2025: Year In Review

If I had to sum up 2025 in one word, it would be homecoming.

In August, Wes and I unexpectedly bought our first home back in my hometown of Torrance. It’s always been a dream of mine to move back to the South Bay of LA — where the streets are wide, the people are laid-back, and there’s always good Japanese food. After a decade spent in the Bay Area and Venice, we lucked out and stumbled upon a home just down the street from our best friends and a quick drive from my family.

It feels both strange and comforting to be back where little Chie grew up. Imagining my older self — artist, creator, surfer, tech worker, and wife — continuing to evolve in this familiar city makes me feel warm and cozy.

It’s been one enormous blessing of a year, and I’m grateful for where we landed. 🥂

Here are three big milestones I’m proud of:

1. Went to the Sundance Film Festival with Adobe 🎥🎬🏔️ [Jan ‘25]

Sundance has always been on my bucket list, and this year I got to attend with Adobe and interview two of my favorite creators — Kenji Tsukamoto and Steven Wommack.

2. Launched my first children’s clothing line with Coco Moon 🐶🎃🌺 [Aug ‘25]

This was a dream project that came out of a passion project I started several years ago, and it’s one of my proudest pieces of work yet. More to come in 2026. 👀

3. I showcased my art at an internal maker fair at Airbnb 🖼️🎨🥰 [Nov ‘25]

Every year, Airbnb’s design team hosts an internal offsite, and this year I got to share my work and invite our designers to write handwritten letters in greeting cards that I designed. 💌

Here are two lessons from this year:

1. It’s okay to take breaks 🛌

In February, I hit another wall — one that felt weirdly similar to ones I’d faced in previous years. I had no energy or desire to work on any creative or self-improvement projects. I’m still figuring out whether it was burnout or something else, but it required me to press pause on the goals I had set at the beginning of the year and even decline opportunities I would’ve normally been excited about.

I felt ashamed and disappointed, but I tried my best to be patient and give myself as much time as I needed. Thankfully with months of therapy and time away, I was finally able to get back into the swing of things by summer.

2. Lean into your uniqueness ✨

I returned to corporate last year and now spend my daytime hours working as a Design Program Manager at Airbnb. My role focuses on building operations and program planning for our Experience Design team, which meant I wasn’t using my illustration or design skills… until this year.

As I settled into the role, I started finding small pockets of opportunity to leverage my (previously hidden) illustration talents to bring joy to others — whether that was illustrating custom emojis for our design team or designing greeting cards for our event. These small acts of creativity make me happy, and bring smiles to those around me.

While these examples comes from my work, these lessons honestly apply to everything in life.

Here are three exciting things that happened outside of my business:

1. Saw Fujii Kaze and XG perform live in LA 🇯🇵🎶

Both of my favorite J-pop artists!

2. Found my first surf coach 🏄‍♀️

His name is Matt Pagan and he’s a cool dude — former pro surfer, current surf coach, surfboard shaper, and community builder.

3. Completed my 7th Olympic triathlon and 4th half marathon 🏃🏻‍♀️

I raced a triathlon in Yosemite and ran the half marathon in San Francisco with my former NetApp coworkers for our 10-year reunion.

Finally, here are a few things I’m looking forward to in 2025…

If you made it this far thanks so much for reading and supporting me on this journey.

Hope you have a wonderful new year and here’s to more creative projects in 2026! 🙌

Cheers,
Chie