumblers can take it up with Wikipedia tbh.

What I Read in 2025

Here’s some stuff I read this year!

If a book has an asterisk (*) by the title, it’s one I edited. If a book has two asterisks, then I read the advanced reader copy.

• Everwoven* by Megan Margherio: A memoir in occasional verse about inner child work in a meditative setting, exploring trauma without traumatizing the reader. It was such a privilege to work on this book.
• How to Save Yourself, First* by Wyn Nichols: This book might as well have been called “How to Save Yourself, First, ANDIE.” As a people pleaser in recovery, I needed this so much. The author also interweaves some philosophy, like absurdism and stoicism, and it was as interesting as it was helpful.
• Are You Mad at Me? by Meg Josephson: I actually read this book at the same time I worked on How to Save Yourself, First, and it was the book-as-people intervention I needed. This book explained why I think everyone is mad at me all the time and what I can do to self-soothe during the times I believe that.
• The Light Runner** by Ally Walker: Netflix’s The OA meets The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch, The Light Runner is a cinematic sci-fi crime drama with philosophical musings. However, unlike The Gone World, the author took her time in explaining the time travel mechanics in her story, so I was completely on board with her logic by the time we shifted to a different timeline. There’s a lot of inner child work in this book, which is very up my alley. Also, caveat: I gave a 3.5/5-star rating on this book on optimistic understanding that my ARC had not been proofread yet.
• Legendborn by Tracy Deonn: A fresh look at King Arthur folklore that explores the issues with  inheritance of power and even white supremacy in magic systems. It was beautifully written, and the main character had a fresh and compelling voice. I loved this book. What a fun read.
• Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma: I read this at the behest of an enthused coworker, and while I’m not sorry I read Immortal Dark, it did absolutely exhaust me. The drama was a lot because the main character had the emotional intelligence of a stick figure. The will-they-won’t-they enemies-to-lovers romance went back and forth about three times too many for one book, in my opinion. I may just read the synopsis on the sequel?
• The Pisces by Melissa Broder: I can’t stop thinking about this book. The main character struggles with codependence, the push/pull of an emotionally unavailable relationship. This book is laugh-out-loud darkly funny, and not just because this codependent is falling in love, unknowingly, with a merman. The tone takes a swiftly dark turn toward the end, and the main character does something that is absolutely unforgivable, and I am left reeling (and reflecting) in the wake of the persistent self-love moral.
• Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung: This collection of short stories reads like a book of Grimm’s fairytales for a modern audience. A woman is haunted by her own poop. A woman is in a car accident and guided from the wreckage by a soft disembodied voice. A boy, left as a sacrifice to a cave god, escapes only to find that life outside the cave is equally dangerous. I was gripped from start to finish.
• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay: I was so pleasantly surprised by this book. I’m a big fan of Paul Tremblay, but I worried he lost his touch after reading The Pallbearer’s Club, but that wasn’t a fair concern: Everyone has to produce just-OK work sometimes, even the experts. Tremblay proved to me once again that he is a master of emotional, speculative horror. I loved this book.
• Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man by Steve Harvey: I read this to “spy on the enemy,” but I was taken aback to discover that many of the men I have dated do seem to follow masculinity as Steve Harvey defines it. It is a disappointing and bleak look at male privilege. Review forthcoming.
• Your Favorite Scary Movie by Ashley Cullins: If you love the Scream franchise, this is a must-read. All the fun facts and special features in one place.
• Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier: Tonally, this felt like if The Pisces and Big Swiss (which isn’t included on this list because I think I read it last year, but it’s one of my favorites) had a baby (pun intended), but it doesn’t have the wow-factor of those other novels. It’s like if those novels were written by JD Salanger, which is not a compliment. I’m not sorry I read, but I’m not sure I can recommend it either.
• How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key: WOW, this book pissed me off. It is a testament to forgiveness and love, but it also made me reflect on self-respect as a concept and whether it’s possible to show yourself and someone else love at the same time. It’s also very funny, believe it or not. I enjoyed the writer’s voice a lot.
• Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak: I didn’t expect this book to seize me the way it did. I wrote a cover letter for an editing gig a few months ago and referenced this book in the opening paragraph, that’s how much it stayed with me.
• Saving Noah by Lucinda Berry: I was haunted by this book. There’s actually not as much philosophical debate as I expected there to be, at least not in the areas advertised (cw: child molestation), but after I finished this book, I had to take a hot bath and just stare at nothing for about 30 minutes. 4/5/5 stars.
• Fantasticland by Mike Bockoven: I normally hate books where every chapter is written from the perspective of a new character, but this book, written as interviews after a hurricane stranded the employees of an amusement park at their place of work, had me in its clutches. It’s like Yellowjackets, which is to say it’s like Lord of the Flies, but also like the YA version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Worth your time.

Also, I am a voracious reader but also a compulsive book abandoner. Sometimes Libby takes my book before I’m finished. Here are books I didn’t finish reading in 2025 but probably will at some point:

• The Poppy War by R F Kuang
• Yellowface by R F Kuang
• The Tell by Amy Griffin
• Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison
• Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
• Alchemised by SenLinYu
• If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein
• Sociopath by Patric Gagne
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Severance by Ling Ma (maybe I’ll finish it this year!)
• Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (essay forthcoming!!)
• Vicious by V E Schwab
• Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck
• The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

What I Worked On in 2025

I dove into book editing this year. I was blessed with so many great projects. So many authors with real skill and insight contacted me, and I had the absolute privilege of guiding them on part of their publishing journey.

One of the authors really stood out this year: Ela Thier, author of forthcoming How to Fail as an Artist: My Best Tips. She’s the founder of The Independent Film School, and her memoir really shook something loose in me. I have felt creatively stuck for a long time, and Ela reminded me that creativity requires play, which requires vulnerability with yourself. 

The age-old adage of “write every day,” through Ela’s interpretation, means show up for yourself, every day. Look at the blank page and sit with your boredom until something comes out. Be there to catch that something when it’s ready to come out.

Since reading her book, I have erupted with creativity. I redesigned my website. I have been writing reviews like crazy. I revisited old essays that I set aside years ago, and I used a new perspective to play with them. They are not finished, but I have touched them, and I know I’m making great progress, and I’m so excited to see how they both appear in their final forms.

This year, I was also published in The Pill Mag, and I have an essay coming out in early 2026 in Barely South Review.

I also worked on, hello, THIS WEBSITE, and I’m particularly proud of these pages:

• Books
• Media Crit
• Portfolio

Here are some other things you can look forward to in 2026:

• The two essays that I mentioned I was working on mere moments ago, hopefully.
• “An Homage to My Past Blogs,” including “Prison Cellulite” on feminism (2014) and “Puzzle Peace” on religion (2010 – 2011).
• A hub for all the lil bb micro poems I wrote on Twitter back in like, 2014.
• A bunch of reviews on media because I journaled a lot about the media I consumed, but I put them nowhere, and I will change that.
• At least one blog a month!!!!

Big Thoughts I Thought in 2025

This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways we cope with our own impermanence.

I’ve always been kind of macabre. (In the eighth grade, for example. my bestie and I cut the heads off of all my many stuffed animals and gutted the stuffing out of them to save them for a giant padded wall in my room; not like a chic Pinterest wall-sized fabric headboard but like a padded room, accent-wall edition.) So, my musings about death are not so much new, now that my mom has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but they are absolutely more focused.

In 2024, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (I thought it might be autism or ADHD, but no, I’m just a chihuahua human, shaking with an intensity of my own making), so most of my actions are fear-based. However, after reflecting this year, I think that might be true for all of us, to different degrees. We go to work so we have a place to live. We want security, to know where our next meal is coming from. We adhere to group standards because being separated from the group, biologically and evolutionarily, has meant death for us.

Every single thing we do, we do to ward off our fear of death, even if just for a second. And it’s funny because we’re so far removed from death, culturally, that it’s not a conscious decision we make. We are unconsciously driven by fear.

At the beginning of this year, I reread for the second time A Return to Love by Marianne WIlliamson, based on the teachings of A Course in Miracles, which is arguably a cult. But A Return to Love was like a love letter written to 19-year-old Andie, and I needed it. I needed to believe that separation is an illusion and to remember that roads and buildings and governments and economies and individual words and letters are all made up—which is to say that they cannot possibly hold the importance we place on them. We are more than our systems.

Also, I’ve been thinking that if death happens to all of us, it can’t be all that bad. It’s the great equalizer, a natural part of life. And: We are designed to fear it. That’s what keeps us alive. This teetering between knowing we’re alive and knowing that we’ll die one day—that’s by design. We’re supposed to be like this. There is nothing to fix or overcome. We’re allowed to just be. In fact, we’re most alive when we are just being.

And, anyway, thinking about things like this has brought me a lot of peace this year.