Reflecting on my 2024

Home—the long way round

Jan 15, 2025

Welcome to Girl Culture, the newsletter where Caroline Siede examines pop culture, feminism, and more. You can learn about Girl Culture’s mission here and support here.

As someone with an obsessive personality, I’ve learned that the only way to get myself out of a rabbit hole is to just keep on digging deeper until I finally get sick of it. And for the past two years, I think my obsessive rabbit hole has been… running away from my problems. After a rocky 2021, I got my first ever truly high-paying contract gig just as The A.V. Club was imploding. So when that gig ended suddenly at the end of 2022, I was left with a full bank account, no regular freelance work, and absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

So, naturally, I decided to make up for lost time with all the traveling I never got to do when I was living paycheck to paycheck as a freelancer for the first 8 years of my career. Across 2023 and 2024 I went to Disneyland twice, saw the Eras Tour three times, enjoyed a lovely family reunion in Palm Springs, spent a glorious week in London, visited the mountains of Boone, North Carolina, and took a spontaneous trip to Toronto. I also found the time to reorganize my apartment, reconnect with friends I’d lost touch with during the pandemic, and take on copyediting gigs outside of the world of cultural criticism. Most importantly, I found myself actually able to enjoy the things I was doing, unlike in 2023 where my mental health felt far more frantic.

Along the way a funny thing happened. I started to realize that I actually like being a film and TV critic—not just because it’s the career path I fell into out of college but because it’s something I find a lot of value and purpose and enjoyment in as a (newly) 35-year-old. It’s a realization I sort of came to last year, as I celebrated the first six months of Girl Culture’s existence. But I think I needed to really get sick of running away before I could realize just how much I enjoy the online world I’ve built for myself over the past decade.

It certainly helps that The A.V. Club is back in my life again. After Paste bought the company and rehired the wonderful Danette Chavez as editor-in-chief in July, I made the leap to return as well. That includes launching my brand-new column, Women of Action, in which I dig into the history of women-driven action movies one film at a time—a fun shift from all the rom-com writing I used to do in my old column When Romance Met Comedy.

In this second phase of my career, however, I’m trying not to tie my freelance work to just one individual site anymore. I’ve loved getting to write more for the smart, funny folks at The Daily Beast throughout 2024. I was also thrilled to start writing for The Boston Globe at the end of the year as well. I got to contribute to IndieWire’s 2024 critics poll of the best movies of the year recently. And I really can’t say enough good things about the community Myles McNutt has built at Episodic Medium, where I got to write weekly reviews of Echo, Doctor Who, Agatha All Along, and the new sitcom St. Denis Medical—assignments that are crucial to giving me a sense of structure and financial stability in the wild, weird world of freelancing.

This was also my first full year running Girl Culture and I’m really proud of the work I did here and the community I’m continuing to build with you all. My goal was to publish at least one piece per month and I managed to write 19 reviews/features, plus a reflection on 2023 and a gymnastics schedule (remember the Olympics?!?). I wrote about big movies like Wicked, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us; tackled trending TV shows like Bridgerton and Emily In Paris; covered classics like It Happened One Night; weighed in on Taylor Swift’s latest album; and even got accredited to cover the Chicago International Film Festival on behalf of the site—a welcome dose of legitimacy for this burgeoning creative project. And while I kicked off 2024 not knowing exactly what I wanted Girl Culture to be, I’m heading into this year brimming with ideas for projects I want to take on here. (Let’s just say some Disney princesses might be on the docket…)

I also want to take a moment to say how deeply grateful I am for all of you who support the work I do here at Girl Culture. Though freelancing is my ideal way to work, it’s a hard way to make a living, even when I’m regularly getting published at various sites. I earn somewhere between $150-$300 for every full-length piece I write—including research-heavy projects that take days to work on. So even when I have a “full” workload, it’s obviously quite hard to get that to add up to a full income. Having Girl Culture as another piece of the puzzle has been a huge help this year. If you’d like to support the newsletter financially, you can become a paid subscriber here. Or you can always just share your favorite pieces with your friends! That really means a lot too and is one of the main reasons I’m committed to keeping my writing here free to all.

Of course, the woes of freelancing are nothing compared to the many horrifying problems in the world right now. I’ve spent much of this year thinking about the genocide in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the ever-growing reality of climate change, the terrifying state of American politics, the impact of Hurricane Helene, and—as I write this—the devastating fires in LA. I also lost two beloved “grown-ups” in my life this year and navigating that grief alongside the even deeper grief of their immediate families has been a reminder of how important sensitivity, empathy, and community truly are. That’s the energy I want to bring into 2025, balanced with the righteous fury we need to make true political change.

With that, I’ll leave you with wishes for a happy new year (if that’s still something we say mid-January) and a roundup of all the major writing and podcasts I did in 2024. If you’d like to support my work somewhere other than Substack, you can find me on Kofi, PayPal, or Venmo, and follow me on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Bluesky. And for a little glimpse into the diary of my life, here are similar year-end wrap-ups I did for 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

I’ll be back later this month with a list of my favorite movies and TV shows of 2024!

Girl Culture

Women of Action

The A.V. Club

The Daily Beast

The Boston Globe

Girl Culture

Reflecting on my 2024

Home—the long way round

Girl Culture

Women of Action

The A.V. Club

The Daily Beast

The Boston Globe

Block Club Chicago

Podcasts/Radio

Episodic Medium

Discussion about this post