Some seasons pass so quietly that we barely notice them leaving. Others seem to contain several versions of a life at once, compressing love, fear, ordinary happiness, disappointment, ambition and loss into a handful of months. The first five months of 2025 have felt like the latter. When I look back now, it is difficult to believe that January and May belong to the same year. So much has happened between them that January almost feels like another lifetime, inhabited by a version of me who had no idea what the months ahead would ask of her.

Perhaps that is one reason I keep writing. Life rarely pauses long enough for us to understand it while it is happening. We move from work to deadlines, family conversations to appointments, plans to unexpected news, carrying whatever the previous day left behind while the next one is already demanding our attention. Writing gives me somewhere to place all of it. It allows me to return to the months I have already lived and notice what I was too busy, too happy or too overwhelmed to recognise at the time. Sometimes we do not understand a season while we are inside it; we only begin to see its shape once we have travelled far enough to look back.

January began gently. Mama was with me in the UK, experiencing a British winter properly for the first time, and there was something comforting about beginning the year with her physically near me rather than appearing through the familiar rectangle of a video call. I had grown accustomed to building a life abroad while loving my family from a distance, so having Mama here altered the rhythm of ordinary days. Suddenly there was someone else in the house, another voice, another routine, another person to consider when deciding what to cook or where to go. Ordinary things became occasions simply because we were finally able to do them together.

We celebrated Jan’s birthday as our little trio, and there was nothing particularly extravagant about it. Looking back, that simplicity is exactly what makes the memory precious. There are moments when we believe a celebration needs grandeur before it becomes memorable, but some of the days I hold closest are the ones where very little happened beyond the people I loved being in the same place. January reminded me that presence is its own form of abundance. After years of airports, time differences and conversations scheduled around different countries, simply being able to look across a room and see Mama there felt like a blessing I did not want to take for granted.

By February, we had begun collecting more memories together. Valentine’s Day took us to Liverpool, although romance that year looked slightly different from the usual candlelit dinner for two. Mama was with us, and somehow that made the day even more special. We wandered through the city, took photographs and braved the wind while I watched her discover another place far from the country she knew best. There was something unexpectedly tender about showing my mother pieces of the life and country I had learned to navigate without her.

Perhaps children never entirely stop wanting to show their parents things. We grow older, build careers, make decisions and become capable of living thousands of miles away, yet somewhere inside us remains the child saying, Mama, look at this. I found myself doing exactly that throughout her stay. I wanted her to see places I had seen, taste things I liked, understand the roads I travelled and perhaps know a little more intimately the world in which her daughter had built another home. The photographs from those days may eventually fade into a much larger collection, but what I hope I remember is the feeling of walking beside her and knowing that, for once, distance had temporarily released us.

March changed the atmosphere of the year. Work had become demanding, and my Health Assessment module at university required a different kind of concentration from me. My days began to feel increasingly divided between professional responsibility, studying and everything else life continued placing around them. There are seasons when adulthood feels less like balance and more like deciding which important thing requires you most urgently, then hoping the others can wait.

Somewhere in the middle of that already demanding month came news that made every other concern briefly feel smaller. My cousin had been diagnosed with cancer. There are pieces of news that divide time into before and after, even when nothing visible changes in the room where you receive them. The world outside continues normally. People go to work. Traffic moves. Messages arrive. Someone somewhere is deciding what to have for dinner. Yet inside your own life, something has shifted.

I began experiencing that strange grief that can arrive before a goodbye, when someone is still here but fear has already entered the family. Every update carried weight. Every message mattered more. Hope and anxiety became uncomfortable companions, and I discovered again how difficult it is to concentrate on ordinary responsibilities when part of your mind is waiting for news you cannot control.

Still, I studied. I went to work. I completed what needed completing. Not because I had somehow mastered the art of carrying difficult things, but because life has a peculiar insistence on continuing. Bills still need paying. Patients still need care. University deadlines remain remarkably indifferent to personal crises. Meals still need making. Laundry accumulates. Perhaps this is one of the quieter realities of difficult seasons: we rarely receive permission to abandon everything else while our hearts catch up. We simply learn, imperfectly, to carry more than one reality at once.

April arrived with a growing certainty that I needed to go home. The decision felt spontaneous on the surface, but perhaps my heart had been making it long before I admitted it. There are times when distance becomes more than geographical. It becomes something physical, an ache produced by knowing the people you love are experiencing something significant while you remain on the other side of the world. I could continue working, studying and maintaining my routines in Britain, but somewhere underneath all that functionality was the knowledge that I wanted to be closer to my family.

And yet April did not consist solely of fear. In the middle of everything, something I had worked towards quietly stepped into the world: Mind the Bedpan was published.

There is something surreal about holding evidence of a dream during a season when life feels particularly uncertain. Publishing a book had occupied my imagination for so long, and suddenly it existed beyond me. It was no longer simply a document saved on a computer or an idea I occasionally spoke about. It had become something another person could hold, read and interpret without me standing beside it to explain what I meant.

I wish I could say I experienced that achievement with uncomplicated happiness, but life rarely arranges our emotions so neatly. Pride existed beside worry. Excitement sat beside exhaustion. Creativity continued even while a much more painful story was unfolding within my family. Perhaps that made publishing the book more meaningful rather than less. It reminded me that human beings are capable of carrying several truths simultaneously. A difficult season does not make every beautiful thing within it less beautiful; sometimes it simply teaches us to hold joy more carefully.

April also gave me the opportunity to take Mama around London and Wales. Looking back, I am particularly grateful that we made time for those journeys because there is a difference between seeing somewhere yourself and seeing it through the eyes of somebody experiencing it for the first time. Places I had become accustomed to suddenly regained some of their wonder simply because Mama was looking at them.

I watched her take in Big Ben, the streets of London and the landscapes of Wales, and I realised how easily familiarity can make us careless. We stop looking properly at places because we assume they will always be there. Then someone arrives who has never seen them before, and suddenly we borrow their attention. Through Mama, I found myself noticing things again.

Those trips have become even more meaningful to me because they happened alongside everything else. We did not wait for life to become perfectly calm before creating memories. Perhaps if we always waited for ideal circumstances, we would postpone living indefinitely. There will always be work, responsibilities, worries, unfinished tasks and reasons to delay something meaningful until later. April reminded me that sometimes joy must be allowed into an imperfect season rather than postponed until everything has been resolved.

Creatively, ideas also began multiplying. There were new book drafts, thoughts about merchandise and possibilities for a vlog. My mind kept producing things even when part of me felt emotionally depleted. I used to imagine creativity as something that flourished only when life felt inspiring, but perhaps creativity is also a way we process what we cannot yet articulate. Writing gives shape to confusion. Stories allow emotions somewhere to go. In a life where so much remains beyond my control, creating something is one of the few ways I can turn experience into meaning.

Then May arrived.

My cousin died on my brother’s birthday.

Even now, placing those two facts inside the same sentence feels strange. A date meant to celebrate one life became permanently linked with the loss of another. May 5 had always belonged to birthdays, messages, wishes and another year added. Suddenly it had to carry death as well.

There are moments when words feel embarrassingly insufficient. I am a writer, and yet grief has repeatedly shown me how limited language can be. You can describe sadness, write metaphors for absence and construct beautiful sentences about memory, but none of them alters the basic reality that somebody you love is no longer here. Sometimes loss does not need to become poetic. Sometimes it simply hurts.

The days that followed felt strangely detached from normal time. Work continued. University continued. My OSCE remained ahead of me. There were still practical preparations to make for travelling home. My planner remained full even while my mind seemed to be somewhere else entirely. I would look at study materials and realise I had read the same line several times without understanding it. I would remember something ordinary and suddenly think of Hans. Grief does not always arrive dramatically. Sometimes it sits quietly beside you while you attempt to complete a completely unrelated task.

I am still showing up. At the moment, that is perhaps the most accurate way I can describe May. I go to work. I study. I prepare for the OSCE. I pack for the long journey home. I write when words come. I rest when I can. Some days I feel relatively steady, while other days everything feels heavier. I am trying not to turn that inconsistency into another thing I need to judge myself for.

I have learned enough about difficult seasons to know that strength is often misunderstood. We imagine strong people moving through adversity with extraordinary composure, but real strength is usually far less impressive from the outside. Sometimes strength is going to work when your heart is somewhere else. Sometimes it is answering an email. Sometimes it is eating something even though you are not hungry, opening the book again after your concentration disappears, booking the flight, packing the suitcase or allowing yourself to cry before returning to whatever still needs doing. Continuing does not always look courageous while you are doing it. Sometimes it simply looks ordinary.

When I look back at January now, I think about how peacefully the year began. Mama was here. Jan’s birthday gave us something simple to celebrate. February gave us Liverpool and days spent exploring together. March introduced fear. April became a strange mixture of urgency, achievement, creativity and family adventures. May brought the loss none of us wanted. Five months, and somehow they contain enough emotional distance to feel like several different lives.

Yet I do not want grief to rewrite the entire year as though nothing good existed before it. Hans’ death is part of 2025 now, and it will remain part of our family’s history, but so will Mama standing beneath London landmarks. So will our trip to Wales. So will Jan’s birthday. So will Liverpool. So will the first time I saw Mind the Bedpan become something tangible. So will the ordinary evenings when nothing terrible happened and nobody knew we would later remember that peace with such tenderness.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons photographs matter so much to me. They become evidence of moments we did not know would later feel significant. We smile at a camera without knowing what the following month will bring. Life exists completely inside that frame, untouched by whatever has not happened yet. Looking back at photographs from the beginning of this year now feels almost like looking through a window at people who do not yet know what is coming.

Maybe that is also why I feel increasingly protective of ordinary happiness. We spend so much time waiting for the significant moments that we forget most of life happens between them. It happens in car journeys, cups of tea, messages from family, meals shared around small tables and walks through unfamiliar cities with your mother beside you. We assume those moments will repeat themselves indefinitely until life reminds us otherwise.

The months ahead still contain things I am looking towards. My brother’s graduation is coming, and I already know how proud I will feel watching him reach something he has worked so hard for. My OSCE waits in June, another challenge sitting somewhere beyond the pages I am currently studying. July will bring my birthday and perhaps an opportunity to breathe after everything the first half of the year has carried. My life as an author is continuing as well, quietly expanding through drafts, ideas and stories I have not yet written.

But I am trying not to rush towards any of those things as though the present is merely something to survive before the better part begins. May deserves to be lived too, even with its sadness. The grief deserves space. The preparations deserve attention. The ordinary days still deserve gratitude. I do not want to become so focused on eventually feeling better that I fail to notice what is still good around me now.

This year is teaching me that life is rarely divided into neat chapters labelled joy, grief, achievement or uncertainty. More often, they overlap. You publish a book while worrying about somebody you love. You travel with your mother while carrying fear beneath the photographs. You prepare for an examination while grieving. You plan for a graduation while arranging a journey home. Life does not wait for one emotion to finish before introducing another.

Perhaps the task is not to organise everything perfectly but to remain present through it. To celebrate without pretending sorrow does not exist. To grieve without believing joy has disappeared forever. To work towards something while accepting that concentration may sometimes fail. To keep making plans while understanding that life has never promised to obey them.

If I could speak to the version of myself standing at the beginning of January, I would not tell her what was coming. I think some knowledge is mercifully given to us only when we arrive at it. I would simply tell her to pay attention. Take the photographs. Sit longer with Mama. Enjoy the ordinary birthday. Walk slowly through Liverpool. Finish the book. Be proud of it. Say what needs to be said while there is still time to say it. Do not postpone love simply because tomorrow feels guaranteed.

And perhaps that is what these first five months have given me beneath everything else: a sharper awareness of how temporary and precious an ordinary life can be. I would never have chosen every lesson the year has offered, but I can choose what I do with the days still in front of me. I can continue writing. I can show up for my family. I can prepare for what needs preparing. I can allow myself to miss Hans without turning his memory into a reason to stop living. I can thank God for the people still here while entrusting the people I have lost to Him.

I do not know what the rest of 2025 will look like. At the moment, I am standing somewhere between grief and anticipation, between university deadlines and a journey home, between what has happened and everything that has not happened yet. I am learning that I do not need to understand the entire year while I am still living it. Perhaps faith is sometimes simply trusting that a season does not have to make sense immediately in order to possess meaning later.

For now, I will keep going in the smallest ways available to me. I will study another page, pack another bag, write another paragraph, answer another message and say another prayer. I will celebrate my brother when his moment comes. I will prepare myself for June. I will welcome July when it arrives. I will continue building this strange little author life one story at a time, while remembering that the person behind the books is allowed to be tired, sad, hopeful, proud and uncertain all at once.

These first five months of 2025 have not been perfect, but they have been deeply lived. They have given me cold British mornings with Mama, windy streets in Liverpool, university notes spread across tables, frightening updates from home, a book with my name on it, journeys through London and Wales, an unexpected flight to prepare for and a loss that has changed the way May will feel to me forever. Somehow, love, loss and little victories have all occupied the same year, sometimes even the same day.

And perhaps that is enough of an explanation for now. Life is not asking me to turn every experience into a lesson immediately. Some things can remain unfinished. Some questions can stay unanswered. Some grief can simply be carried. What matters is that through all of it, I am still here, still loving, still remembering, still creating, still praying and still moving towards whatever comes next.

Until next time,

Anj ♥️