I had a blog series where every December, I would post lessons I had learned from the past year or so of my life. This past December, I didn’t get around to posting. So here were some of the lessons, seven of which are particularly important to me, that I learned in 2025.
Be the worst in the room
This past year, I started struggling in school in a very different way to the one I am used to. Typically, I wouldn’t really have a need to struggle. The answer to my academic problems was to memorize my way out of them. But this year, I started taking classes from many different disciplines and had to relearn how to learn. But being the beginner in the room made me realize that it also made me one of the poorer performers. That really bothered me; I assumed that if I was genuinely interested in a specific class or concept, I would “get it” and perform well. It felt like taking a step backwards by taking classes or doing projects that I didn’t know how to do. What I found, though, is that 1) I wasn’t as bad as I thought and 2) I was in my head, which as hindering my performance more than my abilities were. And by overthinking and over-questioning what my professional goals were and why I was doing this new task, I forgot that my moral imperative isn’t mastery but learning. Mastery is a “place” or level of achievement, while learning is a process. Mastery isn’t translatable across disciplines, but learning is. And so if I continued to focus on mastery as the litmus test for success, I would be disappointed in every single new task I took on just because I wasn’t the expert.
I think this logic will become more engrained in me once I am closer to a career, because as a student the metric of my employability and suitability for further schooling is a measurement of mastery (grades). I do think, though, that being in my final year of undergraduate studies makes it important for me to understand this lesson now.
Phrases often don’t convey the magnitude of what you want to say
I like to romanticize my everyday. In doing so, I something approach conversations with myself, family or others as having the perfect script; ie., there is a perfect response, and every word I utter brings me either closer to or further away from the optimal. Because I take this approach, I put a lot of value in finding the right words. But when I was leaving Singapore, I found I just couldn’t find the right words to say goodbye to certain people or places or things. It manifested as this deep, thorny hidden emotional turmoil that ate me up from the inside. I felt that if I couldn’t express what I was feeling, I had regressed and become withdrawn from the world. Today, I realize that was ill-placed blame. Not being able to find the right words meant two things to me: first, that what I was feeling was something more complex than I had ever experienced previously; and second, that I understood my words are sometimes better saved that shared.
I recently listened to someone talking about what to do when you are emotionally charged. The person cautioned that you should never make big decisions when you are either very high or very low. Instead, you need to wait for the tide of emotions to pass. When I share my thoughts when I’m either high or low, I realized that I may be causing stress to others by sharing ideas that haven’t been fully thought through. And for someone who values words so much, that is troubling. I don’t see this as a regression or losing touch with my emotions, but rather learning how to control them and be more measured.
Pity is not productive
I spent a lot of time working with underprivileged groups in 2025, and it weighted very heavily on me. I was witnessing and hearing about hardships I could not even imagine, and it was shattering what I knew to be true or what I could expect from the world. To me, the world was to be looked at with optimism and rose-tinted glasses. There are beaches and sunsets, sweet fruits and abundance on Earth. But for the people I was working with, the world was about survival and instinct. It was about being savvy, and sacrificing to get by. They had to undo and work against forces that had been born impeding them. How was any of that fair, I would ask myself? Why and how did I end up in such a privileged position while this hardworking person didn’t? Especially given that I didn’t have to work for many of the comforts I have. I have the ability to be the journalist snapping on-the-ground pictures of war and famine only to retreat to a nice hotel to reflect on what they saw. Witnessing without experiencing or being afflicted by human struggle is a great privilege.
I spent a lot of time struggling over my privilege, especially because I saw so many people who needed help. The struggle turned into shame and pity. I took a very reductive view on the people I tried to help, thinking that their life was nothing but struggle.
But then I met a couple of people in Singapore who worked in the construction industry. They worked for 12 hours six days a week, and would take on extra projects on Sundays. I tagged on many more of my own assumptions onto them, reducing their lives to what I thought were disadvantages. Slowly, however, I saw that their happiness depended on things other than status or material comfort. They built homes for themselves on the water, saw their friends every night and had deep connections with their family. This didn’t erase some of the struggles they had, but it made them satiated with their lives in a way I wasn’t.
Honour your seasons
There will be times in your life where you make a mistake, fall, fail or hurt someone. And there will be times in your life where you get the placement, make a wonderful new friend or go on a well-earned vacation. Those two things can and will co-exist, and they are your life’s seasons. You are guaranteed to fall, and you are similarly guaranteed to chance to feel happy. If you chase the happiness, the falls will and must come. And instead of viewing them as rewriting the narrative of your life, you should see them as valuable roadblocks that force you to practise making choices and learn from them.
Know how to hold on, but learn when to let go
Getting attached or having a fixed mindset about what is right or wrong can be forces that keep you from letting go of a task. And in some spaces, that grit or refusal to let go can be rewarded. But, you need to know when something or someone isn’t serving you and let that thing/person go accordingly. You don’t serve yourself by staying in a situation you know is bad for you. And though there is always a risk that you may not find anything better, perhaps the best path forwards is to step away anyways.
Reality is created, not handed to you
I believe that if everyone is given time and space, they will be able to envision certain elements of life that they would regard as a dream. But dreams can easily stay in your head. Think of it like plans: sometimes, they make it our of your head. Other times, they just don’t. But unlike more mundane plans, a life goal deserves to be actionable and attempted over and over again. It doesn’t deserve to stay in some “drafts” folder in your mind, or hidden inside of you so that no one knows what you truly want to make of your reality. And once you realize that there is a process to getting what you want, it is naturally you that will have to follow those steps.
I used to follow that chain of logic and think: “oh boy, thats a huge burden”. But even when I read it back now, I think “that’s a very liberating opportunity”. Because what is given me, you and everyone in this world is agency (maybe not complete agency over all aspects of our lives, but it does give us some degree of agency at the least).
What this logic also means is that when you need to face consequences, you must face them. When you need to be confronted for something you did, you need to receive that criticism. And what matters in the aftermath of what you experience is a reality you can create. You will be handed all sorts of issues and burdens and dilemmas. But if you have a goal in mind and you put your energy towards addressing that dilemma, you would be creating your reality in a way that empowers you.
Make your words your doctrine
When I was little, my parents found I had a particular talent for coming up with lies. They put in so much effort to put me in situations where I didn’t feel compelled to lie so that I could learn the value of being truthful. I would lie when I felt compelled to make a certain version of a story the truth, and I would try to convince both myself and others that this was indeed the situation I was in. But today, I see lying as suffocation. It takes the value out of your words, and your words become hallow and powerless.
For example, I met someone recently who asked me for feedback on a piece of their work. After I gave them feedback, they said to me “if that really is what you mean, then…”. Framing their response that way made me realize that my words form the basis of other people’s trust and more broadly, other people’s faith in reality. My words as meant to be a reflection of the world as I know it, and if I lie to others then they will never know my truth. To but is existentially, my truth will die with me. And that is a very very lonely thing to think about.
So I have vowed to be as honest as I possibly can. I want my every word to be deliberate and full of life.
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So much volatility has entered my life in the past year. The things I thought were true about the world were shattered so many times, I stopped trusting my intuition. What this cycle of breaking and repair has taught me is that I will keep having to go through low points to see their purpose, and will have to learn to cherish the high points while they come.
I have also grow sick of external validation. In my four years of schooling, I have now come to realize it isn’t worth it. I am capable of outworking my own expectations, and so as long as I continue to learn I will continue to get better. What I deserve from myself is an ally who will tell me when to keep going and where there is room for improvement. So as long as I am guided by a desire to care and do good, I will be able to look back on my day feeling it was worth something.
A goal I have for my life post-graduation is to give myself projects that matter to me and pursue them whenever I can. For the goals I have, that means doing things in public where I would make myself vulnerable to other people’s scrutiny. What I have come to see, however, is that hinging my worth on sources outside of my control is exhausting. Though I often think about how embarrassing it would be if I publically fail, I also need to internalize the fact that my life will never be scrutinized by anyone more than I scrutinize it myself.
To end this rather chaotic post, I have to say: first year me did not ever think her life would turn into what it is now. I can’t say she would take it very well either, because she did not like change or uncertainty. But I do know many more things about the world now than I did three years ago. As I get ready to enter into my pre-professional and professional journey, I have a feeling my conception of the world will change again. And it may very well lead to more blog posts like this one. This series has taught me that in every phase of my life, there is learning that makes me better. That learning doesn’t depend on my status as a student or age or living situation or career issues. That learning is a product of being alive. And so as long as I keep documenting my life as I am living it, I can continue to reflect on how life is molding me into the person I will be tomorrow. Not every day, every month or every year will be my year. But I will, of course, come out with some lessons.
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