What was my 2025 highlight?
A friend asked me that today, and for the first time, I didn’t know how to answer.
I lost my dad almost a year ago. What followed wasn’t a single moment, but a long stretch of grief, regret, and conversations I can no longer have. That doesn’t fit neatly into the word highlight. But it has shaped everything.
It made me question whether highlights are supposed to be joyful milestones only, or whether they can also be the things that quietly rearrange you.
If I had to look closer, maybe the highlights weren’t obvious events.
Maybe it was Samu learning how to swim — small, ordinary, and somehow grounding.
Maybe it was watching my mum slowly recover after her neck surgery, progress measured in millimetres, not miracles.
Maybe it was seeing the northern lights again and feeling, briefly, that the world is still vast and indifferent in a comforting way.
Maybe it was building Substance — not as a success story, but as proof that I can still create, even when I’m tired and unsure.
Maybe it was being burned by my own hiring decisions at Deema & Co, and realising I now have a much lower tolerance for bullshit — and that letting go might be an act of clarity, not failure.
Or maybe the highlight is simpler and heavier at the same time: that I am still here.
2025 didn’t give me a clean headline moment.
It gave me endurance.
It gave me discernment.
It forced me to sit with loss, disillusionment, and the uncomfortable truth that not all years are meant to be celebrated — some are meant to be survived.
If this year has a highlight, it might be this:
I didn’t collapse into bitterness.
I didn’t disappear.
I’m still choosing, even if I don’t yet know what I’m choosing next.
And for now, that has to be enough.
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