“…the act of sorrowful rumination over the relatively recent past, makes my world a bitter but also an enlivening place, as my latent creativity appeared prominently on the vast, promising horizon, enchanted by this burning heartache.”

As 2025 is just around the corner, I can’t help thinking about all of the blessings I have encountered in my path this past year and about the lessons I learnt through several setbacks and challenges. I am not going to detail every single achievements and milestones of my goals here, will solely be concentrating on the creative aspects of the year below.

The quote I started this reflection with is from a poem of mine I have written a few weeks ago, so it is relatively fresh. The reason why I have chosen this piece of writing in the beginning of this blog post is because it has a powerful message that I feel strongly about: even the most challenging situation can have a silver lining and may function as a catalyst for further personal development. Sometimes, it is extremely difficult to see clear benefits of a harsh life experience, but if we keep an open mind, if we let ourselves to freely reflect back on an event from a healthy distance, we can discover tremendous positives in the situation and some may even become a blessing in disguise.

This is the year’s biggest lesson I learnt through a personal experience involving letting someone go who was part of my life for more than a decade: the process was quite difficult but it fuelled my creativity to the highest possible level I have ever functioned at. This inspired me to take a leap of faith and experiment with the English language first time in my life as a foreigner with writing poems about the process of letting my past go. This practice has resulted in several great writings that allowed me to apply to prestiges poetry competitions this year. I have also bought the domain for outsidethebud, and started writing regularly again here which makes me very hopeful again of my creative future.

And what I am going to bring with myself to 2025? I am currently working with a designer on a short poetry booklet design for the poems I have written this year out of the process of letting my past go. I am keen to maintain this creative practice in the upcoming year with actively working on new writings and continuing the applications to poetry competitions.