The year began and ended with a sense of fullness, the kind that makes twelve months feel like several lives pressed into one. Joy, grief, growth, and quiet survival all threaded together. When I look back at 2024, it doesn’t feel neat or tidy, but it feels real.
There were milestones worth marking
Fourteen years with my partner. We didn’t celebrate with fanfare, but steadily, a quiet journey still unfolding.
The twins stepped into their teenage years, while my eldest reached fifteen. Sometimes I look at them and wonder how time has slipped by so quickly. Their childhood feels both near enough to touch and impossibly far away.
Work marked its own anniversary: five years at Awesome Motive.
What started as writing grew into something much larger: planning, strategy, and guiding three projects at once. I felt pride in that, in the way my role has shifted and the trust I’ve built along the way.
Spring brought a gift I had always wanted but never expected here in Devon: the northern lights. The sky was alive with colour, brief and fragile, and I rushed out with my phone to capture what little I could. The pictures don’t do it justice, but they hold the memory.
Not all milestones were joyful
I became parentless this year, losing my dad after already losing my mum years ago. Grief brought with it sadness and responsibility. Arranging a funeral, handling a house, the quiet, relentless paperwork of loss.
I gave myself one day to fall apart completely. After that, I did what needed to be done. Clearing his home, I paused in the garden and saw a single caterpillar alive among the emptiness. A small reminder that even in endings, life insists on carrying forward.
On health, work, and creativity
Health became a journey of its own. I lost weight, yes, but more importantly I learned not to measure myself by numbers.
I walked more, sometimes with fear, sometimes with pain. Eventually, I let myself lean on a walking stick. Not a weakness, but as a tool and a way to keep moving.
Professionally, AI demanded new ways of thinking. At first, I feared it would erase what I do. Then I shifted. A colleague’s words stayed with me:
AI is the actor, you are the director.
That change in perspective gave me space to adapt, to work with it instead of against it.
Outside of work, I reached for creativity again. A scarf crocheted and sent to a friend. Poems scribbled in notebooks, some too raw to share, some polished into small offerings…
A Quiet Space
There’s a space you’ve carved,
not in the world,
but in the quiet
where everything else fades.
It isn’t the miles
or the hours that make you real—
it’s the way you settle in,
without asking,
without warning,
and become something
I can’t quite name,
but can’t forget.
You aren’t just a thought
or a distant voice.
You’re the feeling that stays,
the pull that doesn’t let go,
the quiet hum of something
I didn’t know I needed
until you filled it.
Today will pass,
like any other.
But you will stay—
in the space between,
in the places where words
can’t quite reach,
but you’re always felt.
Writing poetry felt like finding an old part of myself I thought I’d lost.
Books kept me company too. Heavyweights like War and Peace and Les Misérables, strange modern tales like The Cloisters and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I didn’t read as much as I usually do, but what I did read asked me to linger, to sit with difficult words and ideas.
I also learned the value of stripping life back. Too many apps, too many systems, all parading as productivity. I let most of them go, leaving only the essentials. What remained was a handwritten journal, pages filling slowly with thoughts and fragments of days.
Looking back through them now, I see not just what happened, but who I was in the middle of it all.
If there is one lesson I take from this year, it’s that growth doesn’t come cleanly. It arrives through loss, through effort, and through joy in small things. It isn’t always visible while it’s happening. But when you pause, look back, and trace the threads, you see how much has changed.
Now I step into 2025 with both caution and hope. There is work still to do, journeys still to continue, and dreams I want to chase. I don’t know what the year will hold. But after everything, I know I’ll find ways to meet it.