2025: Notes from a Year That Changed How I Work

🎢 2025 has been the rollercoaster of my life on several fronts — and one with a heady mix of emotions: fear, excitement, anxiety, joy, uncertainty, and, surprisingly, a few moments of quiet confidence.

🧭 One of the biggest shifts this year was transitioning into independent consulting. From the outside, this felt (and looked) like a professional milestone. But from the inside, it was deeply entangled with learning to slow down, reckoning more honestly with my health, and marking 20 years of living with Type 1 diabetes. 🫀 I spent much of this year letting go of the need to perform that I was “fine” — at work, in my body, and to myself. This wasn’t brave or elegant — just necessary.

✊🏾 That shift reshaped how I showed up professionally as well. Through workshops, teaching, conference conversations, and writing, I found myself returning to questions of power, access, ethics, decolonisation, and justice — not as slogans or hashtags, but as everyday choices to quietly reckon with: how spaces are designed, whose knowledge is taken seriously, and which timelines are treated as acceptable.

🔍 As a result, I’ve slowly shifted my gaze away from polished outputs and toward payin closer attention to how learning, dialogue, and reflections are socially negotiated in my work too. ✈️ Along the way, I continued facilitating workshops, travelled for conferences and meetings, edited and wrote work that genuinely excited me, and collaborated on projects that are still being shaped — and shaping me in return.

🧩 What stayed with me wasn’t just the accumulation of experiences or the volume of work, but a growing realisation of how critical the contexts and conditions surrounding this work actually are.

💭 This year also pushed me to sit with uncertainty more deliberately. Health flare-ups, imposter syndrome, sharp pauses, and deep recalibration were not detours, but part of the central terrain for me this year. I learned — often reluctantly — that stopping, resting, and rethinking were not signs of losing momentum, but ways of sense-making that are just as critical as the work itself.

✍🏾 Some of the work I’m most excited about from this year isn’t visible yet. Tools still being built. Writing still under review. Ideas that need time to breathe. I’ve had to make peace with planting things with faith alone, and with unlearning extractive ideas of productivity and success. Much of what I’m building is meant to mature slowly — not loudly, and not all at once.

♥️ But most importantly, what made this year truly survivable and meaningful was the presence of others. Friends, collaborators, family, mentors, colleagues, and communities all showed up with care and generosity — through structured work, unstructured conversations, shared meals, and quiet check-ins. It was an important reminder that thinking, creating, and doing are never solitary acts, even if they sometimes feel isolating.

🦋 As the year comes to a close, I’m ending 2025 more exhausted than I imagined, but also with more honesty — about my limits, my values, and the kind of work I want to do.

✨ In 2026, I want to continue reflecting, relearning and reorienting as I move forward. Toward slower, more meaningful work. Toward engagement that takes people and power seriously. Toward timelines that are more humane, even when they’re harder to justify or explain.

🌱 As I step into the next year, my commitments for 2026 are simple: Pay attention. Prune as much as I plant. And let my work unfold in its own time.