How did it end?
2025: in review.
January was long-winded and carried many lessons along with. January fortified old routines and built new ones. Time was somewhat on my side and I leveraged it. Maybe a little too much. I was optimistic for a potentially life-changing opportunity. It would set the tone for the rest of my year and I was determined not to fuck it up.
I fucked it up and wallowed for days on end.
But I had to quickly recognize that I had agency and my feelings of inadequacy would not modify the outcome. There would be many other dreams, many more rejections, many milestones to be achieved. I was losing the initial fervor I had come into the new year with and I had to adapt my emotions to my current state. I wish I had carried this lesson with me throughout the year.
New Girl and Intermezzo gave me comfort. I kept small promises I had made to myself.
February resurfaced pent-up anxiety and many, many questions about the limits of my abilities. I was desperate to move the needle, to make progress with my work.
My journal entries had various iterations of “I feel a strong sense of nonfulfillment with my life,” “my heart is filled with immense dread.” But also: “daring to feel good and notice life outside of my travails,” and “tomorrow will come and I will try again.”
February was a lesson in intentionality, new-found optimism, and self-soothing.
The highlight of the month was watching and reviewing every film on The Academy’s Best Picture nomination list. I enjoyed being a pseudo-cinephile.
March began with gratitude, at least for a new year. I wrote in my journal , “my life isn’t where I’d hoped it would be and that’s not okay, but I can live with it…”
March was demanding. My life turned on its head and my priorities shifted. Suddenly everything that mattered in February became secondary.
March was also suffused with a lot of French music and early mornings.
Photographs of the skies – bright and blue, grey, besotted with clouds, at noon, at the crack dawn, at twilight. My favourite LIB franchise (Sweden) and more reading. Hoarding life’s pleasures even when the world was closing in
I re-learned that everything passes in April. The yearning, the weight of memory, the desire that can threaten to suffocate you. It will likely come back, but it passes.
I relearned that old patterns will re-emerge if you’re not vigilant.
I created room for vulnerability in May. Opened myself up to the prospect of romance even if I knew, while dipping my toes into these new waters, that this experience would be short-lived. I was ready to immerse fully anyway.
May was barren goals, languishing, bouts of depression, flailing anchors, and a transition from illness to normalcy. It was experiencing the revolution of the sun, only the sun was my mind.
May was also Overcompensating, Forever, Hidden Gems, Breath, Eyes, Memory.
June brought light with it. Hope. A pep in my step. Some room for softness. June felt like that Louise Erdrich quote about letting yourself sit by an apple tree and tasting as many apples as you could as they fall around you in heaps.
Only for a moment, of course. Before I was buried in the depths of final year project. A reminder to open up to joy without trying to make it last forever.
I read When We Were Birds; it became one of my favourite books of the year.
In July, I desired emotional debridement. I was sick of being buried underneath the gunk of negative energy. I loved Too Much and I Am No Longer Waiting to Be the Best and Roman Fever and Bathsheba & Him. I spent a wholesome day with my friends. I read less and less. I had fully handed my life over to my degree; it no longer belonged to me.
Shame threatened to engulf me in August. Inaction and inertia kept me rooted in the same spot. I barely registered August as a concept.
I watched a lot of TV: The Buccaneers, Gilded Age (S3), Pulse.
September asked me to release all that shame and guilt. To stop avoiding the discomfort, to flow with the fear. To remember the reason why. To name and know what I want.
Morgan Harper Nichols, in her episode “at the threshold of August and September”, talked about embracing the cycle of things. She read a poem which I loved: “…for somehow through the push and pull of everything, they did not overtake you. Yes, you have felt it all, and you have also made it here.”
This was my watchword for the rest of the month.
I loved Someone Birthed Them Broken, especially one story about the inception and demise of a great friendship. I loved Breach. I loved spending the weekend with my friend after five years.
I got accepted into a programme I really wanted.
It was the highlight of my month.
The miracle came, but I was not ready for it. All I felt was fear of inadequacy, but I reminded myself not to run away from the hard thing—even if I really, really wanted to; to flow with the fear.
I had fun for one week and then the rest of October was a blur. All I remember are the incessant crashouts. I was writing the most important exam of my life in a few weeks and I did not feel ready at all. I desired a lot of soothing and reassurance and revisions.
I remember being nostalgic. I enjoyed old 2010s music, “And Love” by my queen, Florence Welch.
November and December were busy and chaotic and felt like many days in one. My mind was consumed with overwhelm and questions and heavy feelings. The biggest question, I think, was “how can I feel this way at the cusp of the biggest transition of my life?”
By the end of it all, I was exhausted.
November also gave me an unlikely friendship. It was new and tender and disarming. I opened myself up in ways I didn’t expect.
Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have had that many aspirations in the most pivotal year of my life. But I wanted it all. I had come into the new year feeling extremely deficient in many ways and I wanted to make up for lost time.
Of course, I crashed and burned in no time. Of course, I didn’t reach the peak of any of my goals. I was drowning. I would come up for air for a while only to be plunged back into the deep end.
I am ending the year exhausted and deeply unsatisfied despite achieving a dream I had toiled years for. For a while, I couldn’t make room for gratitude.
Yet each month offered small gifts amid the overarching heaviness that pulsed through the year.
At the end of the day, I feel anchored; in love, in tenderness. I am ending the year with possibly the biggest win of my life. Even if I cannot feel it in my heart, I know it in my head.
I am here, despite everything. That in itself is enough.