A year looks tidy on paper. January to December. One clean line. My 2025 did not move like that. It came in scenes, small ones. A notification. A quote that sat heavy in my chest. A long walk that made everything quiet enough for me to hear myself again. A graduation photo that looked familiar and still felt strange. If I had to name the thread that ran through my posts from January to December 25, it would be this: I kept circling the same question. How do you keep living honestly when you’re carrying loss, memory, and time?
January: Being seen, quietly
The year opened with something that felt both public and personal: being recognized as one of the “2024 Artists of the Year” by 34 Gallery. Recognition is odd. It can feel good, and it can also make you pause. It asks you to look at what you have been making, and why. I found myself writing about art and mental health, about rest, about the quieter kinds of discipline that keep a person steady. Not a dramatic reset. More like a small light turning on.
February to April: The old pain still speaks
By February, I was back in the territory that never really leaves me: grief. One line framed it plainly: “Tears are the words the heart cannot express.” April came with the kind of writing I think of as inner housekeeping. Posts about patterns. The knots we keep retightening in relationships, “karmic knots,” and the exhausting loop of what goes unsaid. There was also the kind of question that does not age out, a child’s question that still hits like a wave: “If I die, Mama, will I be alive again?” I was not trying to turn any of this into a lesson. I was doing what I’ve learned to do over the years: tell the truth, then sit with it long enough to understand what it is asking from me.
April to June: Walking as a way to carry what I can’t fix
Midyear brought a decision my husband and I made: walking the Camino Portuguese as an anniversary gift to ourselves, marking 40 years of marriage, while also holding the fact that it has been 25 years since our son died. Then the plan became physical, the Camino Portugués, days where your body has no choice but to keep going, one step, then another, then another. We were not doing it for a travel story. We were walking because sometimes grief needs motion, and sometimes prayer looks like sore feet and steady breathing. Arriving on the exact day we lost him did not feel like a performance. It felt like something gently placed in our hands.
September: Grief, in more than one form
September reminded me that grief isn’t a single event. It’s a whole landscape. Some of it was direct, naming the loss and refusing to make it prettier than it is. Some of it was quieter, the ache of what changes as you grow older, the parts of yourself that dim if you do not protect them. I quoted Norman Cousins: “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.” And some of it was the kind of grief people underestimate until they’ve lived it: pet grief, the emptiness after routines disappear, the way a house can feel unfamiliar when a presence is gone. September did not ask me to move on. It asked me to notice what love looks like when it suddenly has nowhere to land.
October: Talking to myself across time
October turned into a month of letters, like I was reaching backward and forward, trying to speak to myself in different seasons of life. I wrote to my 16-year-old self about shame, about cruelty disguised as teasing, about the small moments that quietly shape a person. And I wrote to my 85-year-old self too, part love, part warning, the kind of promise you make when you’ve seen enough life to know pride can become a trap. There was something grounding about that month. Not grand. Not sentimental. Just honest.
December: Memory, technology, and visibility
December always carries a mismatch. Lights outside, heaviness inside. I wrote about the pressure to perform happiness, and what it’s like when the season does not match the state of your heart. I also wrote about technology in a very personal way, uploading a graduation photo into an AI image generator, then feeling unsettled by the result. Familiar, but not quite, like meeting someone you recognize but cannot fully name. I also had an unexpected moment when my name showed up in a Grok-generated Top 10 list of influential political bloggers in the Philippines, and it reminded me how much I miss writing about good governance. And close to the end of the year, I returned to something I care about deeply: being older, and refusing to disappear. “Older, not invisible” was not just a line. It read like a decision.
What 2025 left me with
This year did not give me one big conclusion. It gave me smaller truths that kept repeating. Grief does not vanish. It changes shape. Healing is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is a long walk. Sometimes it is a sentence you finally say out loud. Sometimes it is a story you stop telling yourself. And getting older should not mean becoming invisible, not in families, not at work, not in public life.
If you’ve been reading along, thank you.
And if you’re ending 2025 feeling tender, missing someone, carrying something, or simply tired, it does not mean you’re doing life wrong. It might just mean you loved deeply. It’s not perfect. But it can be different.
Old New Year photos.
