7 life lessons 2025 taught me

If you knew me, you would know how hard it is to teach me any kind of lesson. Starting with simple instructions for a board game, why answering the phone is actually an important thing, or, heaven forbid, how to stop eating sugar. For someone who wants to experience everything this world has to offer in one lifetime (I know that is impossible and it pains me deeply), you could easily conclude that I am quite resistant to change. I probably am. I like when things are safe, good, high quality, and give me a certain sense of comfort, but with the always open possibility that all of it can change one day if I wake up that morning and simply want it to. You know what I mean, right? I want all options open, available, and within reach, which is, to put it mildly, well… delulu. That is why it is hard for me to let new things and people into my already established routines because that means, besides new experiences, people, fun happenings, and opportunities I obviously love, adjustment. It means there is less and less room for everything to remain subject to change while still staying the same on my terms. Confusing, isn’t it? This is why those who actually know me will be extremely surprised and proud of me for managing to learn as many as seven things in these 365 days, or at least attempting to understand that some things must leave, arrive, and end without my control.

Being loud is not that scary

I remember the exact look my mother would give me more than twenty years ago whenever we were in public and I laughed or spoke loudly. Everything I did was always somehow too loud and people would often turn around at my laughter, frowning or smiling, but always turning. There were years when I managed to suppress this and pretended not to notice when someone signaled that I was being louder than I supposedly should be. There were others when every such small moment affected me too much and I would spend days wondering if everything I did was simply too much. It all depended on the company, on a partner, on the dynamic of the relationships I was in. At some point, there would always be someone who would comment on my tone, as if it were something I had to constantly control, shape, and adjust.

For a long time, I believed silence was a form of safety and that a voice was something easily misinterpreted. This year gave me so many chances to be loud, even when it did not seem like a space where a voice held any power. I learned to outvoice whistles, shouts, sirens, and the crowds who have been fighting for justice on Belgrade streets for over a year. In that noise, for the first time, I truly realized that a voice can be a path to freedom.

Things have to end

I never understood that everything really has an end. In theory, that is clear to me, but in practice, it has always been hard to grasp that something is no longer there, that someone is no longer here, that something simply no longer exists. In 2025, I learned, sometimes in the harshest and sometimes in the best ways, that the cliché about old things needing to go so better ones can come is a dynamic I still have an ambivalent relationship with, but maybe 2026 will be the year when I finally accept that everything is uncertain and that endings are completely unpredictable. Anxiety is the main ingredient in this sentence, so I will not continue in that tone. It is simply hard to accept that the dynamics of parting are normal, that it is not the end of the world, that things do not stop existing just because they ended. What I actually learned is that even ruins are not empty. Every collapsed building carries a story inside it, even when it no longer stands. And everything that seems lost, every story that has ended, everything that left or stopped existing, remains somewhere within us. That legacy does not disappear just because there is no longer a wall around it. And the people who left… they stay in what we know and remember, in the traces they left, in the photographs we keep, in the sentences we have repeated a hundred times. It would be best if we could see them again, but I am drifting from the topic and going in circles. Maybe this is not a lesson I learned fully. Maybe 2026 will be the year I stop panicking about it and finally accept that nothing is under my control. But fine, I still have a few weeks left until the end of the year, give me a break.

Slow down, pause, rest

The principle of wanting everything immediately is something I take very literally. That is probably why I am your best option if, in the middle of lunch, you suddenly get the urge to travel to the other side of the world. If I have my passport with me, we go immediately, and if I do not, we go to my place and then we go immediately. This trait spills into every segment of my life, and sometimes all those segments collapse on top of me at the same time, making burnout inevitable. Before this year, I had never experienced burnout like that. It felt as if I could barely stand, read, or watch anything, and what I needed was literally an empty room without sounds or visuals. Since that looked too much like solitary confinement in some institution, I decided, after many years, to simply admit to myself that I needed rest and to actually take it. Trust me, slow down, pause, and rest.

Art is truly important

One of the biggest blows in this region throughout 2025 was dealt to art. Artists lost their workspaces, galleries and cultural centers have fewer and fewer funds, and in Serbia they were even left completely without financial support, which showed us that art and culture are crucial for the survival and functioning of a society. As someone who still works in culture (or at least tries to), I always felt that culture here is like a quiet island on the margins and that those who create it often end up on those same margins with it. That was never surprising, but it has become more obvious every year. I still believe that art knows how to show its significance precisely under such conditions. That persistence carries a clear and devastating truth that its future is uncertain. We can see what a world that forgets about art looks like. And we can understand that this world is not only sad, it is dangerous, because it loses what shapes us and calls us to think critically. That is why the importance of art and culture, a lesson I always knew, reached its peak in 2025 and became something I believe everyone now truly needs to hear: art is not a luxury. It is a way to survive. And when it disappears, so do we.

Enduring does not make you strong

I cannot stand that inherently patriarchal and capitalist principle of glorifying suffering and endurance. How did our grandmothers give birth in the fields and were perfectly fine afterward is the kind of question that could either trigger a meltdown or make me explain for 24 hours straight how senseless, insensitive, and unnecessary it is to look at the world this way. If we stick with this example, which illustrates my point well, data shows that in the 19th century more than half a million women died each year during pregnancy or childbirth because modern medicine basically did not exist. Today, that number is significantly lower. Only a few decades ago, the risk was twice as high as it is now. These comparisons serve only to normalize pain and belittle the experience of women. Speaking generally, there is nothing noble about suffering. You are not more valuable if you struggle or if you endured something that pushed you to your limits. This applies equally to far less dramatic situations like tolerating disrespect or discomfort at work, being underpaid on a project, or watching your marriage fall apart with no chance of repair. Beginnings are hard and deciding to start over is even harder. In 2025, I was forced to return to some beginnings, to understand that better paths exist, and to realize that every step that reduces pain or risk means we have finally begun to protect our lives instead of romanticizing them.

Social media is not real

You know that you will always choose the photo where your head is turned to your good side or where your dark circles are not that visible even though you barely slept, and that selecting pictures for a vacation photo dump can take an entire day. But why does the brain convince us that others always live better lives than we do, that they have more fun, firmer bodies, more time for themselves, calmer children, and more money? This is why it is important to remember that social media is literally designed to trick us. To show us the world through a filter, as a catalog of the most beautiful, carefully selected, and most impressive moments that have very little to do with how people actually live. My lesson this year is not to fall for it anymore. To finally learn to look at Instagram as a catalog of curated fragments, someone’s mood board, not real life. To stop comparing my chaos to someone else’s idealized version. And to give myself some peace every time the algorithm tries to convince me that somewhere out there exists a better, happier, and more organized version of life.

Accept that you will sometimes be the villain in someone’s story

I am not saying that you should hurt people and accept that this is simply who you are and that it is a done deal. On the contrary, things are far more complex than that and that is the entire lesson that needs to be learned. As we know, relationships are complicated, whether they are family, romantic, friendly, or professional. Sometimes your actions will be something that felt like the only possible and logical option at the time. You will not see a different perspective, not because you are selfish, but because sometimes it is impossible. Things will happen, words will be spoken, and there is no rewinding in real life. I have always been the one who wanted to fix everything, explain everything to everyone, justify myself, and present my vision, my idea, and my thought process as clearly as possible so that others understand my decisions, words, and actions. I am glad that 2025, though harshly and forcefully, taught me that such decisions can sometimes lead to absolute collapse and exhaustion. Maybe I will never learn to accept that someone does not understand my words or does not want to hear them and that I will always be the person in someone’s story who showed up at the wrong time or in the wrong place and said the one wrong thing. But what I did learn is to let go and accept that maybe there will be a chance to make things right one day, and if not, it has to become something I can live with.