This Was Not That Year
There’s a particular kind of inventory we rarely take.
The one that counts what didn’t show up. The guests who never arrived. The conversations that stayed hypothetical. The versions of ourselves we outlined in January and then quietly filed away somewhere around March.
2025 was many things. But I find myself thinking about what it wasn’t.
This was not the year I learned a new language. Spanish still sits on my phone, that green owl increasingly passive-aggressive in its notifications. I had imagined myself ordering coffee in Barcelona by now, rolling my r’s with casual grace. Instead, I can say “apple” and “where is the bathroom” and not much else. The textbooks remain pristine.
Un-cracked spines are their own kind of confession.
This was not the year certain phone calls got made. You know the ones. The ones you rehearse in the shower, in traffic, in the grey minutes before sleep. The apologies that would cost you nothing but pride. The questions you’ve carried so long they’ve grown roots. I told myself timing mattered.
Timing always matters until suddenly there’s no time left, and then it never mattered at all.
This was not the year I figured it out. Whatever “it” was supposed to be. Some years feel like assembly - pieces clicking into place, a shape emerging. This one felt more like standing in the hardware aisle, holding something unidentifiable, wondering which project it belonged to.
Maybe none. Maybe it’s just a piece.
The novel stayed unwritten. The shoulder pain stayed painful. The meditation practice lasted fifty-one days before dissolving into the same chaos it was meant to cure. I did not become someone who wakes up full of gratitude. I did not send that pitch. I did not book the trip.
And here’s the thing about the negative space of a year - it’s not failure, exactly. Failure requires an attempt. This is something softer.
More forgivable, maybe. Or less.
The quiet accumulation of “not yet” until “not yet” starts to taste like “not ever.”
But I’m learning, slowly, that years are not containers we fill. They’re weather we move through. Some storms we dodge. Some droughts we simply outlast. The things that didn’t happen in 2025 are not debts I owe. They’re just... information. Data points about where my attention actually lived versus where I thought it would.
And attention, in the end, is the only honest currency. Mine went to smaller things this year. A few relationships that needed tending. Some rest that couldn’t wait. The pet, who doesn’t care about Barcelona and loves me anyway.
Maybe next year the language, the call, the novel. Maybe not. The future remains unwritten, which is both its threat and its gift.
What I know is this, we are not only what we accomplish. We are also what we choose not to finish.
What we set down. What we let pass.
There’s a self in the doing, yes. But there’s also a self in the merciful act of letting some things stay undone.
2025 wasn’t that year. It was just this one.
And this one is ending now, incomplete, imperfect, still warm.