What 2025 Left Behind

Last year flew by.

It was one of those years that still feels difficult to put into words, as if the act of trying to do so creates an ache. The kind of year that held joy, adventure, ugliness, and pain all mangled up together into something impossibly complicated. A year that, taken at face value, should be effortless to name, and yet, extraordinary as it was, when I truly allow myself to step back into the past, and unravel 2025, it leaves me with the most imperceptible, yet undeniably bad taste.

2025 was a year of adventure, love, energy, and highs. It was the year I took four international trips to countries that used to live on lists. It was the year I went on my honeymoon and spent two weeks falling in love all over again. The year we spent quality time with both of our families and welcomed the happiest kinds of news, and the year I said yes to every music event as if my life depended on it. But most memorably, it was the year we expanded our family, and in turn our lives, when we welcomed our sweet little goldendoodle, Dashi.

2025 was a year coloured with thrill, and happy memories, and yet when I look back, it feels like a year painted with shadows. A year underwritten by loss.

2025 was the year we lost our sweet Nila, our family’s dog who I spent all of my twenties with, the one who loved so many versions of me without asking me to be anything more. Her life was so deeply woven into our home, our routines and our lives that her absence felt like the air had gone stale, like the rooms had become unfamiliar, like the warmth we were so used to living inside simply drained out. She was everything to my family in the way that only a soul dog can be, so surrounded and infused with love that her passing felt like our lives had become depleted of it.

Losing her left a wound in my soul that I cannot conceive of a way to heal, the mere thought leaving me crippled with grief, clutching my chest as though, if I just held on tight enough, I could feel her again, touch her again, hold her again, and this time never let her go.

After she passed, what remained of the year was cold.

It kept going in all the ways it always does, but something in me turned inward, something in me went quiet. I carried through the motions, I laughed, I traveled, I showed up, I did what people do when life is still moving and they cannot afford to stay behind. All the while swallowing the lump in my throat, breathing through the spasm in my chest, blinking back the well of tears in my eyes, becoming an expert at performing, at holding myself together, only to fall apart in the quiet moments where grief was the only thing I knew.

And it was not just that I lost her, but that with her I knew I lost myself as well. Her existence was so deeply woven into the fabric of everything I was, of everything I loved, that her absence felt like pulling on the thread that was holding it all together.

But Nila wasn’t the only absence I had to carry.

It seemed like so much of what I loved was slipping through my fingers, turning into versions of itself I could no longer recognize. I lost friendships. I lost my motivation. I lost my drive, and my focus on what truly mattered. I lost my understanding of who I was and who I wanted to be. I lost what used to be a persistent glimmer of hope, of optimism, the steady assurance that everything would always work out in the end. And amidst it all, I lost something that made the reflection looking back at me feel unrecognizable; I lost my light. I lost the spark I took years to recognize, to embrace, to accept, and love as what made me, me.

I was losing, and although it wasn’t all at once, it happened slowly, quietly, in small moments where I chose the familiar ache of the past, where I focused on an insufferable frustration, on questions without answers, where I chose to sink deeper into the isolation, and found familiarity in the hurt.

I spent so much of the year looking back at what used to be that I became almost afraid to think of what could be, as if I was convinced that what was before me would undoubtedly be coated with the same shadow, the same hurt, the same fears that so many things already were. As if hoping was something I forgot how to practice, as if optimism was something I was incapable of choosing.

I moved in and out of the dark corners of my mind, focusing on all of the things that hurt rather than on all of that which filled me with light, so much so that in 2025, somewhere in the middle of all the excitement and movement and noise, I lost my way back to who I was.

But 2026 will be the year I find myself again.

The year I remember exactly who I am. The year I find my energy, my joys, my light, and hold onto it, protect it. The year I relearn to focus on what I can control rather than what I cannot. This year I will build something new instead of living inside the jagged fragments of all that was left broken. It is the year I put my energy towards growth, the year I stop resisting change and begin to believe that whatever is evolving has always been, and will always be, what is best for me.

It’s the year I trust the Universe once again.

There are memories that live in the dark corners of my mind, submerged in grief. And perhaps one day I will learn to breathe long enough to seek them out and pull them to the surface, but for now I simply choose to keep my head above water. Although moving forward may feel more painful than living in the past, I know my heart can still love all that 2025 left behind fully and deeply, maybe even more than if it had been left unscathed.

I don’t know what 2026 holds, but I choose to believe that the paths quietly taking shape, the ones the Universe creates in her own time and her own way, are better and brighter.

They have to be.