2025 In Review
For the past few months I’ve been telling myself a story that 2025 was a “bad” year. Upon coming to write this, I decided “bad” isn’t actually a useful way to characterise a whole year, and furthermore that this one had many redeeming features. Admittedly, I suffered a lot in the last 12 months, and earlier drafts of this post included descriptions of what happened to cause said suffering, as some kind of attempt at virtue-through-vulnerability. The whole thing steered dangerously close to victimhood instead, and I don’t want to dwell unnecessarily; the point is to highlight the lessons learned and the ways I grew.
I had some amazing things happen this year. Someone very dear to me reappeared in my life after not speaking for over three years, and we quickly returned to being best friends. I feel closer to my brother than ever before, after getting to follow his band round on tour and even play on stage with them. I felt inspired by how he and his friends take themselves far less seriously than me and any of my friends, and seem happier for it.1 I was touched by the overwhelming generosity of my own (admittedly sometimes over-serious) friends; they fed and housed me for large parts of the year, and offered me work even when I was evidently not at my best. At times when I most needed the love of others, I received it.
This year involved confronting many painful realities. For most of my career, I’ve assumed that if I work sufficiently hard to get a higher-paying/more prestigious job then I will feel fulfilled in my work, and the dissatisfaction up to that point will have all been worth it. It finally sunk in that this is not the case, and I need to approach my career differently if I’m going to get what I want. I am not the romantic partner that I aspire to be, and I have a lot of work to do on myself if I want to get there. I have not outgrown my depression - it will require vigilance, diligence and perseverance to manage in the long term, possibly for the rest of my life. My identity was previously based on superficial, external things that could (and did) crumble at any moment, because it was easier to construct it that way rather than do the hard work of recognising my own intrinsic value. I’ve had a sinister idea lurking in my subconscious for my whole life - I will fix my problems, one by one, until eventually I have none and live out the remainder of my days in constant bliss. This year, I have killed that idea.
As I said, these confrontations hurt, but now I am a step closer to living in the real world. I’m grateful to my past self for enduring the pain for the benefit of my current and future selves. The recent Tarantino/Dano spat has had me thinking about the film Little Miss Sunshine a lot.2 In particular, the scene where Frank tells Dwayne about Proust’s reflection that the good years of his life were a total waste; it was the suffering that made him who he was.3
Sure, it’s a bit twee, but I buy it nonetheless. I don’t think I’d change the last year - I felt alive, and I have no desire to change that. I scrabbled around for meaning and found little, but now I think that not only was I looking in the wrong places, I was overvaluing the concept of meaning in the first place. Visa is right - I’ve been allowing myself to be eaten alive by the Scylla of excruciating meaning, and in fact I should be spending equal time flirting with the Charybdis of meaninglessness.
As always, I have big ambitions for next year, and plan to use all the lessons I learned in order to ensure that 2026 is a time of transformation for me - but more on that soon. Happy new year, dear readers; I hope you all find joy and prosperity in 2026.
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Which is not to say that they don’t take their art extremely seriously, because they certainly do. It is simply to say that, off-stage, they can laugh at themselves and feel quite at ease, seemingly unbothered about what others around them might think. I wonder if their cathartic on-stage expression begets this kind of security outside of performing? ↩︎
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One of my favourites of all time; I adore Dano and duly brand Tarantino as a heretic. ↩︎
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If I was even more of a snarky asshole then probably I’d make some kind of joke here about the suffering inherent in reading In Search of Lost Time, but I’m endeavouring not to be and so I won’t. ↩︎