Photo by Chris Santi on Unsplash
I wasn’t planning on doing an end-of-year recap. Mainly because I had lost all sense of time. I barely understand it’s December, let alone that tomorrow is 2026.
Yet when I realised that 2025 was about to end, I was hit with a sense of shock. I could barely recall where 2025 went. And I don’t mean that in a whimsical ‘time flies when you’re having fun’ sort of thing. I mean it in a – I have massive blanks in my memory of what even happened – kind of way.
The first instinct usually betrays the inner workings. The sense of panic of not having ‘achieved’ much is a sign that I’m still rooted in a sense of needing achievement. 2025 was completely bereft of achievement. Externally, this year looks like a failure. I went from having a prestigious sounding job to an unemployed, barely functioning adult. As time has gone on, I have turned more insular, with fewer social contacts and friends.
But that was also the point. I needed to be ripped away from a life that was not mine.
I started 2025 feeling totally lost. I had a sense of continuous existential angst. I had no idea where my place in society was. I constantly questioned what the point even was of me living. I felt doomed to be a floating ghost in a world which had no desire for me to even exist.
Coming to the end of the year, I feel far more calm and grounded. I am better rested, and have a way stronger sense of stability. I’m still not ‘there’ yet, but I have hope for the future. I also understand, at least in broad terms, my life trajectory and where I’m meant to be heading.
The journey between these two points was a massacre. I essentially needed to strip out any pretense I had of living a normal life. Societal and community comforts will probably not be something I experience for much of my adult life. Instead, I am somewhere between being blessed or cursed. My role is one of the seer. I observe truths. In theory this is a blessing as I can see things that most people cannot. In practice, I am cursed to a marginal existence as that person that says things people don’t want to hear.
Although my career journey on paper looks impressive, it has been filled with a sense of angst and frustration pretty much throughout. Being able to see means seeing the dysfunctions of the modern workplace. I’ve often felt like I was watching a car crash in slow motion. Yet I also quickly learnt that averting people to the danger would be upsetting the peace. I would either be ignored or be blamed for creating problems. The only way to deal with it was to play willful ignorance to things that were obviously wrong. Piece by piece, I felt my soul being crushed. No wonder the burnout eventually came.
I also have found I do not fit into most social spaces. For the normative groups, I’m the oddball who has too many radical beliefs. In the radical groups, I’m too nuanced and question things too much. I think group dynamics dictate a certain level of compromise around personal opinion and the group collective. For most people, this seems to be a worthy trade. But for me, shifting away from my integrity feels like a deep internal betrayal. I’m not sure whether that is because I have too many points of difference to most groups, or because I have an inherent heightened value on my personal integrity.
I’ve spent the recent months shifting between states of anger to mourning. Anger at realising that I have been given life instructions that were leading me to internal ruin. Mourning for the life that was meant to be so much easier, warmer and simpler.
Some days I had a sense of energy. Other days I barely could lift myself out of bed. The Anxiety and internal pain at certain points felt never-ending. When it seemed like my body was coming back to life, then a new phase of intense internal processing began.
I had crazy, vivid dreams. In one, I vomited blood and needed to find Gordon Ramsay for help. Another, I had the power to turn invisible, and used it to escape people chasing me because I had killed people they knew. Even last night, I had a dream of being back in my classroom for English in Year 9, being cordial with an imaginary frenemy. My understanding is that this is my psyche doing dramatic rewrites of deep-rooted identity.
2025 was the toughest year I’ll have in my adult life. The stuff I’m describing is well beyond the norm of what most people experience. But the upshot is that I’m finally reaching a place of clarity.
Although the toughest, 2025 will also probably be the most important year I live. It has set the run-way for the rest of my adult life.