a half-year of toil and tension - 25' retrospective
part one of my 2025 retrospective; reflecting on the first six months of the year which have tested my consistency, gratitude, and intentionality
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Foreword
As I start drafting this post, I’m sitting at a cafe called La Lune Market in North Strathfield.
It is 28 November 2025, about 11:00am, is scorching hot, and I’m having an iced latte and half a sandwich.
Strathfield is a very notable suburb in Sydney and only just a few years ago was considered one of the most overwhelmingly Korean suburbs in the country. This isn’t entirely true because Strathfield is a very large space and it’s only the commercial/commuter area that has a significant Korean presence.
That has really phased out these last few years, with Strathfield becoming increasingly popular for South Asians and Caucasians, and new age Koreans choosing to move further out west.
A lot can change in a few years.
One month from now, I’ll be in South Korea for a family holiday. I could be waking up in the Airbnb, boring my brains out on a train, attending some Christmas/New Years mass, or perhaps sitting in a cafe in Seoul that is very, very similar to where I’m at now.
(Edit: Funnily enough, on the 23 December 2025, I’m editing this post from murmur coffee on Jeju Island)
To add to this, just a year ago, on this very date, I was sitting in a conference hall in Buenos Aires, Argentina representing a company I no longer work for — already devising whether I should jump ship while sitting in said conference hall.
A lot change in one year.
About two months from now, specifically and conveniently on 28 January 2026, the least to my apartment will end. As at the time of drafting, I’m at odds on whether to extend the place for another six months to eliminate the hassle of transporting your existence from one shoebox to another; by the time I edit this, I am determined to move, to continue my initiative of living in different areas of Sydney to know where I’d want to buy in the future.
While it’s not ordinarily the case, I think a lot can change in one month. A lot can change in a few seconds, even. One well-placed or poorly-made decision can instantly elevate/derail your life for the better/worse.
“If you get one percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” - Atomic Habits, James Clear
Great in theory but questionable in practice, I don’t wholly subscribe unfortunately to the atomic thinking of making sure each day is 1% better than the last.
There are times where you’ll have a bad day for reasons entirely out of your control. There are times where you’ll fall back to horrible at best, stagnant at worst — routines. There are times where there is a literal rain on your parade. Full disclosure: I’ve felt a bit of that this year.
I’ve always picture it more like an election, where every action you take is a casted vote to the party you want to win — which, happily enough, don’t actually need all the votes to win. You just need the general majority.
Methodology
When I do these annual retrospectives, I usually have a line-by-line database in Notion that outlines everything that has happened. I unfortunately don’t have one this time around and perhaps more misfortunately, don’t have a good reason as to why other than I’ve gotten lazy about it.
I really regret this.
Sometimes, when I end the day with mixed feelings and melancholy, that the day had not operated in my favour — I like having this actual and objective list to prove that I had done something of note; even if or particularly when it has items like ‘worked on this report’ or ‘refueled the car’ or ‘cleaned the sink’. I’m a financial analyst at heart mind and appreciate all and any statistical proof that I had some physical impression in the world. I don’t have too much of that to fall back on right now other than the photos in my camera roll or transactions on my bank account.
What I do have this time around, however, is about 80 or so articles here on Journaling in Public published throughout the year, including a number of monthly recaps which I’ve tagged in life, recently.
You are reading part one of my 2025 retrospective which is a comprehensive recap of everything I have written, experienced, and thought throughout January to June — with part two available here. Part three, which takes a more prospective, determined, and forward-looking lens towards 2026 will be available here.
January
James, an old friend of mine, had gotten into content creation and he shared this one little snippet where she shared that January James would not believe the courage, experiences, and audacity held by December James1.
While part of me wishes to argue the same, it hasn’t entirely been the case for me. Select sections of December Sav are entirely unrecognisable to January Sav but reading through the notes app / little things stylised posts that I did nearly weekly at the start of this year, I’m seeing a ton of sentiments, thoughts, aspirations, and notes of worry that continue to thoroughly underpin January Sav and December Sav.
In my 2024 retrospective, I shared that while by all accounts and metrics my year had gone with strong and joyous success, I was not operating with the level of intentionality I wanted. I ended the year feeling like a bystander in my own body, my actions and lifestyle decided by someone who knew better at best. I felt as if it was a convenient coincidence that it turned out the way it did.
As such, I established intentionality as one the core value I would bring into 2025, to fold choice and goal-setting and trajectory into the way I make decisions — determined not to let life happen to me, but for me to happen to life.
Here, I sit at the edge of December, spending a free morning unlike most other mornings, wondering if I’ve really acted on that.
I’ve made some dramatic changes to the way that I live.
I would argue that I’ve grown, become more mature, act with more wisdom, take the right responsibilities.
But are these really something I had chosen for myself?
Or have they been done in the name of external pressures and people-pleasing and someone else’s belief as the right thing to do?
How many of the decisions I make are actually mine?
And perhaps more importantly — does it even matter?
Other notable events this January:
For someone who proclaims to not like travel nor driving, I sure have done a number of road trips this year. This year started with a hike to Blue Mountains.
I was pretty determined to pursue my Actuarial Institute exams at the start of the year and was wondering how I was to balance full-time work and part-time study and casual-time writing without losing my mind. Spoiler: This did not turn out as expected.
A central thought: Feeling suffocated in that the leisure time I had did not truly belong to me, a thought you’ll see echoed quite sonorously throughout this year.
February
I established a few New Years Resolutions2 for myself and by February I was already needing a second wind of motivation for half of them.
Despite not really achieving any of these resolutions, I’m very glad to have made leaps and bounds on the most trackable and actionable one of writing two posts per week for 104 total articles by the end of the year. I was well on-track in February and maintained that same momentum till around May, and even though I’ll end 2025 without having hit the steep and difficult target of 104 — I believe I’ve established enough of a writing habit which I can stick to, or at least readily come back to, for the rest of my life.
February was a not-so-subtle-but-rather-slap-in-the-fact reminder that you don’t actually require the start of the year or start of the month or even the start of the day to realign, recover, or reinvent. It was a kind but firm reminder that you have free will and you can, very much, reload and fire. When you cannot find time, you make time.
Other notabilities in February:
Published a Valentine’s Day themed article that I was admittedly nervous to write — on expectations, overcommunication, boundaries, self-identity, and emotional kintsugi
Told myself very firmly that I had to do at least some form of diet fixing and physical exercise… which, fuck me there’s always next year isn’t there?
Had a lot of decision-anxiety in my head about big boy purchases and home-ownership right before and somehow during a keshi concert which is a bit funny because the average keshi concert goer definitely cannot afford a home
March
Something big always tends to happen in March.
For example, March 2022 was when I was let go from the graduate program which was a fast-track lesson that showed sometimes you genuinely will end up in a place you cannot compete in — but in turn kickstarted my career in the insurance space. March 2024 was when I became official with my partner and alongside having my very first corporate trip, experiencing that awkward impostor syndrome of ironing a suit in a hotel room. And uh, let’s just say the entire world knows what happened on glorious March 2020.
Nothing as dramatic as the above happened in March 2025 for me, but it did continue to be a hectic and eventful set of days. I learnt here that this eventfulness has the uncanny effect of increasing the quality and quantity of my writing, carving way for some of my favourite pieces this year and revealing how well-placed I actually am to write about my early career adventures.
This March was a prime showing that in order to write a rich, deep, engaging, and extraordinary newsletter — you need to live in a world that is rich, deep, engaging, and extraordinary; and that isn’t to say you must lead a life with trapezes and Ferraris and waltzing in twos in a Ferris Wheel, but to be able to look at life with appreciation and abundance, finding magic between the nooks nad crannies of the ordinary.
In March, we had:
A pretty passionate declaration that Rosie by Rose was my album of the year, and the basic bitch in me had concurred because three of my top five Spotify Wrapped songs were from that album
I handed in a voluntary resignation for the first time. It was scary, with the department head and even the CEO taking my departure quite personally…
…and learning that no matter what people say or even what I feel: these decisions are never as bad as I think
It was my one-year anniversary with my partner where we had our first omakase experience at Haco in Surry Hills
And also my first world-class soccer game watching Indonesia vs Australia qualifiers for the world cup
April
I haven’t figured out the right word to describe it — the sensation where you feel like nothing interesting has happened when objectively speaking a ton of interesting things had happened3 — but it very much happened in April, when I wrote this post declaring that life is made up of ordinary Tuesdays.
Off the back of a million-event month of March, April was shaping up to be a quieter month — and while it felt like it, the snippets of notes I’ve left for myself indicate that it could not have been the case. In said post, I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t do weekly recaps because not enough would happen in a week to warrant an interesting update but almost consistently upon sitting down with a keyboard; it is so, so easy to fill up a page with a three-digit number of misspelt words talking of wonderful events and funny insights over the last 168 hours.
My coverage took a more introspective angle this month.
A brave accusation that my financial, health & body, relationship, time management, and especially self-confidence problems originate from an early onset scarcity mindset that I did not choose to inherit but have actively chosen to continue (and that for me to grow from it, I must actively challenge it)
Reinstating what I believed to be two of my core traits and aspirations of the year: by exploring unusual and underrated things I wholeheartedly appreciate and the non-definitive and loosely defined blueprint of an extraordinary life.
Got back into Minecraft following a viewing of arguably the worst movie of the decade (a great fucking viewing though)
More travels! This time a nifty weekend getaway to the Central Coast and Long Jetty Wharf which includes a lakefront property and feeding llamas.
My most liked thing on Substack is my comment on Amanda Brown’s the epidemic of constant communication; probably the best article I’ve read on this site and lowkey required reading for anyone getting into a relationship.
May
After a fragmented and intentionally uncohesive approach to writing in the first four months, May turned out to be a month of yearning with pieces that opt for slow living, self-forgiveness, and again - intentionality. I wrote this sentence in swamped, but he’ll be alright, in the midst of a wicked slump of burnout:
“I’ve got my 20s to experiment, 30s to try, 40s to try again, and perhaps a few decades of shots-on-goal after that. There is so much I could do in a single year. What about a whole ass lifetime?”
This idea of focused dedication, for both short bursts of intensity and long burns of consistency, makes achievement inevitable. The idea that ‘time will pass anyhow’ is the central theme I have chosen for this retrospective. Little did I know, this school of thinking had already found its place across both my published works and personal journal, etched in my vocabulary, mulled in my subconscious.
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Time is something I speak about with such venom and animosity, but let’s be honest: at the ripe age of 25, is it not my most potent advantage?
This month, I rediscovered something I had always known but conveniently forgotten since I stopped doing short stories for Reedsy Prompts — creativity seldom comes from absolute freedom, but from rules and limitations.
A blank page and blinking cursor is a terrifying imposition; but a teeny prompt, a half-finished sentence, a whistle coming from the tree — it helps insurmountably so to have a nudge of inspiration in the right direction alongside the creative and graceful and elating ways at which we ski between the rules.
From here on, I decided to take a more ‘clustered’ approach to writing where I decide my niche for the month ahead and squeeze it like a sponge.
Other notabilities of note:
Hit 10 subscribers this month which I am very happy with. This number has multiplied to 50 since then (as at the time I publish this post), and hopefully there will be many more of you :)
Witnessed one of the coolest performances of the year at Vivid Sydney which is interesting because I’ve always found Vivid to be an underwhelming event — yet still find myself going to it. Maybe Sydney really doesn’t have shit to do.
Already feeling nostalgia for the Minecraft Forever World which I played for literally like one week before never opening it again.
June
Selfishly speaking, June is often a good month for me because, well, it’s my birthday month.
My birthday is on the 15th of June which I conveniently refer to as the middle of the year4 and as such, is nifty timing to stock check how the year had gone thus far; to pat my back on any accomplishments/consistencies and course-correct anything that could have been better.
Dinner was at the spectacular Restaurant Hubert, an underground French bistro with a front-row seat to a live jazz band. June also featured a weekend getaway to the Northern Beaches, still within Sydney but not a place I normally frequent.
Inspired by Chloe Shih’s 30 by 30 series which I had first listened to via the Joy of Missing Out podcast and eventually as pocket-sized cinematics, I put together a similar collection of my own with 25 by 25 — highlighting five lessons per week across anything that felt relevant to me, from: the mechanics and acceptance of cringe, my personal rules around jealousy, how self-deprecation is rarely beneficial, the architecture of self-forgiveness; and the firm, overarching concept that life is LONG.
Life is long is yet another variation of time will pass anyway — it’s interesting to find this messaging intertwined between my words and whinges.
As we’re reaching a surprisingly large number of words in this section, I’ve cut up the second half of the year into part two of the retrospective: available here. If you’d like to jump straight to intention-setting for 2026, which may or may not be published yet, it’s available here.
Hi there, thanks so much for reading. I’ve never been one for paywalling my writing — cause then it would no longer be ‘in public’! If you’d like to support me and for whatever reason show it via monetary means — a link to buy me a coffee is available below:
I have just realised this now while editing this post that James also uses ‘A lot can happen in a year’ as the central statement to said post. Great minds think alike, I reckon.
Said resolutions were: 104 articles on Journaling in Public in 2025, host a special date night fortnightly, run a 5k, live a life of intentionality.
I realise this is just called recency bias
The middle of the year is 2nd of July as the 183rd day. I just like to say it’s 15 June because 12 divided by 2 is 6 for June and 30 divided by 2 is 15 for the middle.