2025: The Year the World Felt Too Loud and Life Felt Too Fragile

By: Shaimaa Peshimam

If I had to describe 2025 in one word, it would be exposure.
This was the year where nothing stayed hidden—grief, cruelty, love, loss, faith, fear, or hope. Everything stood bare. People left too soon. The world bled in public. Faith was tested not quietly, but brutally. And somehow, in the middle of all that devastation, small beginnings still dared to exist.
I don’t know if 2025 broke me or stripped me down to something truer. Maybe both.

This year, death felt closer than ever before.
Not as an abstract concept. Not as something distant that happens to “others.” But as something that walked freely into conversations, homes, hospitals, classrooms, timelines, and prayers. People who were here at the beginning of the year—breathing, planning, laughing—became memories before the year could end.

There’s something deeply unsettling about realizing that someone you spoke to in January became a name you whispered in grief by December.

Early deaths hurt differently.
They don’t feel natural. They feel unfinished. They leave behind sentences that were never completed, lives that were still mid-chapter, promises that never got their chance to unfold. This year, I lost people who were not supposed to leave yet. People who had more to give, more to become, more to fix, more to love.

And the strangest part?
The world didn’t stop.
The sun still rose. Notifications still buzzed. People still argued about trivial things. Life kept moving forward, even when it felt morally wrong to do so.

I learned this year that grief doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it just sits quietly inside you, watching the calendar flip pages without permission.

One of the most painful realizations of 2025 was understanding that grief has an expiry date—at least in the eyes of the world.
At first, people check in.
Then they assume you’re okay.
Then they forget.
But grief doesn’t forget.

It just learns how to coexist with daily tasks, forced smiles, and unanswered questions. Some losses this year didn’t even get the dignity of full mourning because another tragedy followed immediately after. Loss stacked upon loss until emotions went numb.

I found myself thinking:
How many more goodbyes can a heart absorb in one year?
And yet, the answer was cruelly simple—as many as it has to.

This year took people who felt like anchors—teachers, healers, elders, quiet warriors who never needed applause. People whose presence alone made spaces kinder. People who carried wisdom softly.

Their absence left gaps no one could fill.

What haunted me wasn’t just losing them—but realizing how irreplaceable goodness truly is. You don’t notice it fully until it’s gone.

2025 taught me that not all losses are loud.
Some are devastating precisely because of how quietly they leave.

Not all losses had names.
Some losses were internal.

This year, I lost versions of myself I had carried for years—the one who believed effort was always rewarded, the one who thought fairness eventually arrived, the one who assumed time was generous.
I lost my naïveté.
I lost my certainty.
I lost the illusion that good intentions are enough.

But I also lost some things that needed to go.
I lost people-pleasing.
I lost silence where my voice was necessary.
I lost guilt for outgrowing spaces that couldn’t hold me anymore.

2025 didn’t just take from me.
It edited me.

If personal loss shook me, Gaza shattered something deeper.
From past few years, the world watched a genocide unfold in real time—and argued about it instead of stopping it. Children were buried before their dreams were even named. Families were erased not by accident, but by systems that justified destruction with sanitized language.

2025 will be remembered as the year humanity was tested—and failed loudly.

What disturbed me most wasn’t just the violence.
It was the silence.
The selective outrage.
The way empathy became conditional.
The way lives were weighed, categorized, and dismissed.

How did we normalize seeing children die on our screens before breakfast?
How did we scroll past mass graves and still debate semantics?

There was a moment this year where I realized that history wasn’t something behind us—it was happening now, and we were being recorded by time itself. Generations from now will ask, “What did they do when Gaza burned?”

And too many answers will be:
Nothing.
Watched.
Justified.
Looked away.

This year didn’t just feel heavy—it felt symbolic.
There were moments where the signs people speak about—the ones whispered in religious texts and philosophical warnings—felt impossible to ignore. Sudden deaths. Natural disasters. Moral confusion. The blurring of truth. The ease with which cruelty became entertainment.

It felt like the world was accelerating toward something, and not necessarily something good.

People called wrong things right.
Called conscience “extremism.”
Called silence “neutrality.”

And in all this noise, I kept wondering:
Are we nearing the end of something? Or the beginning of a reckoning?
Maybe both.

2025 didn’t feel like a normal year.
It felt like a warning.

And yet—this is important—2025 wasn’t only destruction.

Somewhere between grief and exhaustion, new beginnings quietly emerged.
Not dramatic ones.
Not cinematic ones.
Small ones.

Health improving slowly.
Hope returning cautiously.
Dreams reappearing, but humbler.
Boundaries becoming firmer.
Faith deepening—not louder, but steadier.

I learned that sometimes growth doesn’t feel like progress—it feels like survival.

Some good things didn’t announce themselves because they were fragile, still forming. And maybe that’s okay. Not everything needs to be shared immediately.
Some things are meant to grow in silence before they face the world.

It evolved.
It stopped being about certainty and became about trust.
It stopped being about answers and became about surrender.

Watching the world suffer while still believing in goodness was not easy. There were days faith felt heavy. Days where prayers felt like whispers into a void.

But even then, something kept me grounded.

Maybe faith isn’t about feeling peace.
Maybe it’s about choosing not to become cruel when the world gives you every reason to be.

2025 took people I loved.
It took my comfort.
It took my illusions.
It took my sense of predictability.

But it left me with clarity.
It left me with compassion that hurts but refuses to die.
It left me with a deeper understanding of how temporary everything is.
It taught me to love louder.
To delay less.
To say what matters while there’s still time.

I won’t romanticize this year.
2025 was not “beautiful chaos.”
It was painful, revealing, and deeply unsettling.
But it was honest.

And maybe honesty is what we needed—even if it came wrapped in grief.

As this year ends, I don’t feel triumphant.
I feel awake.
Aware that life is fragile.
Aware that silence is a choice.
Aware that time is not promised.

If the world is nearing a reckoning, I hope I meet it with integrity.
If tomorrow comes, I hope I live it with intention.
And if loss continues—as it inevitably will—I hope I never grow numb to it.

Because the day loss stops hurting is the day humanity truly ends.

This was 2025.
Unforgiving.
Unfiltered.
Unforgettable.

And somehow—despite everything—I’m still here.