2025: Friends, Family, Faith, Love, and Everything in Between

Here are the lessons I learned in 2025.

Not because I mastered them, and not because I executed them perfectly, but because the year dumped me some lessons.

Nothing about 2025 felt dramatic in the moment, but looking back, it quietly rearranged my priorities and my life.

What I Thought The Year Would Be

I remember thinking at the end of 2024 that I was going to start 2025 with a bang, or a few bangs. I made a list of things I wanted to do, and I remember focusing on the outcomes rather than the process it involved.

However, I have come to learn that outcomes are seductive. They promise clarity, validation, and proof that we made it.  But, I have learned they’re also noisy and temporary. When I started a new business this year, it showed me how easy it is to chase movement without direction, productivity without meaning, resilience without rest. What shifted wasn’t what I achieved (which I am truly grateful for), but how I paid attention. I became more aware of what drains me, what steadies me, and what quietly pulls me off course. I noticed patterns I used to excuse. I stopped forcing momentum where alignment was missing.

I became aware of how much I used outcomes as a compass, and how easily I let results determine my sense of worth, direction, and confidence. When things worked, I trusted myself, and when they didn’t, I assumed I was failing, even when I was aligned with my values, my effort, and my intent. 2025 exposed how fragile that system was.

I also noticed patterns I’ve repeated for years: my tendency to carry too much alone before admitting I’m overwhelmed. My habit of staying productive when I’m actually misaligned and the way I confuse responsibility with self-sacrifice, and endurance with strength. This year didn’t shame me for those patterns, but it didn’t let me ignore them either.

At some point, the question stopped being “How do I make this work?” and became “Is this actually right for me?” That shift didn’t solve everything, but it changed the way I listen to myself. I began paying more attention to how decisions felt in my body, not just how they looked on paper. I had more confidence in my values, on what my values meant to me and how I applied them to my life and the people around me.

On Just Doing It

The big theme of change for 2025 for me would ring familiar with many of you: “Just do it.”

Thanks Nike.

Not in the motivational, poster-on-the-wall sense, and not as a call to recklessness or blind confidence, but as a quiet decision to stop over-intellectualizing the things I already knew needed to be done.

For a long time, I confused preparation with progress. I waited for clarity to feel complete, for certainty to arrive, for the conditions to feel optimal. I told myself I was being thoughtful, strategic, responsible. In reality, I was often postponing discomfort, I was negotiating with fear under the guise of being rational.

2025 confronted that habit relentlessly.

Again and again, I found myself stuck at the same threshold, aware of what needed to happen, yet hesitating because the outcome wasn’t guaranteed. I wanted reassurance before movement, validation before commitment. But this year made it clear: clarity does not precede action; it follows it. Most of the understanding I was waiting for could only be earned on the other side of doing.

This mindset applied to more than just work or ambition. It showed up in conversations I’d been avoiding, boundaries I knew I needed to draw, and decisions I kept deferring because I didn’t want to disappoint or offend anyone.

What surprised me was how often action reduced anxiety instead of increasing it. The fear I built up in my head rarely survived contact with reality. Even when things didn’t go well, they became clearer, more defined and more manageable. So, doing something, anything, was almost always better than carrying the weight of indecision.

By the end of the year, I stopped asking, “Is this good enough?”

Instead, I just do it. It reframed everything in my mind. Doing something without thinking has consequences, but inaction has consequences too, just quieter ones, and often they are more dangerous. They show up later as regret, stagnation, or the dull frustration of knowing you could have moved sooner.

Loss of Friendships and Connections

One of the quieter realities of 2025 was loss, but not the dramatic kind, but the slow disappearance of people who were once I considered close. Friendships faded, and connections dissolved. Some ended without explanation, while others ended because continuing them would have required versions of ourselves that no longer existed.

I used to think loss was a failure, as if every ending meant something had gone wrong, but I came to realize not all separations are betrayals. Some are simply the natural consequence of growth moving in different directions, because people evolve, values sharpen, priorities shift. I strongly believe holding on too tightly out of nostalgia can become its own form of dishonesty.

Some friendships ended because of distance, while others ended because of truth, and a few ended because I finally recognized patterns that were unsustainable. I no longer see these endings as debts that need to be repaid or wrongs that need to be avenged. They were necessary chapters, and I thank each and everyone of them for playing the characters required for those chapters to be filled.

On Past Shame and Who I Used to Be

This year also forced me to confront something deeper: shame. Not surface-level regret, but the kind that sits quietly in the background, influencing how you see yourself long after the events have passed.

There are things I did in the past that I’m not proud of. I engaged in infidelity on one of my former spouses. I abandoned people when it was inconvenient to stay. I said words to hurt others to protect my own. I participated in the modern culture of sexual excess.

I never tried to outrun that version of myself, not because I am not ashamed, but because I did it. I feel like many people don’t realize that sometimes we are the problems of the problems in our lives.

Shame doesn’t disappear when you ignore it, it waits and you hear about it. It leaks into your decisions, your relationships, and your sense of self-worth.

I am definitely not excusing my past appalling behavior as being “necessary” or “part of the journey.” I allowed myself to say plainly: I caused harm. I failed people. I acted selfishly, and I was wrong.

I have always been honest about that part of my life.

Becoming a Better Person Is Not About Erasing the Past

What changed this year wasn’t that I suddenly became virtuous. I just began measuring myself by intent, consistency, and responsibility, and adopting a moral stance.

I realized that being a “good person” isn’t about grand gestures or public redemption arcs. It’s about choosing integrity even when it costs you everything. It’s about restraint, accountability, and the willingness to sit with discomfort instead of passing it on to others.

Owning my past mistakes, and owning that distinction changed everything for me.

I am not the person I used to be, fortunately.

Not because time passed, but because I chose to change. I chose to act in alignment with the values I claim and wrote down and pinned. I chose to pray and repair myself.

A heartfelt apology to the people I have disappointed in the past. I wish you all of you well.

On Relationship, Sacrifice, and Choosing What Actually Matters

This year, something settled in my personal life in a way that feels unfamiliar but steady. I used to chase happiness as an outcome of any situation, but I found a better drug and that is: Contentment.

Contentment, I’ve learned, is not the absence of desire, but the absence of internal conflict.

Happiness is often fleeting, while contentment is often a carefully curated formula.

I found a partner whose values align with mine. Not perfectly, not effortlessly, but meaningfully. The alignment isn’t aesthetic or circumstantial, it’s ethical. We agree on what matters when things get hard, on what is worth protecting, and on what we refuse to trade for comfort or status.

That alignment came at a cost (real cost) for the both of us.

Both of us had to walk away from things that many people would consider non-negotiable: certain pressures, certain opportunities, certain forms of security, certain versions of success and riches that looked impressive from the outside.

There were moments where the rational calculus didn’t favor us, where staying together required choosing uncertainty over abundance, simplicity over accumulation, and presence over prestige.

This wasn’t romantic sacrifice, but it was a sober, deliberate, and often uncomfortable decision.

I’m usually very private about my relationships, be it familial or romantically. I don’t believe intimacy needs an audience, and I’ve never felt compelled to perform happiness for others. That is why I rarely post about my families or my spouse, but this felt worth sharing, not as proof, and not as persuasion, but as a quiet counterpoint to the cynicism that surrounds love now.

I’ve seen how disappointment hardens people and how past failures get mistaken for permanent truths. How love gets reduced to either fantasy or transaction, and how many people stop believing in it not because they’re incapable of it, but because they’re tired.

If there’s anything I’ve learned this year, it’s that love doesn’t disappear, but often it gets buried under misalignment, fear, and exhaustion.

In a world that treats wealth, momentum, and optionality as the highest goods, choosing a person can look irrational, but that framing assumes that we could only choose one or the other. Why not both? My experience this year challenged that assumption. I chose both a person and abundance that we choose to build together.

I don’t romanticize this, I never do. I might be the most skeptical person out there, my close circle knows this. I watch Candace Owens each time an episode drops, for god’s sake. There are still compromises, still tension and still uncertainty about the future. But the difference now is that uncertainty is shared, not lonely.

On Family, Distance, and Choosing Responsibility

Family became clearer to me this year, not louder, not more dramatic, but more defined. I realized that no matter how far my life expands outward, I will always choose my family. Not out of dependency or obligation, but out of conviction and intention.

I’ve decided to become closer to them in a more intentional, professional way. That might sound cold on the surface, but it isn’t. It’s rooted in respect, and I believe, respect goes a long way. They are not here to manage my life, absorb my chaos, or take care of me indefinitely. That was never their role, and expecting it would be unfair, to them and to me.

I may not see them as often as I used to. Life has expanded, responsibilities have multiplied, and proximity has changed, but absence, paradoxically, has sharpened my appreciation.

Time together became deliberate instead of assumed, conversations more attentive and presence more meaningful.

I also came to believe that making it out in the world, building something of my own, standing on my own terms, can be a form of care. Becoming someone my family doesn’t have to worry about feels like a responsibility I take seriously.

I am deeply aware of how fortunate I am. Families are often complicated, fractured, or unavailable in ways people rarely talk about openly. Mine is not perfect but it is intact, supportive, and grounded in a way I no longer take lightly. We argue, we misunderstand, but god knows we always show up.

This year shifted my relationship with my family from proximity to perspective, from reliance to responsibility, and from assumption to gratitude, and I don’t think I could ask for more than that.

On Religion, Impermanence, and Choosing a Private Faith

One of the most significant changes I experienced this year happened quietly, without announcement or certainty. It had nothing to do with community, image, or belonging, but it had everything to do with how I choose to live with myself.

I was a staunch atheist for a long time. My family knew, and most of my long time friends knew this fact. I was not casually skeptical, but firmly convinced that religion was unnecessary at best, dishonest at worst. I questioned belief systems rigorously, and I explored many of them. Not out of confusion, but out of a genuine attempt to understand why people believe what they believe.

My god, I became a witch when I was a teenager. That was how curious I was.

What surprised me is that the journey didn’t end with rejection, but in fact it ended with clarity.

I eventually settled into Buddhism, not because I believe it is superior, complete, or universally correct out of all the religions I tried. I chose it because it aligns with how I already understand the world: impermanent, imperfect, and deeply shaped by intention. It doesn’t demand belief in order to threaten consequence, instead it asks for awareness, discipline, and responsibility, quietly.

I have always believed religion should be kept private, both in ourselves and by the state. Buddhism appealed to me most was its lack of urgency. No requirement to convince, no obsession with identity and no pressure to perform faith outwardly. It allowed me to remain skeptical where skepticism is healthy, while still committing to a moral framework that is inward-facing and self-accountable.

Coming from both polar ends, being an atheist and of faith, it gave me a perspective I didn’t expect. I understand the arguments against belief because I lived them. I also understand now that rejecting permanence doesn’t lead to nihilism, it can lead to care. When nothing is permanent, how you act matters more, not less.

Religion didn’t make me “good.” It didn’t absolve my past or promise salvation, but it offered something more practical: a way to sit with discomfort without fleeing it, a framework for ethics that doesn’t rely on fear, and a reminder that my faith is not a performance, it’s a practice.

Perhaps that’s the biggest change I’ve witnessed: I no longer feel the need to define myself by what I reject or adopt.

Faith, for me, is not an identity, it’s a discipline. I believe, discipline, when practiced quietly, has a way of changing a life without announcing itself.

What The End Feels Like

For a long time, I lived like a prince. Not in any dramatic sense, just in the way life was structured, things worked, support existed, and I had people around me to do things I did not want to do.

This year changed that. 2025 humbled me in the most ordinary way possible. I learned what it feels like when effort is no longer abstract, but daily and unavoidable. Being cut off was probably the worst and best thing to happen to me. Worst, because the safety net vanished all at once. Best, because it forced clarity that there was no one else to absorb the impact, no arrangement to fall back on, no illusion of progress without cost.

Do I miss being served on a silver platter? Of course. Comfort is comfortable. Anyone who says otherwise is pretending. But there’s also something grounding about knowing that whatever comes next will be built, not resumed.

I’m still moving toward ease, stability, and abundance, but perhaps this time, it’s my own dirty hands doing the dirty work, and with people I choose to build with.

That shift alone made this year fantastic.

I am leaving 2025 less impressed with outcomes, and more committed to alignment.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to those who made it this far.