2025 didn’t arrive loudly. It didn’t announce itself as a year that would matter more than others. It started quietly, almost practically, the way most years do — with small shifts that didn’t seem like they were asking much of me at all.
Work finally eased. Not because the work disappeared, but because I wasn’t carrying it alone anymore. For the first time in a long time, I had real support — someone who could think alongside me, absorb weight, share responsibility. The constant pressure that had defined so many of my days softened. I slept better. I worked fewer late nights. I wasn’t operating in survival mode.
And that space did something unexpected.
Without exhaustion dulling everything, I started noticing where else I’d been compensating — where I’d been smoothing, absorbing, adjusting, staying measured even when something didn’t sit right. When you’re tired all the time, you don’t question imbalance; you just endure. Once the strain lifted, it became impossible not to see.
That awareness followed me straight into the building issues.
What began as frustration over decisions that didn’t make sense slowly revealed itself as something deeper. It wasn’t about one policy or one vote — it was about patterns. Information withheld. Questions treated as nuisances. Silence rewarded more than engagement. I kept approaching it the way I always had, believing that clarity would lead to conversation, that good faith would be met with good faith in return.
It wasn’t.
Instead, clarity was framed as disruption. Transparency became “noise.” At one point, the situation escalated to legal language where a conversation between neighbors should have lived. That moment landed with a surprising kind of calm.
Not anger.
Clarity.
I realized I had reached the limit of how quiet I could be without erasing myself.
So I ran for the board.
Not to be in charge. Not to blow things up. But because I couldn’t keep watching decisions get made in the dark and pretend it wasn’t my place to speak. I organized neighbors. I shared information that should never have been controversial. I listened — really listened — to people who felt dismissed or worn down or unsure how to engage anymore.
I didn’t soften the truth to make it easier to hear. I said what I believed needed to be said, even knowing it wouldn’t land gently. I could live with myself doing that.
That mattered more than being liked.
While all of that was unfolding, my grandmother began to decline.
There’s a particular weight to watching someone fade slowly — not dramatic, not sudden, just a gradual narrowing of the world around them. When she passed, the grief didn’t arrive with sharp edges. It settled. It marked time. It made the past feel more complete, more firmly behind me, in a way I wasn’t prepared for but somehow recognized.
I didn’t try to turn that into meaning right away. I just let it exist.
Summer came anyway.
The lake became what it always has for me — a place where my body remembers how to steady itself. We did the Lake Michigan trip again, the long loop around familiar harbors. Port Washington. Manitowoc. Frankfort. Suttons Bay. Traverse City. Days measured in distance and docking instead of deadlines.
Same boats. Same people. Different emotional weight.
There was a moment that would probably seem insignificant to anyone else, but mattered deeply to me. I stepped away from the trip by car, spent the Fourth at the camper, and then rejoined everyone in Saugatuck to head back to Chicago together. On paper, it’s just logistics. To me, it mirrored the entire year — moving between worlds, choosing connection, not needing to prove continuity in order to belong.
Later in the year, I finally took the solo journey I’d been talking about for years. The one I’d always said I wanted to take. The places I’d always said I wanted to see.
I didn’t do it to prove independence. I did it because loss has a way of stripping excuses down to their core. Waiting stopped making sense.
That trip changed me quietly. I liked who I was inside it — more present, more open, less interested in managing outcomes. I learned that solitude doesn’t have to feel lonely when you’re actually listening to yourself.
When I came home, the year wasn’t finished asking things of me.
Otis left me the day before my kitchen was taken apart.
He was sixteen — fourteen of those years spent with me — old enough that his presence had become structural. I got him when he was two, during an earlier chapter of my life, and he stayed through everything that followed. Relationships changed. Homes changed. Years passed. Otis didn’t.
He wasn’t dramatic or demanding. He just was. In routines. In quiet assumptions. I still leave the closet door cracked for him without thinking. I still do a double take when I’m sure I saw him sitting in his usual spot, or felt that familiar weight in the room.
Losing him closed something gently but definitively.
The next day, construction began.
A major riser replacement project meant my kitchen had to be dismantled — walls opened, cabinets removed — all to access the plumbing hidden behind the sink. It wasn’t cosmetic. It wasn’t optional. It was necessary, invasive, and timed with almost cruel precision.
The kitchen is where I ground myself. Where I cook, host, reset, and hold tradition. Watching it get stripped down to framing and dust felt like losing another layer of normal all at once.
The delays stretched into the holidays, quietly undoing traditions I usually rely on to steady myself when everything else feels unsettled.
But something unexpected happened in that absence.
Instead of powering through the loss of it, I reached out. I asked. I let the tradition move instead of disappear. After Christmas, I’ll spend the day in Jon’s kitchen, making my grandmother’s banana bread — the same recipe I’ve made so many times on my own. Jon will be there. Nick will be there.
The setting will be different. The disruption in my own kitchen — and the way this year has asked me to stop carrying things alone — opened space for something I didn’t expect. The tradition won’t just continue. It will deepen, held inside connection instead of solitude.
And that feels like the right kind of adaptation.
By the end of the year, I could finally see the pattern.
2025 asked for endurance.
It asked for silence.
It asked for me to absorb, smooth, and keep things moving the way I always had.
What it got instead was honesty.
I didn’t come out of 2025 lighter.
I came out clearer.
Not sharper. Not harder.
Just more honest with myself.