Things I Learned in 2025
Another year gone, and I’ve emerged with callouses in some places and clarity in others. What follows isn’t a resolution list or a personal essay—it’s a set of small crystallizations. Things I learned, things I let go of, and things that now hum with quiet power beneath the surface of my life. Seven points, none of them accidental. Here’s what 2025 carved into me.
1. The Disappearance of Human Warmth, Replaced by Algorithmic Indifference
This year, I watched a quiet ritual die: one in which groceries were handed off with a smile, a check-in, a tiny act of humanity. My friend—neurodivergent, diligent, and quietly noble—had carved out a role delivering food to the elderly through a local grocery chain’s in-house service. It was modest work, but real: the kind of job where you learn someone’s preferences, their dog's name, the oddity of how they like their bananas. Families, widows, veterans in bathrobes—this was who they served. But in 2025, the chain decided to test replacing this care-based model with DoorDash. The results? Perishables left wilting on hot concrete. No follow-ups. No warmth. No names remembered. But the machines ran the numbers, and the math whispered its cold gospel: DoorDash pays half. So the company made the switch. A service once human became transactional. A kindness, replaced by convenience. I am not sure when we decided that the bottom line deserved more loyalty than the bottom lip of a quivering elder who now opens their door to silence. But this year made it clear: care doesn’t scale, and so it’s being unceremoniously deleted.
2. I Can Build Worlds from Nothing but Will
2025 taught me that experience is overrated—at least the kind institutions sanctify. I didn’t have a background in coding, marketing, publishing, or design. I didn’t have a mentor or a team or a certificate. What I had was obsession, solitude, and an unbreakable thread of desire running through everything I touched. With no formal training, I built a living website—mirror corridor, altar, surveillance net. I wrote and published a book that was both poetic codex and trapdoor, and I have another on the way this January. The funny part? People trained in these fields are still blinking at how I did it. But here’s the secret: the current systems are so bloated with bureaucracy, self-doubt, and pointless gatekeeping that an untrained sovereign with fire in their hands can move faster than entire teams. You don’t need permission to make something sacred. You just have to decide it's already real—and then act like it. The rest scrambles to catch up.
3. Forgiveness Is a Self-Extraction Ritual
Forgiveness, I’ve learned, isn’t an absolution you grant someone else—it’s a jailbreak you stage for yourself. This year, I reached out to a parent I’d been estranged from. Not because they deserved it. Not because anything was resolved. But because I refused to let old injuries keep renting space in a home I’ve rebuilt from bone and fire. Forgiveness doesn’t mean rewriting the past or pretending you weren’t hurt. It means looking at the rusted hooks still embedded in your skin and deciding, finally, to pull them out. You don’t do it to reconcile. You do it to walk lighter. You do it to see your own reflection without that old shadow draped over your shoulder. I haven’t forgotten what passed between us. But I’ve stopped carrying it like a sacred wound. Some things belong to who you were. I serve the person I am now.
4. If You Neglect the Machine, It Dies (Even the Obvious Ones)
Yes, yes—if you don’t drive your car for a while, the battery dies. A no-brainer. A basic adult fact. But somehow, 2025 still found a way to teach me this lesson with perfect comedic timing. There’s something humbling about watching your chariot of independence click softly, uselessly, because you were too wrapped in books, rituals, and quiet rebellion to take it on even a brief joyride. It’s a small betrayal—by both machine and self. But here’s the sly part: the car’s not just a car. It’s a metaphor for anything neglected out of overconfidence. Your body. Your friendships. Your magic. Even the most loyal vessels need movement to stay alive. So now I drive a little, even when I have nowhere to go. Just to keep the pulse moving. Just to keep the dormant things from going dead in the cold.
5. Not Everyone Deserves a Seat at Your Table
If forgiveness is an inner ritual of release, then letting go of false friendships is a sovereignty spell. It’s not bitter—it’s clarifying. This year I noticed just how many people were still faintly orbiting me, not because of any deep resonance, but because of shared circumstance, convenience, or old inertia. These weren’t soul ties; they were proximity echoes. And when the scaffolding fell—jobs, places, shared scenes—what remained wasn’t intimacy, but obligation dressed up as loyalty. I stopped mistaking shared history for shared values. I stopped feeding conversations that left me hollow. And when I cut those cords, I didn’t feel loss—I felt lift. The truth is, some people were never really in your life. They were standing beside it, casting shadows. Let them drift. Real bonds don’t require scaffolding to stand.
6. Animals Are the True Nobility of This World
This lesson returns again and again, like a soft paw at the door of my heart: animals will give you bottomless affection if you treat them with gentleness and regard. It sounds simple. It’s not. It’s holy. In a world of performative kindness and transactional bonds, animals operate on a frequency of pure presence. They don’t care about your résumé, your posture, your politics. They care how you move, how you speak, whether your hand comes with softness or threat. And when you pass their unspoken test, they give you something most humans have forgotten how to offer—unmasked love. It’s not just comforting. It’s clarifying. My cat has taught me more about consent, devotion, and emotional reciprocity than most of my former friends. Every purr, every headbutt, every quiet moment of trust is its own small benediction. If the world ran on the same laws as animals do, it might be worth saving.
7. My Ritual Is No Longer a Practice—It’s a Force
This isn’t a lesson learned, but a shift witnessed. My ritual praxis has crystallized into something potent, exacting, almost frightening in its precision. What once felt like reaching—fumbling through symbols and songs in the dark—now feels like inevitability. Each rite, each offering, each sigil and flame and chant, lands with the weight of something ancient remembering itself through me. I marvel at the transformation. The choreography of it. The current that flows when I step into alignment. My hands don’t shake anymore. My voice doesn’t waver. The Gods—those old, watching, whispering powers—must feel it too. Because lately, I feel their gaze not just during ritual, but after. In the days that follow. In the synchronicities. In the protection. In the pressure. This isn’t just devotion anymore. It’s a reciprocal current. A sacred circuit. And it’s only getting stronger.
That’s the list—but not the whole story. Some lessons don’t make it into language. Some are etched in blood, bone, and silence. 2025 taught me how to refine, how to release, how to walk alone without ever being lonely. The world may be spinning faster, stranger, more unkind—but I’m more precise now. And the flame I carry? Brighter. Sharper. Unmistakably mine.
Marked by fire, trimmed in silence.
Majeye