Lessons from the worst year 🌱
Some rugged optimism from 2025.
Dearest,
The year has not been easy. It’s not even been decent, not really. And there are voices in my head telling me I shouldn’t burden you with the kinds of learnings that such years hold.
But I did spend the past month noting down everything I learnt through 2025. And through the process, I realized that I got through a year of career, health, and personal challenges without crumbling into any of it, superimposing false meaning on it, or losing the desire to make meaning from it. So maybe it’s worth sharing, after all.
These are hard lessons and I have attempted to put them down with honesty and optimism. The optimism is rugged, collated, but I trust you will find it.
And if you have had a tough year too, a period of restructuring, foundational collapse and rebuilding, I hope this letter offers you solace. 🫂
Lessons from the worst year
1. Knowing what you want does not mean your life, your body and mind, are equipped to get there in the next step. There is sadness, confusion, and grit in transition periods.
2. When it comes to survival, keeping your eyes open and picking the least of your coping devils can be an honourable choice.
3. Make. It is a force you are betting on, the only act louder than destruction.
4. Sometimes you will start working on a project because you think you have a lot of knowledge about it and life will say, honey, sit down. Let me show you how little you know. It happens to the best of us.
5. Other times, you will start working on a project you know nothing about and realize you had so many valuable perspectives within you, waiting for the right push. You don’t always know what you know.
6. False starts do not exist. There is only energy that you gather, play with, expand, and carry forward in varied containers.
7. Ambition without community is hollow and unsustainable. Being in community with the right people grounds and guides what you create and offer. A dedication to more than yourself transforms the weight of ambition to a thrill of generosity.
8. When it gets too loud outside, look for the place within where it’s just you, untethered to the weight of this world.
9. Rock bottom every three weeks means your body is refusing simple solutions and easy pivots. Each rock bottom is a boundary, clarity.
10. Your life may shrink when it meets the sledgehammer of honesty. Understand this is not failure but a necessary next step.
11. Especially for those who do not follow any scripture, find 3 or 4 poets who speak directly to your soul and keep their work easily accessible.
12. Your worst fears will come true. But so will unlikely reunions and unfathomable apologies, improbable scenarios you have romanticized in daydreams. Expect cruelties and serendipities in the scrunched up oddballs the world tosses your way.
13. During your toughest years, you are going to offer others strange amounts of understanding. It’s the only way you can offer it to yourself too.
14. The harsh inner voices of those you love will trigger your own if you are not conscious of how you engage.
15. Articulation and translation are not the same. Articulation is a necessary container for your truth, but translating yourself is a privilege for those who’ve earned it.
16. We are all asking distinct questions of life. What seems like the same question on the surface for two people may be two very different questions, paths, and lives that will unravel from them. Pay attention to what motivates those around you to seek the answers they do.
17. Even when you know you’re headed in divergent directions and that change lurks close, sit with a friend when you can. Eat, drink, dance, sing, laugh, read, walk with a friend every chance you get.
18. You may not get the response you want, or any response at all, but you will be glad you said the hard truth, asked the uncomfortable question.
19. Being single in your thirties means you will often be among people who’ve formed alliances and units. You do not have to fight the loud chorus for your presence or voice. You’re the solo, act like it.
20. Adult friendships grow quieter and less central than you’re used to. But in the best ones, you still get sufficient conversations and moments of depth. Trust that they add up.
21. Accept that some years, you cannot love in voracious ways. But the small ways you still love continue to hold and shape you.
22. Receive good gifts with an embarrassingly open heart. Print out posts friends write about you and carry it in your wallet. Cry at their Christmas presents. Send a dozen thank you messages for the right gift at the right time. Humble yourself enough to feel a want being met, the froth of excess, to know that you are worthy of beauty and care.
23. Your family is a treasure chest of wounds and traditions, patterns and stories, memories, maps, beginnings. Hold this knowledge close, it matters.
24. Stay in gratitude. Stay in grace.
25. Read oeuvres. Listen to discographies. Know what potential, decent attempts, developed skill, and profundity each look like in an artist’s journey.
26. For every long interaction you have with ChatGPT, read a poem. Do not let that one AI writer become the blueprint of how language flows through your mind.
27. When you find yourself near a raintree, stand under it, witness how the Earth cracks open, emerging into a microcosm of itself. You can feel all the planet in this bubble.
28. Also, spare a gaze at the fanning grandeur of a Bismark palm, the vulgar and sensual sausage tree, flaking leopard trees, dancing canna lilies, marooning Indian almonds, deceptively gorgeous lantanas, allamandas blowing their own trumpets, and crown flowers flexing their complex origami petals. Nature takes time to see but I promise, precious else is a more valuable quest.
29. Stop for the dragonflies, whenever you spot them.
30. When nothing feels worth it, remember that a young man is travelling the whole world to discover its secrets. And Luffy is yet to become the pirate king, so stay for his last fight.
31. The most unsuspecting decisions often lead you where you need to be. Start that random mid-week reading hour. Buy that boring-looking study desk. Reach out to a friend and say let’s make this together. Say, maybe silence. Say, maybe poetry.
32. Grief is a heavy privilege. One day, after many days of grieving, you will wake up to realize that your insides have been rearranged and you no longer have the grief’s exact slot. You can now fill yourself up with guilt and longing or accept the new lightness. I hope you choose light.
33. When memories of joy, of the good years, return, believe them. Not because it is going to be exactly the same again. But because there’s a reach in trusting their veracity. And this exercise keeps your spirit fierce and nimble, ready to fight, make, love.
34. The fleeting joy you feel today needs no interpretation, no validation to exist. It doesn’t have to be part of a larger narrative.
35. Let the jagged edges show. In your writing, your art, your thinking, your relations. An authentic path and self arrives with jutting edges, evolves into squiggly lines. It is never linear, seldom neat.
36. As a writer, you will mourn at every transition for all you could not give words to in a season. That’s natural, remind yourself that being a human is a much larger and more profound exercise than being a writer.
37. When its time is over, no matter how beautiful, you must let it pass.
Here’s wishing you some type of iridescence in hardships and all types of weird wonder in the ordinary.
Wishing you love.
Wishing you stay.
💌
Soumya
Holding close 🍑
Listening to 🎵
Thank you for reading! 💞
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Some beautiful lessons here. Thank you so much for sharing 💕
Oh Soumya, this was so relatable and gorgeous to read.