2025 in Five Words

At the start of the year, I had to catch up with a team I’m part of. we wanted to escape the dull rhythm of formal meetings and genuinely check in on how everyone had lived through 2025.I asked a simple question:

If you had to sum up your entire year in five words, what would they be?

I enjoyed listening to everyone, some pretty interesting answers where there, until they flipped the table on me. I had two minutes. I had never truly reflected on the year before, so what came out surprised even me.

These were the five words.

Diplomacy

Looking back, I was difficult to deal with, I was stiff, blunt, and careless with words. I spoke without filters. I often had no energy to talk at all. this year, 2025, marks visible progress toward something I’ve been trying to fix since 2021, that was when I first realized that life becomes easier when you follow procedures instead of forcing emotions to leak in order to take actions. I’ve always struggled with empathy, putting myself in someone else’s place . I believed honesty meant mirroring whatever I felt inside. most of the time, that was numbness, emptiness, and a brutal sharpness in detecting what would go wrong ten miles down the road. but not anymore.

this year, I became kinder. I started paying attention, to my words, my actions, and the quiet ways I could hurt people. this change wasn’t limited to my close circle; it extended almost everywhere.

being diplomatic helped me get what I wanted from people. I had understood this intellectually before, as one of the lessons I learned earlier:
https://a7med7x7.github.io/posts/21/#:~:text=wasting%20time%20with.-,cheerful%20face%20and%20sweet%20words,-You%20can%20get

This year, I sharpened it in practice.

Loss

In March, I lost someone I loved deeply, almost a father to me. my uncle. through him, I tasted again the fear of losing someone you love. he occupied a space in my life that no one else did. I loved having someone older than me who loved me genuinely, and whom I loved back without effort or doubt. among all the young men in the family, he loved me the most. maybe because I was more polite than my cousins. or maybe because he loved this particular sister(my mother) more than the rest, since they lived together far away from Sudan. how he made me feel was unique. I had never experienced anything like it before. now that he is gone, it feels as if I didn’t just lose a person, I lost something within myself, I missed a huge piece in my life. living with the memory that he is gone still feels unreal.

Allah opened another window for me: my uncle from my father’s side, Abdalrahman. He is the last man on earth I look up to and feel that same warmth toward. And I’m afraid quietly, constantly, that I will lose him too.

Regret

I regret how I handled my relationships, I keep avoiding and pushing away the people I love. toward the end of the year, I had conversations with different people, potential friends, good people, some already in my life, but whom I never allowed myself the time to truly know.

Part of this was because of a bizarre system I built for adding new friends, My real regret isn’t that I stepped away to fight my darkness. It’s that I didn’t let their light in sooner, I felt too broken to sit at their table. I didn’t realize they had saved my seat the whole time. what saddens me most is not that they forgave me, but that I still struggle to forgive myself.

Autonomy

I’ve always had autonomy. I don’t remember being forced into much in my life. but this year, autonomy reached its maximum. I gained control over my environment and learned how to bend it toward my interests. more importantly, I learned how to limit this infinite freedom into something productive, something consistent. living away from home for the entire year amplified this. Autonomy showed up everywhere: in my daily life, in my decisions, and especially in my career.

I never took my career too seriously. I let it flow with the questions I was curious about. I wasn’t chasing capitalism. I was chasing understanding. only in 2025 did I notice real progress. I found myself introducing myself in meetings, telling the story of how I got here, and in doing so, making it visible to myself for the first time, the brutal truth is this: it wasn’t discipline or ambition that carried me here, yes those were necessary but what was directing me. It was autonomy. not chasing money. not forcing myself to fit. Just following the questions I genuinely wanted to answer. the places where I have control.

Clarity

For the first time, I gained clarity about who I am, especially in the last three months.I can’t say I’m proud of what I discovered. I mostly uncovered my darker sides. But even that is progress, progress I once wished for, even if I don’t like what it revealed, I thought I was ready, I thought I could face the truth about myself, It turns out I was frightened. snd maybe that, too, is clarity.