Reflections 2025

2025 has been a strange year. I found myself back into the rigour of assignment and exam preparation after ages, trying to get into the mindset of an earnest student, and embarrassingly and less enthusiastically, into the middle of old patterns I thought I had outgrown.

It’s been the kind of year that reveals its significance only at the eleventh hour, just before the calendar changes, and you don’t know whether to be grateful for God’s neon signal or stunned.

Winter Wonderland Wonders

It has brought home uncomfortable truths that were best left gathering dust. Any worthwhile joy demands you to risk visibility, vulnerability and pain, and in refusing to engage with your fears to overcome them, you are choosing to stay stuck. This lack of bravery makes it more difficult to leave the past behind where it belongs, or even convince yourself that you deserve absolution too.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about forgiveness, not the Christian, Wake Up Dead Man variety, but the internally transformative one. The one where you try to remind yourself that you did not have the wisdom of hindsight at the time and that you are not a masochist but a fallible human making the best possible decisions with the tools, readiness and emotional maturity available to you (however limited in scope).

The year has taught me that clarity, when it comes too late, is cruel. Your mind becomes an overzealous editor, replaying missed chances and missteps on loop. Secure people, I’m told, take rejection sportingly and often walk away. Insecure ones resist. And sometimes, inconveniently, you can be both, vacillating between hope and despair, depending on the day, hour, or sleep debt.

Heartache may not come knocking with promises or even an invitation. It’s especially disorienting when nothing was formally owed. You slowly realise that intention doesn’t equal action, and restraint doesn’t shield you from consequences.

This year has pushed me into philosophical overdrive on questions of destiny and agency, and I’m still undecided (an infuriating Achilles Heel). Either way, surrender doesn’t come easy, and if destiny is something we create, the least we owe ourselves is self-forgiveness and the ability to start again at our beginnings. Growth, it turns out, doesn’t always look dignified. Sometimes it looks like Rudolph.

Here’s hoping the next year is kinder. And if it isn’t, here’s hoping I am.