Welcome to Mia’s Queue, a free newsletter for “humans in the loop” who care about conscious culture in a tech-driven world. I love exploring how taste and curation facilitate self-discovery and create deeper connections with others. This edition offers context for my word of the year and the playlist with its name.

I’ve felt uncomfortable in my skin for my entire adult life. This discomfort often takes the shape of a nebulous, radioactive blob that I’ve come to call “the ick.” The ick is my inner critic, a not-very-nice gal who likes to convince me I’m helpless and small. She makes me feel gross, inadequate, and sometimes downright wretched.

I’d love to blame this feeling on hormones or another stressor, but she’s been there since the moment I first felt another’s eyes on me. Any attention, particularly that from the male gaze, made me feel instantly unworthy. If a boy liked me, I was convinced he obviously had terrible taste. And when I did manage that initial disgust, I mourned the end of relationships even before they’d started. (This became a lifelong pattern: I would expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised when it didn't happen.)

My parents got divorced in a traumatic manner, preserving my ick in amber. My sense of self was already so shaky. One parent had strong, inflexible ideas about who I should be, and I largely felt invisible to the other. There wasn’t a lot of physical touch or comfort. My parents’ solution was to overdo it with material things, but the offerings came with strings attached. I felt spoiled, and sometimes was told outright that I was. It was confusing.

Where does all this leave a developing person? Instinct tells us to fight, flight, freeze or fawn, and I chose to freeze. Stuck in recursive loops of unproductive thinking, stagnated by fear, and wanting to stay small, I was kept in a jail of my own making. Intellectually, I can tell myself that everything is fine (and it usually is — I truly have a great life, a wonderful community, and a loving partner), but as they say, the body keeps the score. Each of my shoulders has frozen at different times, my skeleton often feels like twisted metal, my skin crawls at night, and when meditators say to “tune into the body,” I never know what they mean.

This winter, my breakthrough has been finally understanding my body as a source of intelligence that I’ve ignored for too long. In my “suck it up, buttercup” mentality, I’ve historically brute-forced this bag of flesh and bones to go along with whatever I needed it to do. My loyalty has been to something or someone outside of my body: overeating because I feel guilty about wasting food; holding on to things I don’t need or want because of sentimental value; indulging in phone, news, and social media addictions because it feels like that’s what it takes to be relevant in today’s world…I let the tyranny of shoulds and musts be my guide. Now I understand this as a form of disrespect to my higher self.

I wrote almost a year ago about a newfound feeling of self-expansion. Before that, I briefly mentioned trying to shift the Titanic that is my mind. I can see, now, that I am managing to slowly but surely turn the ship. It’s happening in much smaller increments than I imagined, and it’s a progressive, organic, continual process of uncovering, layering, and connecting.

What’s helping me get unstuck? Lots of walks, writing, getting lost in music, gratitude for the people in my life, my creative angels, a new awareness of my body, a few strategic coaches and confidants, and a bit of medicine to break up the big stuff.

The process has felt like a slow-motion timelapse of a tightly closed bud revealing its petals. (Cue Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent).”) That’s why my word for 2025 is “flowering.” I love everything about this word and what it represents: a gradual unfolding, natural beauty, stimulating scent, the divine feminine, and the mystery of life itself.

I also love that the word “flow” is embedded in flowering. I know when I’m in flow, the ick dissolves and my internal voice finally gets quiet. Only then am I able to find the spaciousness — and the grace — to figure out who I really am.

This year, we’re flowering. Who’s in?

Leave a comment

Flowering: The Playlist

Every year since 2018, I’ve created a dumping ground playlist with all the songs that resonate with me that year — a tangible representation of my frequency, if you will. The playlist energizes me all year long and feeds my algorithm to deliver more of the same (which then informs the playlist). Last year’s was almost 19 hours long!

Many of the tracks I include are released in the current year, but sometimes they’re just new to me. I usually give the playlist an IFYKYK name, although sometimes I’m the only one who understands the reference. The first few songs put a certain energy and intention out there, but really each mix is best served shuffled.

So, that is the context for 2025’s playlist, “Flowering.” I welcome you to join me in tuning in and using music as a portal to another place, maybe even as a pathway to your highest self.

I couldn’t help but kick things off with the trippy bulldozer “Alice in Orchidverse.” These lyrics are just too perfect:

Something churning below is blooming.
Will you surrender to its beauty?