2025 Heartache to Healing: Building Again After Loss

The fireworks are done now. The last paper crowns have been swept into bins. The group chats have slowed down. The sparkly dresses are back on their hangers and the world has returned to its usual noise.

So, happy new year to you. Truly. If you are reading this quietly, without a crowd around you, I hope this lands like a hand on your shoulder. Not the kind that startles you. The kind that steadies you.

I have been thinking about 2025 in the way you think about a house you once lived in. You remember the corners. You remember which floorboards creaked. You remember the light that used to come through the window at a certain time of day. And you also remember why you left.

2025 was heartache and hard decisions. It was the year I walked away from WMQ, not because I stopped caring, but because caring was costing me too much. There is a difference, hey. Sometimes leaving is not a lack of loyalty. Sometimes leaving is the first honest act of loyalty you give to yourself.

For a long time, my work was my proof of life. If I was useful, if I was needed, if I was carrying something for everyone else, then maybe my own pain would stay quiet. Maybe my fear would stay in the background. Maybe my body would behave if I behaved. That is the deal you try to make when your health becomes the uninvited guest at every table.

But chronic illness does not negotiate. Severe heart failure with left ventricular dysfunction. Atrial fibrillation. Autoimmune pancreatitis. Type 2 diabetes. They do not care that you have a meeting at nine. They do not care that your calendar is colour coded. They do not care that people rely on you.

They arrive when they want. They take what they take. And they leave you doing the maths that healthy people never have to do.

How much energy do I have today

How much pain can I tolerate and still be kind

How many hours can I give before my body cashes the cheque

In 2025, I got tired of pretending I could outwork my own mortality.

That sentence is hard to write, because it sounds dramatic until you live it. Until you wake up and your chest feels heavy in a way that is not metaphorical. Until you know what it is like to carry medication like it is a passport. Until you sit in waiting rooms that smell like disinfectant and quiet fear, and you learn a new language made of numbers, scans, and risk.

Limited time changes the way you look at everything. It does not always make you brave. Sometimes it makes you angry. Sometimes it makes you soft. Sometimes it makes you disappear for a while because you cannot find the words for how unfair it feels.

But it also makes you honest.

And honesty is what pulled me out of one chapter and into another.

Starting my own little online company was not some glossy, overnight reinvention. It was messy. It was learning as I went. It was staying up too late, then regretting it the next day because my body keeps receipts. It was the quiet pride of building something that came from my hands and my mind, not from someone else’s permission.

It was also deeply personal.

Because when you have lived with illness for years, you start to crave control in places where you can have it. You cannot always control the rhythm of your heart, but you can control the way you show up. You can control the choice to create. You can control the way you use your story, not as a weight, but as a tool.

And somewhere in the middle of that, I found myself helping other people start their own companies too. Not because I have everything figured out, but because I know what it is like to stand at the edge of something and wonder if you are allowed to leap.

I have met so many people who are carrying ideas that could change their lives, but they are waiting for a sign. Waiting for confidence. Waiting for permission. Waiting for the perfect time.

The truth is, the perfect time never comes. The fear does not politely step aside. You move with it. You build with shaky hands. You start small. You start tired. You start anyway.

And that is one of the lessons 2025 gave me, again and again. Waiting does not save you. Waiting just wastes you.

I know that sounds harsh, but I mean it with love. I have stopped romanticising hope as if it is some magical force that visits you when you are good enough. I do not live like that anymore. I do not sit around hoping life will hand me something gentle.

I choose.

We choose our destiny, not in the fairytale sense, but in the daily sense. In the small decisions that become a direction. In the boundaries we keep. In the phone calls we finally make. In the people we stop chasing. In the work we stop doing for free. In the way we treat ourselves when nobody is watching.

Destiny is not a lightning strike. It is a pattern.

And speaking of patterns, let me talk about the new year posts for a second.

Every January, we scroll through everyone’s highlight reels like we are auditioning for our own lives. Some people post a hundred photos. Airports. Champagne. Fancy dinners. Skin glowing. Teeth white. Smiles wide. The perfect caption that makes it seem like they were born knowing how to be happy.

Some of us post a few photos. A dog. A sunset. A dinner at home. A blurry selfie where you can see the tired behind the smile. Some of us do not post at all, because we are just trying to survive the day.

And here is the thing.

Achievement is not a competition. Some people achieved ten things in 2025. Good on them. Some people achieved one thing. They kept going. They stayed alive. They got out of bed when their mind was heavy and their body hurt. They asked for help. They said no. They left the relationship that was breaking them. They took their medication. They went back to therapy. They made it through Christmas. They paid their rent. They held their grief without drowning in it.

If that was you, I see you. And I am proud of you.

Because the only thing that matters in all of this, beneath the photos and the captions and the performance of being fine, is genuine connection.

Not followers. Not likes. Not the illusion of being adored by strangers.

Connection.

The kind where someone sits with you in silence and it feels like love.

The kind where someone answers your call at the wrong hour.

The kind where you can tell the truth without polishing it first.

My best friend Sammo gave me that kind of connection in 2025. He made me escape the noise. He pulled me out of my own head and into nature, like he was reminding my spirit where it came from.

And I felt it. The true power of the sea.

There is a moment when you step into salt water and your body remembers something older than your stress. The cold hits first, then the burn, then the surrender. The ocean does not care who you are on paper. It does not care about titles or heartbreak or the emails you forgot to answer. It just moves. It takes you as you are.

The salt water hit my skin and it felt like medicine that did not come in a bottle. It felt like my ancestors were speaking through the tide. I thought about Tatana in Papua New Guinea. I thought about Badu Island in the Torres Strait. I thought about being water people, and how the sea has always been more than scenery. It is story. It is memory. It is a living, breathing relative.

In the ocean, I did not feel broken. I felt held.

And when I climbed out, hair wet and chest open, I realised something that made me both sad and strangely grateful.

I had been starving for that feeling. Not just the sea, but the truth. The simplicity. The reminder that life is not meant to be lived as a performance.

Then Ryan left.

I do not know how to write about that without it sounding like the usual breakup story, because it was not usual to me. It was my life. My home. My future. My rhythm.

When someone leaves, people love to say time heals. I have always hated that sentence. Time does not heal anything on its own. Time just passes. What heals is what you do with the passing.

Ryan leaving forced me to do things I did not want to do. Practical things, like redoing my will and updating beneficiaries. That sounds like paperwork, and it is, but it also feels like a funeral for a version of your life.

It made me sit there with a pen and think, holy fuck. This chapter is officially closed now.

Not in the dramatic way where you burn photos or throw their clothes onto the lawn. In the quiet way. In the adult way. In the way that makes your stomach drop because it is real.

Breakups are hard for everyone, but they hit different when you live with chronic illness and you know time is not guaranteed. When your life has already been shaped by hospitals and diagnoses, you become painfully aware that love is not just a feeling. It is also a plan. It is also care. It is also, will you stay when things get scary.

When Ryan left, I grieved him, but I also grieved the future I had built in my head. The small ordinary moments. The growing old together. The safety of thinking I did not have to start again.

And I want to be honest here, because honesty is the only thing worth offering.

There were days I thought I would not survive the grief. Not because I wanted to disappear, but because my body was already carrying so much. Heartbreak felt like a weight on top of an already tired heart. It felt like trying to breathe through water. It made my chest ache in a way that scared me, and sometimes I could not tell where emotion ended and symptom began.

That is the thing about living with illness. Your body becomes a place where fear can live.

But I also made a choice.

I chose to let that chapter close properly, not because I did not love him, but because I did.

If I keep a door half open, if I pretend there is going back, then what we had becomes a looping wound instead of a completed story. And I refuse to turn love into a ghost that haunts me.

What we had meant something. It was beautiful in its own way. I loved him so much. That is true. And it is also true that it ended.

Both things can exist. Love can be real and still not be forever.

So I am choosing to honour it by not begging it to return.

I am choosing to carry the meaning forward, not the attachment.

And now, on the other side of that loss, I am slowly remembering something I forgot.

I am still here.

My heart still beats, even when it misbehaves.

My body still gets me to the ocean.

My mind still creates.

My spirit still reaches for connection.

I am learning how to date again, not as a desperate search for a replacement, but as a return to possibility. As a way of saying, I am not done. I am not finished. I am not defined by who left.

I will find love again.

Not because life owes me, but because I am willing to meet life. Because I am willing to be seen. Because I am willing to risk tenderness even after it has hurt me.

And while I am talking about love, I have to mention my sister.

One of the brightest parts of 2025 was helping her step into her career. Watching her grow. Watching her claim space. Watching her become more certain of herself. There is something holy about seeing someone you love realise their own strength.

It reminded me that legacy is not always money or property or big public achievements. Sometimes legacy is what you water in other people. Sometimes it is the way you show up for family. Sometimes it is the encouragement you give at the exact moment someone is about to give up.

If you are reading this and your 2025 felt small, I want you to hear this.

Small is not shameful.

Quiet is not failure.

Survival is not less impressive than success.

And connection is the only currency that never crashes.

So, happy new year. Again. Not the performative kind. The real kind.

May this year bring you people who tell the truth with you.

May it bring you the courage to choose, not wait.

May it bring you salt water moments, whatever that looks like for you.

May it bring you the kind of love that does not require you to shrink.

May it bring you a life that feels like yours.

As for me, I am walking into 2026 with scars and plans and a heart that has been broken and rebuilt more than once. I am walking in with grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. I am walking in with my ancestors behind me, the ocean in my blood, and the stubborn belief that even with limited time, I can still live a life that is full.

Not full of photos.

Full of meaning.

🩵 E