If 2025 had an annual appraisal, I would have several comments. Strengths: kept me employed, gave me people to love, supplied enough good days to prevent a formal complaint. Areas for improvement: communication, workload distribution, advance warning before emotionally significant events, and a frankly questionable approach to work-life balance. Overall rating: met expectations, exceeded them in departments nobody asked to expand, and occasionally introduced “development opportunities” that felt suspiciously like problems.

I started the year with no heroic resolutions. I had no intention of becoming a 5 a.m. person, drinking celery juice, running before sunrise or writing affirmations on a mirror. I know myself. If I am awake at five in the morning, there is a very good chance I am either working a night shift or regretting several decisions. What I wanted from 2025 was fairly modest: do my job well, keep life moving, spend time with people I love, travel when possible, and avoid unnecessary nonsense. I thought this was a reasonable request. The year apparently considered it a suggestion.

Work occupied a large part of it, as work tends to do when you are a nurse and twelve hours can somehow contain the emotional content of an entire television series. Being a Stroke Clinical Nurse Specialist means that a normal working day can change tone very quickly. One minute you are reviewing symptoms, scans and treatment options; the next you are speaking with a family who woke up expecting an ordinary day and are now trying to understand how everything changed between breakfast and lunchtime. Stroke does not respect diaries, birthdays, holidays or anyone’s plans for the afternoon.

Those conversations never became routine to me, and I am glad they did not. Clinical knowledge gives you the facts, but facts do not automatically tell you how to say them to somebody whose world has just been rearranged. You can know the anatomy, treatment window, prognosis and next steps and still reach a point where the most useful thing you can offer is a clear explanation followed by enough silence for the family to absorb it. Sometimes they ask questions you can answer. Sometimes the honest answer is that we need to wait. Sometimes everyone in the room desperately wants certainty and medicine simply does not have any available that day.

I used to think being experienced would eventually make those moments easier. It does, technically. You become better at choosing words, better at reading a room, better at recognising when people need information and when they simply need a minute. But easier is probably the wrong word. Experience does not turn you into furniture. You still notice the husband holding his wife’s hand, the daughter trying not to cry, the family member asking the same question twice because their brain has not caught up with what they have just heard. If anything, experience makes you understand more clearly what that moment means.

Nursing also gave me another recurring lesson in 2025: effort is not a guarantee. You can escalate quickly, make the right calls, follow the pathway, involve the right people and still end the shift wishing the outcome had been different. Healthcare is inconveniently immune to the idea that hard work should always produce the ending we want. This is difficult for people like me who enjoy fixing things. Give me a problem and I want a plan. Give me uncertainty and my brain immediately requests additional information. Unfortunately, medicine occasionally replies, “We’ll see,” which is an answer I have never particularly enjoyed.

Outside work, the year had its own business to conduct. Hans died, and Millie died too. I am not going to force humour into those losses because neither needs decorating. Grief has its own personality. It does not maintain office hours and has little respect for whether you are currently busy. You can be perfectly functional for days and then see a photograph, remember a date or hear something familiar and suddenly your mind has opened a file you were not planning to review.

Losing Millie changed the atmosphere at home in those first weeks. Pets occupy such ordinary parts of a day that their absence becomes noticeable in equally ordinary places. A corner of a room. A feeding routine. The expectation of seeing them when you come through the door. Hans belonged to a different part of my heart, tied to family, shared history and the strange permanence of people who have existed in your life for so long that imagining the family without them requires an adjustment nobody wanted to make. 2025 made me understand that grief does not always look like crying. Sometimes it is simply noticing absence repeatedly.

Then, because life apparently dislikes leaving a house emotionally consistent for too long, Miyu and Luna entered the picture. Two kittens are an excellent cure for excessive seriousness, mainly because they do not respect it. You can be contemplating life, mortality and the fragile nature of existence while a kitten launches herself at a curtain for reasons known only to her. Suddenly philosophy has to wait because somebody is attempting to climb furniture using techniques specifically excluded from the manufacturer’s warranty.

They changed the rhythm of home. There was running, wrestling, toys appearing in places toys had no business being, and the daily discovery that owning cats mostly means purchasing expensive items they ignore in favour of cardboard. They also introduced the particular privilege of being loved by an animal that occasionally bites you shortly afterwards. One minute they are asleep against you like tiny angels; the next they are sprinting down the hallway at 3 a.m. because apparently the Olympics have introduced an indoor feline category.

I needed those ridiculous moments more than I realised. They did not replace Millie; that is not how love works. A new animal does not fill the exact shape left by another. Miyu and Luna simply made their own space. The house had movement again. New routines formed. New photographs filled my phone. I began developing a suspiciously detailed knowledge of cat behaviour while simultaneously accepting that neither cat had any intention of respecting household authority.

Being far from the Philippines also took on another meaning when Cebu was hit by Typhoon Tino. Living abroad gives you an odd relationship with home. You can be thousands of miles away and still feel immediately pulled towards what is happening there. You read updates, check on people, scroll through photographs and feel the frustration of distance. I could not physically be there packing supplies or distributing water, so I did what I could from where I was. Help became coordination, messages, donations and finding ways to turn concern into something more useful than simply staring at a screen feeling helpless.

That experience changed my understanding of distance. Being abroad does not cancel belonging. You can leave a place without becoming indifferent to it. Home remains capable of calling you into action, even when the call travels several thousand miles. I did not need to personally hand someone the water to understand that the water mattered. Sometimes contribution is less photogenic than we imagine. It may simply be getting resources from one place to another and trusting that they reached hands that needed them.

Thankfully, the year was not an uninterrupted collection of serious events. There were trips, meals, days off, conversations that had absolutely no educational value, and plenty of moments where nothing meaningful happened at all. I have become increasingly fond of those. I no longer need every day to teach me a lesson. Occasionally I would like a Tuesday to remain a Tuesday without assigning me personal development.

Going home was one of the better parts. There is a peculiar experience in returning to streets you knew before your life expanded elsewhere. Everything feels familiar until you notice what has changed, and then you realise you have changed too. Places that once belonged to daily life now carry memories attached to them. People look older. Buildings disappear. New ones appear. The food still manages to taste correct, which is reassuring because some institutions should remain stable.

Travel also gave me a break from being professionally useful. Nurses spend so much time anticipating needs that it is strangely luxurious to have an afternoon where the most important decision is what to eat next. No scans. No referrals. No alarms. No one requiring an NIHSS. Just the very manageable problem of choosing lunch, a responsibility for which I remain highly motivated.

Then there were the achievements nobody would put on a certificate. Finishing difficult runs of shifts and still managing to form sentences afterwards. Taking opportunities even when part of me wanted another week to think about them. Choosing not to respond to every misunderstanding as though I had been summoned before a tribunal. Realising that kindness does not require making myself permanently available. Getting better at recognising when I was tired before my body escalated the complaint to senior management.

I also became more selective about what deserved my energy. This was probably overdue. I spent years treating endurance as proof of character. If I could tolerate something, I assumed I should. If I could keep going, I kept going. If somebody needed me, I found room. 2025 introduced a much more useful question: just because I can, why exactly am I doing this?

That question saved me from several unnecessary internal meetings.

I still said yes when I should have said no. I still overthought conversations that deserved approximately four minutes of attention. I still occasionally drafted entire explanations in my head for people who had not requested one. I did not become an enlightened woman floating through the year unaffected by other people’s opinions. That sounds exhausting in its own way. I simply got better at catching myself.

Faith remained part of how I made sense of the year too. I would like to say I surrendered everything gracefully, but God and I both know that would be inaccurate. My version of surrender sometimes looks suspiciously like handing something over and then checking ten minutes later whether there has been an update. I like answers. I like plans. I would prefer prayers to come with tracking numbers. Still, 2025 gave me several opportunities to accept that my understanding is not always required before I can continue.

By the end of the year, I was less interested in deciding whether 2025 had been “good” or “bad.” Twelve months are far too untidy for that. It contained grief and kittens, difficult shifts and good meals, worry and laughter, responsibility and travel, loss and new attachments. It had days I would happily repeat and others I would decline if offered a second performance.

What changed most was probably my definition of a successful year. It is no longer a list of major achievements lined up neatly for December. Sometimes success is much less impressive from a distance. You kept doing work that mattered. You loved people while they were here. You missed them when they were gone. You helped where you could. You took the trip. You came home. You laughed. You rested occasionally without filing an apology. You got a little better at knowing what deserves your attention and what can safely be ignored.

So if I had to complete the final section of 2025’s appraisal, I would not write that the year transformed me. That sounds far too dramatic, and frankly, I still have many of the same bad habits. I still lose things I was holding five minutes earlier. I still believe I can complete an unrealistic number of tasks in one afternoon. I still think “I’ll have an early night” with an optimism unsupported by historical evidence.

But I know myself better than I did in January.

That will do.

2025 can therefore be signed off as completed, with several learning points, multiple incidents requiring reflection, a few excellent memories, some losses I would rather not have known, two cats added to the establishment, and enough evidence to confirm that I remain very much a work in progress.

No further action required.

Until 2026, obviously.

Anj ❤