'My year started as a disaster. Then I started chasing "glimmers".'

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Here's a little fun fact I learned this year: sometimes life doesn't send you a sign. 

Sometimes, it sends you a full-blown demolition crew (hard hat optional) that bulldozes everything you thought was stable.

My Bulldozer Moment? It hit just four weeks into 2025.

By February, I found myself unexpectedly single, jobless and stuck in an apartment lease I had absolutely no ability to pay for unless I decided to start selling photos of my feet on the internet. (Yes, I did consider it.)

I was staring down the barrel of 36 with the terrifying realisation that I had to start my whole life from scratch… again. It was somewhere I'd been before and that was the part that felt the most exhausting and humiliating. Losing yourself once could be called character development. But losing yourself twice? Thrice, even? In your mid-thirties? That's a twist the writers throw in when they've absolutely run out of ideas. 

I didn't want to do it. I really did not think I had the emotional upper-body strength. 

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The truth is, I had completely dissolved inside my last relationship and I didn't know who I was anymore. I couldn't tell you what I wanted, what I loved, what I dreamed about or what made me feel like someone worth rooting for. I wasn't a Main Character in my own story anymore, but instead a blurry background extra holding a coffee cup that very clearly had nothing inside it. 

And yet..somehow — call it maturity or fate or delusion or maybe just the pure adrenaline that comes from hitting absolute rock bottom — I decided to look at all of this as an opportunity. 

A glimmer instead of a trigger, if you will. 

I didn't know this at the time, but the thing that would ultimately explain why this extremely cursed year became the happiest one I've had in over a decade had an actual name. A "glimmer", I would learn much later in the year, is the opposite of a trigger. Instead of sending your nervous system into a panic mode, it signals safety, connection and joy. 

It's a tiny flicker of something good. A micro-moment where you think, "oh, this is life, and it's surprisingly amazing". It can be the warm patch of sun on your back, a stupidly good coffee, a friend saying "I'm proud of you" without you having a breakdown first or even a random dog deciding that you are its new best friend. 

A glimmer is the song you forgot you loved so much coming on at the exact right moment. It's the day when your lipstick looks absolutely perfect or the time a stranger compliments your outfit in the supermarket line or when a work colleague says "I heard something lovely about you" unprompted. 

And the magic of glimmers is this: once you learn to notice them, they start to multiply. Your brain starts scanning for them automatically, like a tiny internal golden retriever signalling at joy. 

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When I finally learned this concept, months into my unintentional life overhaul, something clicked. THIS was why I had been feeling so damn happy despite absolutely nothing — and I really do mean nothing — going to plan. 

I wasn't chasing big dramatic life changes or trying to reinvent myself. I wasn't manifesting or journaling or waking up at 5am to do breathwork and sit in stillness (though, god bless the girlies that do). I was simply noticing the small, good things and I was letting them matter.

Nearly 12 months on, I can't believe I wasted even a second thinking 2025 would be a write-off. It became — and I cannot believe I am saying this without even a hint of irony — one of my favourite years I have ever lived.

I scored my dream job. I grew closer to my friends in a way that made me feel like a real, grounded human. I cooked more. I went out more. I tried new things. 

I danced until 3am on sticky dancefloors and woke up with sore feet and no regrets. I went on dates. I had great sex (also bad sex but that's all part of the fun, right?). I confronted parts of myself I used to run from. 

And instead of feeling scared or exposed or unhinged while I did all of this, I just felt… happy. Like genuinely, spine-tinglingly, annoyingly happy. Not because life was perfect (it was not) but because I was simply paying attention. 

The wildest thing? Things that used to bother me just… stopped. Not because my problems had disappeared, but because they shrank. My nervous system was no longer primed for catastrophe because my brain was too busy scanning for the next tiny spark of joy. 

I had become addicted to noticing my life, and the very, very good things that were in it.

So no, 2025 wasn't a write-off. 2025 was a reset, or rather, a reroute that was delivered via an emotional sledgehammer.

It definitely was anything but glamorous or inspiring. At several points it wasn't even hygienic.

But when that metaphorical bulldozer levelled everything, I had a choice: I could stay on the ground crying, or I could get up, brush the debris out of my bra, and start noticing what there was in my life that didn't suck.

And shockingly, there was actually a lot.

Feature image: Supplied.