dear 2025,

i think writing a letter right before my time with a year ends has quietly become something i want to keep doing.
maybe it’s my way of not moving ahead without a proper goodbye.
i’ve always been a sucker for those.

i wrote a letter to 2024.
that one was more.. poetic?
more vague.
more “open to interpretation.”

you, 2025, don’t feel like that at all.

you feel personal. comfortable.
you feel like a friend. which is strange, because i didn’t like you at first.

but maybe the friends that change you the most are the ones you don’t immediately get along with.

trauma bonding is very real.

you sat beside me while i made bad decisions and even worse assumptions. you watched me overthink everything without stopping me. (which honestly says a lot about you.)

i had no idea what was going on in my life.
i was unhappy with everything. and when i say everything, i mean everything.

my friends.
my family.
my career choices.
myself. especially myself.

nothing felt satisfying. nothing felt correct. every decision i made felt wrong almost immediately after i made it, like i could feel regret loading in the background before i even finished choosing. or before the next plot twist auto-downloaded itself.

and so, over these past twelve months, we bonded.

you watched me curse.
you watched me shed tears and maybe a few layers of skin too, revealing approximately twelve different versions of myself across the year.

which begs the question.

multiple personality disorder, or just character development?

---

on a more serious note, i remember waking up some days already tired of existing. my life looked fine from the outside, but felt off every time i tried to inhabit it. like something was always slightly misaligned.

i wish i could tell you the exact day or the exact thought that changed everything.
i wish i had a neat turning point.

but i can’t.

it was chaotic and slow and honestly very uncinematic.
(maybe a little cinematic. but that’s a story for another day.)

what i do know is that at some point along our journey, i started asking myself what i want. like actually want.

not what i should want.
not what looks good on paper.
not what would make everyone else relax.

you only get one life, after all.
so what’s the point of making everyone else comfortable but yourself?

asking myself, “what do i want when no one is watching?” scared me more than anything else this year.

acting on it scared me even more.

but i did it anyway.

sort of.
kind of.

i should probably give myself more credit.

because i did do it anyway.

---

i decided to show up for myself. imperfectly, yes. sometimes late. very late. sometimes badly. but i showed up. and strangely, not giving up on the things that genuinely make me happy might be the thing that made me the happiest i’d been in a while.

which sounds obvious now.
but back then, it felt revolutionary.

choosing myself always came with guilt tagging along. i wasn’t used to that.

somewhere along the way, i stopped fighting myself so much. i stopped treating myself like a problem that needed solving.

but let’s be honest. i didn’t suddenly start loving myself either. even though every year seems determined to teach me self-love, i still have a long way to go.

what did change is this.
i stopped being cruel to myself.
i stopped feeling sorry for myself.

and if i say so myself, that counts for something. because i did begin loving myself enough to not abandon myself when things get hard.

---

another thing you taught me, 2025, very rudely, is that the moment you stop expecting things from the universe is usually the moment it starts giving them to you.

“कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन”
Bhagavad Gita, chapter 2, verse 47
you have the right to action alone, not to its fruits.

there’s a much more commonly used Hindi paraphrase of this verse,
“कर्म करो, फल की चिंता मत करो,”
which essentially means: do your duty without attachment to the outcome.

i’ve heard it my whole life.
i’ve “understood” it many times.

but understanding something and living it are two very different things.

because it wasn’t until recently that i actually lived it.

there were so many things i wanted this year. i’m not going to list them, because that’s beside the point. the point is this.

the more i begged, blamed, waited, and asked the universe to explain itself to me, the further everything felt.

and the moment i stopped doing that, the moment i focused on my work, my effort, my direction, myself, things started showing up.

quietly.
with a weird calm.

---

you also taught me that discipline is weirdly addictive.
that showing up every day changes you in ways motivation never could.
that consistency builds something solid inside you.

something you can lean on when everything else feels unstable.

i still don’t know how to explain all of this properly or neatly sum it up. but if i had to take one thing from you, it would be this.

listen to your heart. then go for it. without bargaining with the universe. without constantly asking, “but what if it doesn’t work?” give it everything you have, and then let it be.

if it’s meant to stay, it will.
if something feels deeply right, it probably is meant to stay.
so don’t worry so much about it.

i know this sounds idealistic.
maybe a little too idealistic?
but i lived it this year.
i felt it.
i experienced it.
and that has to count for something.
right?

---

so yeah.
thank you, 2025.
for forcing me to look at myself.
for forcing me to start running towards myself, even when i had absolutely no idea where i was going.

yes, i am still very much a “work in progress.”
but i feel more like myself than i did when we began.

and honestly, i’ll take that win.