A blog by Pepetoe.

As this year comes to a close, I look back on what this year has taught me, and how I’ve adapted along the way. I feel tender. Changed. Lighter in ways I didn’t expect, and sore in places I didn’t know could still ache. There’s a quiet duality sitting with me as the year ends: not everything is healed, not everything is resolved, but something fundamental has shifted.

This wasn’t a year that handed out closure or clarity on a timeline I could control. It took more than I anticipated, and it asked for a level of honesty and detachment I wasn’t ready for when January began. Some of the hurt is still close to the surface. Some of the lessons still feel raw.

But alongside that tenderness is a sense of release. A loosening. A freedom that came not from winning or achieving, but from letting go of roles, expectations, patterns, and versions of myself that were never meant to be permanent.

I’m ending this year holding both. The ache and the space it created. The loss and the lightness. And for once, I’m not rushing to make one cancel the other.

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This year didn’t leave me untouched. It marked me. Not in ways that are easy to explain or package in a simple blog post, but in ways that feel permanent enough to notice. There are moments from this year that still sit heavy in my chest, reminders of how much can change when you’re not paying attention, or when you stay too long in places that ask you to be smaller than you are: staying in friendship groups or workplaces that no longer serve you, or holding onto versions of yourself that just don’t fit anymore.

Some of the hurt is obvious. Endings that didn’t come with clean conclusions. Conversations that didn’t go the way I hoped. Versions of myself I didn’t expect to meet, let alone have to reckon with. I learned quickly that growth doesn’t always arrive as clarity. Sometimes it arrives as discomfort that refuses to be ignored.

I spent a lot of this year grieving things that didn’t look like grief at first. Grieving the life I thought I was building. Grieving relationships that no longer fit. Grieving the certainty I once had in my own choices. There’s a specific kind of sadness that comes from realising you’ve outgrown something you once relied on, not because it was bad, but because it no longer matches who you’re becoming.

And yet, in the quiet spaces where grief settled, something else began to emerge.

Relief.

Relief from trying to hold everything together. Relief from constantly explaining myself. Relief from trying to prove myself time and time again, to be heard, to be loved. Relief from living in ways that required too much effort for too little return. Without meaning to, I started clearing space. Letting things end without rushing to replace them. Choosing stillness where I once chose noise.

This year taught me that freedom doesn’t feel “euphoric” at first. Sometimes it feels like emptiness. Like standing in the aftermath of something and realising there’s nothing to go back into. That emptiness was uncomfortable, but it was honest. And in time, it will become easier, but that’s something I can work on going into 2026.

I learned that I don’t need a loud life to feel fulfilled. I don’t need constant validation, constant connection, constant forward motion. What I crave now is clarity. Depth. Fewer things that matter more. A life that feels intentional rather than impressive. A “softer life”, if you like. A life with no expectations, no pressure. Just acceptance of what’s coming my way. And I feel honour in that I can do this. Lead a life that is simply “meant to be”, rather than planning out each day, each month, with endless standards to meet along the way.

There’s a softness (and stillness) that comes with accepting this. With allowing yourself to be hurt without treating it as failure. With acknowledging that you can be wounded and still moving in the right direction. With letting the universe write your story for you. Taking the agency out of my daily life is a calming thought. That I don’t feel the need to prove anything anymore, not to myself, not to anyone else.

Ending this year, I’m not standing in certainty or confidence. I’m standing in truth. I know where it hurts. I know what I lost. And I know, with equal clarity, what I no longer have to carry. I don’t need to label this year as good or bad. I don’t need to make it mean something tidy. It was what it was: difficult, formative, and quietly freeing.

I’m walking into the next chapter lighter, even if I’m still bruised. And for the first time in a long time, that feels like progress.

Not because everything is healed.
Not because the hurt is gone.

But because I’m free enough now to keep moving forward without pretending I’m untouched.

Xo Pepetoe