2025- Love, Loss and Letting Go

2025 was, for me, a year defined by change. Much of that change was necessary and intentional—carefully considered steps toward something different. Still, there were unexpected shifts throughout the year that altered my life in ways I couldn’t have fully prepared for. I lost a lot. I ended a relationship that had been all-consuming for the past three years of my life. I lost my grandmother—something that was not entirely unexpected, yet grief has a way of arriving long after you think you’ve made peace with the idea of loss.

And yet, despite everything, 2025 was a year full of love. I fell in love with a new city. I began shooting. I left an island that, this time last year, I never believed I would have the courage to leave. As I’ve spoken about before, reflection is something I’m actively trying to practice more, and the end of the year feels like the most natural moment to pause, look back, and take stock of who I was, who I am, and who I’m becoming.

Love

Love, in its many forms, was a defining theme of 2025. I fell in love, I fell out of love, and I chose to walk away from love. Each of those experiences taught me something different—not just about love itself, but about my capacity to hold it, release it, and survive its absence. I turned 20 this year, an age I have dreamed about since I was a child. I never fully understood why it felt so significant, but now that I’m here, I think it’s because 20 feels like standing at the edge of something expansive. So far, it has been my favourite age to be—an age where everything feels possible, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Romantic love no longer feels like the centre of my world in the way it once did. Instead, love showed up in quieter, more enduring ways. In friendships that grounded me. In late-night conversations. In choosing myself, even when it hurt. In learning how to be alone without feeling lonely.

I learned that love doesn’t always ask you to stay. Sometimes it asks you to leave. Sometimes it asks you to trust that letting go is not a failure, but an act of care—for yourself and for the other person. Walking away was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it was also one of the most honest. Love also found me in places. In streets that slowly began to feel familiar. In moments of awe when I realised I had built a life somewhere new. In picking up a camera and learning how to see the world—and myself—through a different lens. I have also been fortunate enough to have met someone who has shown me what love is supposed to feel like, worry-free, full of laughter and comfort, and I am hoping he will stay around for a while.

If 2025 taught me anything, it’s that love is not fragile. It stretches, changes shape, and survives endings. Even in a year of loss, love remained the constant thread, weaving meaning through everything I left behind and everything I stepped toward.

Loss

Loss sat with me all year. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes so loudly I couldn’t think past it. I learned that grief doesn’t always announce itself—it seeps in, waits, and then suddenly you’re carrying it everywhere.

I grieved someone who is still alive. That kind of loss is confusing and cruel. There is no funeral, no clear ending, no permission to mourn openly. Just the slow realisation that someone who once knew you deeply no longer exists in your daily life. I grieved the way we spoke, the way we loved, the future I thought was certain. I grieved myself in that relationship—the version of me that felt safe, chosen, understood. Letting go felt like tearing something out of my own body while pretending I was fine. But it opened a door which I didn’t realise existed to a person I am proud of being. I realised for so long that I didn’t actually know myself, I didn’t know the person I had been all these years, and since the loss of that person, I have never been as comfortable and happy as ever. I will always be in debt to him; he taught me so much. However, I adore my life more than ever now, and who I was before is not a person I would ever want to become again.

And then there was my grandmother. Even knowing it was coming didn’t soften the blow. Her absence is quiet but constant. It shows up in moments you don’t expect—in things I want to tell her, in habits I still carry, in the ache of knowing the world has moved on without her. Grief didn’t hit all at once; it came in waves, sometimes weeks later, sometimes out of nowhere. It taught me that death doesn’t end love—it just changes where it lives.

Packing to leave my home felt like another kind of death. Every box held proof that something was coming to an end. I mourned rooms that had witnessed my becoming, walls that had held me through heartbreak, joy, boredom, and growth. Leaving meant admitting I would never be that version of myself again. Even though I wanted to go, even though I knew it was right, I cried over the smallest things. Grief doesn’t care if the decision was yours.

This year showed me that loss isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s choosing yourself and feeling the consequences of that choice. Sometimes it’s missing someone you’re not supposed to miss anymore. Sometimes it’s standing in an empty room and realising you’re already gone. I used to think grief was something you moved through. Now I know it’s something you learn to live alongside. It reshaped me, softened my edges, and forced me to sit with feelings I would have once avoided. Loss changed the way I love, the way I leave, and the way I hold onto the people and places that remain.

If love was the throughline of 2025, then loss was its shadow—always present, always reminding me that to feel deeply is to risk everything.

2026

I learned this year that love and loss speak the same language. They arrive through the same door, leave the same marks on your body. To love deeply is to agree, quietly, to be undone.

2025 did not leave me whole, but it left me honest. I carry absences now—people, places, versions of myself that no longer exist in the way they once did. Some mornings, I still reach for what isn’t there. Some nights I am overwhelmed by gratitude for having felt it at all.

I left without knowing exactly who I would become on the other side. I only knew I could no longer stay. Leaving asked me to trust myself more than I ever had before—to believe that even without certainty, I would find my footing. And I did. Slowly. Imperfectly.

Grief taught me how to move gently through the world. Love taught me how to stay open despite it. I am learning that becoming is not about arrival, but about allowance—allowing joy to sit beside sorrow, memory beside hope, the past beside the present without needing to choose between them.

I do not carry this year as a burden. I carry it as proof. Proof that I can love without losing myself. Proof that endings are not erasure. Proof that even in leaving, something remains.

I step forward not unscarred, but unafraid. With softer hands. With clearer eyes. With a heart that knows now: to live fully is to risk everything—and to choose it anyway.

Happy New Year, All my love,

T x