dear 2025

i will learn to love you

you have a big year to beat. 2024 was huge, my favourite year by far, filled with a lot less fight/flight/freeze, a lot more love and certainty, a lot more laughter, a treasure trove of memories to cherish for years to come.

it was filled with belonging and happiness more than it was filled with skittishness and loneliness. it was filled with new friends and old friends and countless pages turning. it was filled with eagles soaring to new heights, dolphins diving to new depths, new horizons, new attitudes. old wounds stitching themselves closed, old books becoming bibles, old haunts becoming something sacred and special.

you can’t possibly fill 2024’s shoes. you have no glittering promise, no taunting allure of the “golden days”. you’re an empty year, a graveyard year. i’m standing on the cliff face of you, again, and instead of a wondrous ocean and the new land in the distance that 2024 seemed to hold, i can’t see through the fog. instead of the deep breath of courage and the tremors of excitement, i find myself clasped by the shaky, spindly fingers of fear and drenched in despair.

but as much as you scare me, as much as i don’t want this year to happen, as much as i wish i could close my eyes, and wake up in 2026, with my dreams finalised by someone else, there is nothing i can do. you are already here, and ticking onwards, another day, and another. we’re already a week into 2025. i don’t have a journal, or goals, or a resolution.

but i’m learning it’s ok to be a little late. a little late to uni. a little late to my dreams. a little late in figuring out which paths i want to run headfirst down. a little late to starting a journal, or changing my job, or reorganising my room. this is a year of lateness, after all. no matter what i want to do or say about it.

so i will start my journal 12 days late in the year, and i will think up a resolution that doesn’t meet those stupid S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria, something lame like “hydrating more”, and i will enter the year with the flippancy i have always dreamed of achieving.

i will learn the value of a year without promise, without expectation, without anything attached. a floating year.

you do not have to be big, or bold, or grandiose to be beautiful. last year was the year of mountains and monuments. this year will be for wildflowers and dragonflies and tiny birds on train stations.

last year was for fireworks of memories. this year is for cosy fireplaces and the comfort of close friends. last year was for final moments, and this year is for firsts.

nothing is fixed. nothing has ever been fixed. i can see that now. the friendships i made last year have not sunk, they will merely take on a different journey. the opportunities i wanted have not vanished, they are waiting around a corner for me to stumble into them.

i will start up a hobby and be truly, horrendously awful at it, and it will not matter, because it will never be my career. i will think about my career but i will not let my life be dictated by it, not yet. 2026 can be stressful, this year is allowed to be idyllic. dangerously so.

i will spend more time with friends in quiet, softer ways. we will have our journals and our waterfalls and our movies, we will have library visits and city walks and nothing in big, loud, obnoxious groups full of people who secretly hate each other.

i can decorate my room as many times as i like, or reorder it, or simply leave it as it is. 2 weeks might as well be 2 months, or 2 years, and i cannot predict the future, nor how long i will be living in this room.

i will learn epicurean philosophy and mantras. i am not afraid of storms, for i am learning how to sail my ship. i am not afraid of becoming amy march on my way to attempt to be jo. i am not afraid. whatever happens will happen, and whatever happens, i’m letting it.

dear 2025, i will not let my fear of you stop you from becoming beautiful. i will not let my fear of myself stop me from growing. i will not let my fear stop my world.