GOODBYE 2024, HELLO 2025...

 

 

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I honestly can't believe I'm sat here once again, typing out another reflection on the year gone by; it only feels like yesterday that we were saying goodbye to 2023! But here we are, let's look back, look forwards and talk about life...

Honestly, 2024 has been broadly fine for me on a personal basis; it felt like it hurtled by and perhaps didn't have as many big 'moments' as the year before, but there were still plenty of wonderful experiences and things to be grateful for. What's been incredibly difficult is to live in this world (if I had to sum it up in one sentence). I've felt incredibly troubled by a lot of things, to be completely honest. Society feels more polarised and divided, less empathetic and lonelier than ever before. The level of information we have access to hasn't helped us to better understand anything, it seems, it's only allowed people to build their ecosystem of facts which could be entirely different to your own. All of this is happening whilst we bear witness to the most horrendous state crimes via social media, as our governments and media tie themselves in knots to justify what's happening (the term 'gaslighting' has been overused and twisted so much that I've retired it from my vocabulary, but it's difficult to describe this in any other way). Personally, I've found it really difficult to create beauty content with this weight on my mind every single day. 

I guess that leads me onto another feeling, which I did express earlier in the year in this post, but it's honestly just grown in the months since that post; I don't think I have a place in this space any more. I'm pretty sure of the sequence of events and how I feel now, but it's hard to pin-point whether I could have landed in a different spot or not... I noticed in mid 2022 that my content just... stopped hitting. I thought it was a blip, and I'd had blips that lasted a few months before, but I never got out of it! My social media has really felt like it's withered and died and obviously people don't read blogs like they used to. The community I used to feel a part of is a shadow of what it used to be now that the beauty content creator world is so saturated. This isn't my job and I've never wanted to force myself to bend to viral-style content that's going to be more popular and I've just carried on because I enjoyed what I was doing, however I think that enjoyment has really died this year. Maybe it's a combination of factors but a few that come to mind are; generally feeling distracted by other things going on in the world, feeling like I've shared all I want to share on beauty, sensing the lack of interest in what I put out and generally feeling disengaged and repetitive in my content. I’ve come to learn that a new launch is genuinely being as revolutionary or exciting as the adverts try to claim is rare and I don’t want to feed into the overconsumption issues we have as a society. What felt fun and exciting a few years ago now feels inherently problematic. I want to see through the work I've started, but I think I'm ready to let my place on the beauty internet go in 2025. It's been amazing and the highs were really high but I don't feel like this is making me happy any more and I want to focus on what actually makes me passionate.

I know this all sounds quite dark, but for me; 2024 has been a pretty good year outside of these things! I'm so grateful for the places I've been; from the Northern Lights in Iceland to the Italian Riviera. I've really loved cooking and sharing my recipes on my other account and learning skills like baking sourdough bread and brewing my own kombucha. I feel like I've really settled into what I feel is a healthy lifestyle with plenty of exciting food and I'm enjoying experimenting, having fun and getting creative. I've had such a mindset shift where I'm just drawn to flavours and colours over the beigeness of ultra-processed foods that aren't really satisfying to me. It's just stopped looking like anything I want to eat if I have a choice (though obviously; if I'm hungry at a service station, I'm getting Subway!) and cooking has become something relaxing and therapeutic rather than a functional act. And I kind of love that for me...

For 2025, on a wider scale, I hope to see a world where we can talk and understand each other as human, with inner worlds as rich as our own, rather than abstract concepts. A world where people aren't getting fired or silence for seeing gross injustice and reacting to it whilst establishment figures do mental acrobatics to... not be human beings. And one where we can be that little bit more tolerant and find common ground outside of our tribes and preconceived notions before we lose all sense of connection and community (and our ability to interact with people we don't agree with in a healthy and productive way). We're all so burnt out and tired that we have little time for one another and assume bad faith in every interaction and it's only getting worse. I really hope we can collectively move to a better place in the future, though if I'm honest; I suspect this is going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. 

As I've mentioned, I don't think I have a lot more fight left in me when it comes to this platform, but I do love cooking and creating content for the very small food account I have. So, I look forward to doing more of that and even just dedicating more time to writing (seeing as I wrote a whole novel a few years ago and have completely neglected it ever since...)  So, hopefully 2025 is the year I finally let go of the sense of duty I tend to carry around with me and spend the spare time I get in life actually enjoying what I'm doing (crazy concept!)

I also hope that for me personally, 2025 is the year when myself and my partner can begin to build a life together. After 2 and a bit years; it feels like the only thing holding us back from properly coming together as a team has been life circumstances and timing! I really want things to move forwards and for us to set down our roots and future life together in the new year. I'm 32 in 2025, so with each year that goes by, I'm only becoming more conscious that time flies and you have to take proactive steps towards the life you want rather than kicking the can down the road and expecting it to just 'happen' to you! I'm nervous but very excited about the future; whatever happens, something has to happen in the next 12 months and I have to drive that. From this side of things; I don't know exactly how this will turn out, but I'm looking forward to finding out...

I know this hasn't been the most uplifting post in the world, but it's my little space to be honest and this is how I've experienced 2024, so I had to be honest about it! How was your year? What do you hope for in 2025?

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