Hello dear Joy Risers,
Click play to listen, or read full transcript below of this podcast episode.
Welcome to the December episode of Notes to Self, my solo podcast made for you, by me, at my desk here, fuelled this month by endless shots of hard liquor (just kidding) and a heartfelt desire to offer company and comfort to your creative self.
If you’re joining me here for the first time, this podcast seeded from the notes to myself I have been jotting down at the beginning of every month now for years. My hope in sharing them is that they might offer resonance or support to your creative life too.
Here we are. Together. December 2025.
Even when we all know it’s coming, this month still manages to barrel towards me like an electrical storm blown in from the west with its own unpredictable charge.
December slips into my nervous system, heat lightning at the edge of clouds, a quick bright flicker across my heart. I never seem to meet it the same way.
Some Decembers I feel cracked open by its beauty; some years it makes me feel scraped thin. Most years, it’s both, often within the same hour.
Here, on the southeast Queensland coast in Australia, December holds hefty keys to hefty times in life: summer, the longest school holidays of the year, Christmas, New Year, and everything they all entail.
No matter where I’ve spent each December, this month has felt like a threshold as much as a celebration. Everything arrives seemingly at once.
The joy.
The ache.
The remembering.
The wanting.
The old stories. The new tenderness.
The grief that can still surprise me.
The phone calls that come, the ones that don’t.
The people we see, the people we long to see.
The distances we can cross to each other, and those that we can’t.
Even though I love this time of year, and actively fend off the sneak of stress and apathy so I can revel in what it means to me, this month of memory rituals, the uncontainable magic of the festive season still catches me off guard.
The uncontainable mess of it does too.
So, my last Notes to Self for the year are, unsurprisingly, about how to hold contradicting things that are true at the same time. (Especially when I’m writing fiction, trying to create art during this month of emotional electrical storms.)
❤️🔥 Before I share my December Notes to Self, I want to say thank you. A deep, heart-wide-open thank you for reading The Joy Rise this year.
Your messages, replies, and reflections on how my words have accompanied and shifted you have given me the gift of accompaniment in return.
The stories you’ve shared with me, of your creative bravery, grit, awe, wonder, love, and determination, have brought me so much joy and filled my resilience tank too.
This space is nothing without you; any sanctuary that The Joy Rise has become is because you’ve made it with me. I’m endlessly grateful.
✍️ I also want to let you know that I’m pausing billing for a short while, which means all paid subscriptions will be paused.
As of this week, I’m in the thick of a not-here-to-fuck-about deadline to finish my third novel, The World Beneath Her Feet.
I’m at the point in the process where I need the deep immersion of focused hibernation to write Maggie Byrd, my new leading lady and queen of my heart, to the last page of her story. As of this issue, I’m going to disappear into my deep, interior cave of story-making. The Joy Rise won’t go fully silent though.
The other queen of my heart, right-hand woman, and very excellent human, Alice Wood, will pop in occasionally to make sure the lights are left on here, always shining in the dark for you, while I’m away writing.
🌸 I’d love to offer one shared provocation before I go, something we can quietly carry together in the new year. I know I’ll need this anchor in the coming months as much as you might too.
When I return early 2026, I hope my first letter to you will include a photo of my first printout of the hundreds of pages that will be my completed draft manuscript. Pages that feel unfathomable right now… but I believe in myself, and I’m trusting the quiet, brutal, beautiful, steady work ahead of me.
And I’d love to ask you this: what would you like to meet yourself holding when we reunite next year?
This isn’t a question about setting or ‘smashing’ a goal, or ‘slaying’ a resolution, or ‘hustling’ to produce. Ye gods, no thank you.
This comes from genuine curiosity: what would you like to feel a little closer to in your creative life in a few months’ time? Tenderness? Courage? Rest? Joy? A deepened habit of noticing? A gentler way of speaking to yourself?
I wonder if you’d like to choose one small thing and keep it close through the season, winter / summer. Meet you here with it, in spring / autumn?
So now, to my main December Notes to Self.
It’s just one note. Made up of five words.
And they are:
