2025 — That's a Wrap

I nearly didn’t publish this. Not because it felt untrue, but because it felt inconvenient. And I’m increasingly wary of the instinct to keep the inconvenient bits private while polishing everything else.

2025 resists summary. It wasn’t marked by a single turning point, but by accumulation — repeated pressures, ongoing adjustments, and a widening gap between what was expected and what was actually supported. That gap matters.

The hard yards

It was a hard year, not in a dramatic, headline way, but in a grinding one. The kind of hard that settles into your shoulders, your sleep, your patience. A year that kept asking for more focus, more resilience, more output — while quietly removing the conditions that make any of that sustainable.

Pay is part of this story, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. Flat pay alongside rising expectations doesn’t just bruise morale, it creates burnout that is physical, mental, and financial.

Physically, it showed up as exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix, tension carried day after day, and a baseline fatigue that became normalised.

Mentally, it meant carrying more context, more responsibility, and more risk, with less slack and less certainty.

Financially, it meant absorbing all of that in a cost-of-living landscape that kept rising regardless — where food, energy, travel, and childcare don’t politely stay flat just because pay does.

Layered onto that were commute days — twice a week, with around three hours of travel each way. Six hours spent getting to and from work, on top of a full working day, turning those days into thirteen-hour stretches that start early and end late. They’re often dismissed because they’re “only” a couple of days a week, framed as a personal choice. And yes, I chose it — because I had to. Because survival sometimes looks like trade-offs that aren’t really choices at all. The cost of those days wasn’t abstract. It was paid in energy, attention, and the narrowing space left for recovery.

Add to that more time in the office being framed as “culture,” and the picture sharpens further. Less flexibility. Less room to recover. Less acknowledgement of the cumulative cost. The unspoken expectation was clear enough: work comes first, and everything else needs to adapt around it.

That was the point where I stopped treating time with my partner and our kids as something that merely helped me cope, and started treating it as something I was actively unwilling to sacrifice. Ordinary moments — shared meals, school runs, walks that went nowhere in particular — stopped being “nice to have” and became essential. Not sentimental. Structural.

My partner carried more than her fair share at times, with a steadiness I don’t take lightly. The kids, blissfully uninterested in any of this, kept pulling me back into the present — into noise, questions, silliness, joy. They didn’t need me to be productive or composed. They just needed me there. And honestly, that was a relief.

That grounding didn’t make the year easier. But it made my priorities impossible to ignore.

Professionally, 2025 stripped away any remaining tolerance I had for pretending that care, accessibility, and sustainability are optional extras. They’re not. They’re foundational. When organisations treat them as negotiable — when they ask people to do more with less, indefinitely — the cost doesn’t vanish. It lands somewhere. Usually on the people least able to push back.

I’m done translating those values into something quieter or more convenient. Accessibility isn’t a bolt-on. Sustainability isn’t a vibe. People aren’t abstractions. If a system only works when everyone overextends, it’s not a good system.

Writing has been part of how I’ve processed all of this. Not hot takes. Not neat conclusions. Just notes from the edges — trying to understand how power, language, and responsibility actually play out in practice. Writing as a way of staying honest, rather than agreeable.

If 2025 took a lot out of me, it also clarified things.

So, what next

Going into 2026, I’m far less interested in momentum for its own sake. Fewer projects, chosen properly. Work that’s well-supported, thoughtfully paced, built to last — with people who don’t confuse pressure with performance, and who understand that paying people properly is part of sustainability. Full stop.

On a personal level, I’m protecting what kept me intact this year. Time with my family that doesn’t get squeezed into the edges. Rest that doesn’t need a productivity justification. Space to notice the small, grounding moments — because they aren’t small at all. They’re the point.

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I don’t expect 2026 to be easier. But I do expect to meet it with clearer boundaries, less tolerance for nonsense, and a firmer grip on what I’m willing to give — and what I’m not.