bruises

a summary of 2025 and a hope for something better

Photo by Abigail on Unsplash

I can say, without much hesitation, that 2025 was a terrible year. Not unrelentingly so — there were bright moments threaded through it — but awful in the way that seeps in slowly, settles in the body, and leaves you feeling older by the end of it.

I was depressed by April. Then I lost my job. Then I married the love of my life — which is, undeniably, one of the best things that has ever happened to me — and then I remained unemployed for six months, a stretch of time that felt elastic and unreal, during which I became convinced I was losing my mind. I can recall very little from those months. Just as the year tipped over into 2026, I found a fixed-term contract. On paper, this looks like an arc. A story with a beginning, middle, and something resembling an end. I suppose I should feel proud of having made it through. But mostly, if I’m honest, it has all been bone-deep exhausting. My emotions feel as though they’ve been put through several rounds in a boxing ring and left there, blinking, long after the bell.

I cried a lot in 2025. I am not, by nature, a crier, but this was the kind of crying that demands the full involvement of the body. Shuddering sobs. The sort that leave your eyes swollen and aching, that require ice packs and deliberate, careful breaths so you don’t choke on yourself. That kind of crying.

And I didn’t write. I couldn’t. Everything I tried to put down felt unbearably sad, and somewhere inside me, I knew that stepping away from writing was the only way I might eventually return to it.

Writing, for me, has always been a little like pressing on a bruise. That small, almost morbid curiosity: does it hurt? You feel it before you think it — a sharpness beneath the skin, a reminder of what’s still there. I do this with thoughts, with memories. I press and press until I think I understand them, until they begin to take shape, and then I write. There is comfort in that, in giving structure to the ache. In trying to understand what you feel so that you can file it away as a resolved issue. But last year, every attempt to write produced a new kind of pain. One I wasn’t ready to look at directly. So I stopped pressing. I stopped writing.

I thought this would frighten me. And it did, but it also made space.

Not writing unnerved me because I like plans and rhythms, and schedules. But forcing myself to sit down with nothing to say was worse. I had ideas about how the year might unfold, about what it would produce, and none of that came to pass. And I was angry. A lot. And so incredibly sad. So I pivoted. I read more. I went for walks without narrating them to myself, without filing sensations away for later use. I let myself live without turning everything into material. I wasn’t online much either; I stopped offering my life up to the internet. The world grew quieter that way — less extractive, more inhabitable. It was freeing, and it also very much wasn’t. I became trapped in my own head, which is its own sort of torture. I missed writing. I just didn’t know how to return to it.

The year moved on regardless. I watched the weather change, felt time accelerate as it always does, spring tipping into summer, then autumn, then winter. I sat inside and watched our fig tree grow leaves and fruit, then shed them again. Everything felt slightly off-kilter, as though I were perpetually a few steps behind, facing the wrong direction. Like falling off a cliff, repeatedly. It was horrible.

I know I had put pressure on myself. But it is all I have ever known to do. To push and push, to make sense of it all — to turn discomfort into meaning, to extract beauty from the mess and shape it into something neat and lyrical. We love that idea, don’t we? That everything happens for a reason. That every bad year comes with a lesson attached. But life isn’t always ready to be written about. Sometimes it needs time to settle, to turn itself over quietly in the dark. Sometimes that takes months. Sometimes there is no lesson to learn but to just keep going. A clever blue fish said something similar.

Now, when I think about writing again, it doesn’t feel sharp. It doesn’t feel compulsory. It feels like something I might get to do. The impulse is returning slowly, gently — like light finding its way through thin curtains in the morning. A sentence appears in my notes app. A thought drifts past as I fall asleep, and I let it go. Nothing urgent. Nothing demanding.

I’m moving carefully, wary of rushing whatever fragile thing is beginning to spark again. I have plans for 2026 — loose ones, provisional ones — and a quiet hope that it might be a better year. Or at least a softer one.

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