At the beginning of every year, we go through the regular old task of remembering to write the date of the year accurately. It took me 10 days to sign ‘2025’ in my journal entries last year. This year it’s going to take me 2027.
In the last few days, I’ve found myself signing 2024 as the date in my entries.
I think I’ve skipped an entire year in my head. Somewhere I was trying to forget 2025 existed. This has happened to me in the past where I’ve just completely hit skip in the cognitive load to remember events, people, entire lifetimes during years I’ve found to be traumatic.
2025 was something else. I don’t know if I’ve ever been pushed to the edge of confronting the best and worst parts of myself, my heart’s deepest desires, and reckoning with what’s important the way I’d been forced to last year.
So naturally, I absolutely have no interest in remembering any of it. Because I’ll have to do the bloody work once I know what I want. Why can’t the things I already have be the things I want? (Actually maybe I do). Someone framed my high-stress year as a high-agency period between doctor visits, financial stress, and relationship trouble. I felt like I wanted to throw them off the roof and hug them at the same time.
My therapist often iterates things from the lens of ‘making choices’; that there is no good or evil, there are only choices. I’ve exercised a lot of choices in 2025 (I almost typed a different year again). Some blind, some painfully aware, mostly just from a place of standing at the edge of constantly having to choose differently or better or more or less.
I always remember Sridevi in English Vinglish. After being treated terribly by her family for not “speaking good English”, a colonial marker for status and esteem in India, she goes out during a visit to the U.S. in search of proficiency over this non-native tongue through an English-speaking course. She finds English, but also friends, and shockingly, herself in the process.
And by the end of the movie (after one of my favourite speeches of all time at her niece’s wedding), she forgives her family. What bothered me wasn’t just that she forgave her condescending husband, but how easily she did. No pauses, no throwing laddoos in his face, no alimony, nothing. Just immediate ‘yes ok u r husband, ilu sm’.
She said, “When you don’t like yourself, new things start looking very attractive. But when you come back to yourself, the things that already exist in your life look good to you.” [Paraphrase, but she was mostly talking about her life, not just her people].
I think 2025 was my stupid Sridevi-husband. I was struggling to forgive him all year. But my high-stress, high-agency self made choices that allowed me to find a way back to myself, to what I want, and more importantly, to accepting the reality that you’ve got to find a way to fulfil your own needs yourself more often than you rely on others to do it for you. You just can’t escape parenting yourself, friends.
I am now focused on finding my own proficiency, through work, through turning up to do hard things, to be with my deepest discomforts, through nourishing myself, through hopefully taking myself out on dates, through communicating with authenticity even if being authentic is inconvenient to everyone in my life.
As soon as I arrived at this place, I found it very easy to forgive my rude 2025-husband. Forgiveness came to me as easily as slipping into my most familiar shorts (I am not a pyjama girl).
The things that I already have feel important, vital, and incredibly attractive. I will water this forest in 2026 (I got the date right). I will be the tree I want to see in the world.
