2025

I’m going to call 2025 the year that I survived, because for a while there, I wasn’t quite sure that I’d make it to the end. Not to be all dramatic or whatever but this damn year might actually have been the worst year of my whole life – and there are some serious contenders for that title.

I thought I was holding things together pretty well in the first half of 2025, but looking back now, that was sheer delusion. I wasn’t holding anything together; I was swallowing things, burying them deep, and calling it compartmentalisation – which is a good idea in theory. In reality, though, I was building a caldera of rage that was ready to blow at any moment; absorbing the pain, anger, hurt, and betrayal, then turning it into red-hot lava.

Eventually, of course, everything spilled out in an almighty eruption. Too much pressure. Not enough space. Boom. My little caldera reached maximum capacity, shooting out lava that scorched and burned every bridge, every person, every structure in its path. I burned my whole life down. Gone. Dead. Lovers, friends, family, my home, my belongings, my sanity, my health – all lost, changed, or otherwise scorched.

But what was it that Patrick Pearse said? Oh, yes: “From death springs life.”

Red-hot lava soon cools, then nourishes the dead earth with minerals. In time and with some patience, planted seeds start to sprout. The now-enriched earth gives life to new plants and trees, even entire forests eventually. Isn’t that how it goes? Isn’t that what I learned at school and from all those nature documentaries?

Maybe there is some truth to it. Maybe the first signs of life are starting to peer through the once-scorched earth. Aren’t I laughing again? Smiling again? Perhaps even a little more than I did in ‘The Before?’ Aren’t I rebuilding those lava-burnt roads and bridges again? Rebuilding myself again, stronger and more durable and better equipped?

In times such as these all those lines and cliches seem to ring true. There is light at the end of a tunnel. The caterpillar does transform into a beautiful butterfly. Life does spring from death. What doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. You will make it through.

Knowledge is power, too.

Because now, I know.

I know that they will never change, but I also know that I’m capable of not only dealing with it but also dealing with it alone. I know that I don’t need them. And I also know that things are better with them gone. I know who my trusted people are, and I know that they are the best trusted people in the world. But I also know that I can handle a lot more than I thought I could.

Maybe I didn’t know those things enough before. But now, I do. I’ve gone from thinking that throwing myself off a bridge was better for everyone, to looking at my sadness getting smaller and smaller over my shoulder. It’s in my rearview mirror now. I’m through it, past it, over the worst of it. I no longer cry from morning to night, or lock myself away like some princess in a tower that needs saving.

Instead, I chose to save myself. I threw myself over my shoulder, then rode off into the night. Perhaps that’s what real, true, ground-shaking love is – discovering that you are your own white knight and that you’re perfectly capable of saving yourself? If that’s the case, I won the jackpot in 2025. I found the biggest, baddest, toughest white knight of them all… and I know, she’ll save me every damn time.

2025 was the year that I survived, but it was also the year that I found myself again.

I guess, all in all, 2025 wasn’t so bad, after all.