Personal Essay: The Year That Was

 

Graphic Design by Jacqueline Davis Moranti

This past year, 2025, didn’t just happen to me, it dismantled me. I entered it with plans, goals, bright ideas and a sense of momentum. By the end, I discovered that life doesn’t unfold along tidy lines. It bends you, twists you, splits you open, and in those fissures you find the truth you’d been running from.

In January I walked in with energy, hopeful, confident, convinced I knew who I was and WHERE I was going. I believed that tenacity and grit were the currencies of transformation. I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could sculpt the life I wanted with precision: just enough intention, just enough effort. That notion was lovely in theory, but it didn’t prepare me for the surrender this year demanded.

The lessons of 2025 weren’t delivered gently, they hit like sudden downpours in places I thought were dry. I lost versions of myself I didn’t even know I was still carrying. Identities that once gave me comfort revealed themselves as outdated armor. Projects that felt vital fizzled. Bonds I assumed were steadfast faded into echoes. Every time something fell away whether a vision I held, a relationship, or a sense of certainty, it felt like a fracture. And yet, it wasn’t destruction. It was admission: if those pieces were capable of leaving, then they were never truly mine to hold.

There were manyyyyyy days I felt broken. But, not broken in the poetic sense, but broken wide open. I stared at mirrors and saw past the surface, I saw the parts of myself I had stitched over with optimism and denial. I realized how deeply I’d buried grief, unmet needs, unspoken desires that were just as real as the goals I chased.

In the middle of what felt like an unraveling, I learned something essential: vulnerability isn’t weakness,  it’s a current that connects every fold of our experience. When I cried, I wasn’t falling apart. I was releasing. When I failed, I wasn’t proving I was unworthy. I was learning what I really want to carry forward.

There were moments of loss that made me wonder how many times a heart can hurt and still keep beating. There were professional pivots that shook the foundation of what I thought I wanted. There were nights where sleep felt like a distant guest, honest grief, unfiltered fear, yearning for a version of myself that may never exist again.

But somewhere in that wide open terrain, something unexpected grew. I discovered strength that wasn’t forged by sheer willpower, but by surrender. I found clarity in the space where I stopped pushing and started allowing. I learned that the person I am becoming is someone who grows not despite the pain, but because of it.

By the end of this year, I no longer wanted to cling to comfort or certainty. I wanted truth, even when it stings, even when it asks me to unlearn who I thought I was. I wanted a life that matches the real contours of my heart, not the polished idea of it.

2025 didn’t just stretch me, it shook me open. It made me meet myself in places I’d long avoided. It asked me to look at what hurt, what mattered, what was worth keeping, and what was not. That kind of reckoning isn’t peaceful. It isn’t quiet. It’s raw, chaotic, confusing, and at times unbearably honest.

Now I can say this: everything I lost, I needed to let go of so that what remains has room to breathe. What came apart showed me what will endure. What emptied out made space for something real to move in.

As 2025 ends, I’m carrying forward not just lessons but a deeper sense of self, one shaped by challenge, tempered by adversity, and anchored in a clarity that could only come from being broken open.