My Camera Roll Told Me Everything
The soft butter glides over lightly toasted bread as my mind drifts back over the year that was 2025.
When I sat down to make my little recap video for TikTok, I had to scroll through my camera roll and choose what would represent the year, and in doing so I ended up witnessing the whole truth of it. Glamorous dresses, champagne glasses, easy smiles with friends, quiet cuddles with my daughter, fresh flower bouquets, moving-in day at our new apartment, kisses from old loves, photos of handwritten letters, screenshots of good news - and woven right alongside them, tears, legal documents, broken belongings, screenshots of overdue bills, old journal pages heavy with feeling, photos of friends I had to let go of, books that still carry ache, invoices from expensive lawyers, evidence of abuse.
All of it lived together in the same year, in the same life, on the same phone.
It made me realise that happiness for me in 2025 wasn’t the absence of hardship, but the coexistence of two things at once. Showing up each day as close to my authentic self as I could manage, regardless of what anyone else was thinking, doing, or saying and accepting that life is never going to be a straight line, but a constant movement between ease and effort, softness and strain, light and shadow.
There were so many small pockets of peace scattered throughout my year, and I’m certain that if you really sat with your own, you’d find them in yours too. I noticed that even while some truly ugly battles were unfolding behind the scenes, I could still sit at a dinner table with my girlfriends and laugh until my cheeks hurt, still feel warmth and connection even when other parts of my life felt like they were on fire.
2025 taught me to release the pressure that I can only enjoy myself when everything is resolved, healed, or tidy. I decided that things don’t need to be perfect to be good. Things are good because I am here. Because I am breathing. Because I am alive.
Life will always change you, test you, stretch you, inspire you, and humble you. What matters is how you choose to see it, and what you choose to do with the wisdom you collect along the way. There is no final destination, no perfect moment waiting to arrive, no version of life where difficulty disappears. There is only living, right up until the very end.
We are not exempt from tragedy, pain, or discomfort - but we are also not excluded from joy, excitement, love, relief, clarity, and peace. They exist together, as pieces of the same vast, beautiful, complicated puzzle. And when you can accept that life is illogical, that difficulty is the quiet twin of ease, and that both are necessary, the dance becomes gentler, fuller, and far more meaningful.
Be grateful for this life because the only promise we are ever really given is that it will one day end.
Most ardently,
Chenise Sinclaire.
