2025: Difficult, thought-provoking & Spilling Over With Love

It's going to be impossible to write a reflection on 2025, but I'm going to try. It will be scattered and incomplete, especially given how tired I am right now. Regardless of what emerges in this post, this blog offers —imperfectly and messily— a record of some of my thinking from the course of the year.

Posts like 'Nearly a third of Adults not comfortable sharing a diagnosis with a friend. Here's Why I Share', 'What If This Diagnosis Were To Be Creatively (Generously, even Affectionately) Re-written?', and Rooms of Expression: 'House' Reflective Exercise are indicative of how compelled I am towards the social and relational aspects of life with a heavily stigmatised diagnosis like BPD.

Overall, this year was tremendously difficult for me. I had an immense amount of stress related to moving my entire life from one city to another back in late summer. I had anticipatory grief from the last days of winter to mid-summer for the loss of my much-loved city, my home, my meaningful work and the geographical proximity of some brilliant friends.

I feared the loss of my friends and that, combined with change, uncertainty and exhaustion, created a spike in some of the most difficult aspects of my mental health difficulties (suicidal thoughts, urges to self-harm, paranoia, intense fears of rejection and so on).

I've lost a great deal and also gained a great deal this year. If there's one thing I haven't lost this year though: it's my friends.

To my surprise and contrary to my fears about geographical distance, I felt I grew closer to my friends. Further away geographically than ever, strangely enough I feel emotionally closer. It may be because of the increased intentionality of my friendships now and the fact that it's so plainly obvious that I'm invested in a friendship when its from a distance.

Relationships were a clear theme that emerged from a year of incisive, thought-provoking books. A key thinker for me this year was Sophie K Rosa, the author of Radical Intimacy. In this brilliant book, Rosa writes: “We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on it – because they do.”

These words resonate. At numerous points throughout this year, I experienced relationships as painful. At times, they even felt so painful that I didn't know what to do. I was full of fear, uncertainty, confusion, longing and aches so big they could fill a blue whale's call. Is the other person fulfilled? What does equality and balance mean or even look like in a relationship? How should I communicate within this relationship and is that okay for me and is that okay for the other person? How/when/with whom/how much can I 'unmask' and is it safe/okay/mutually comfortable for everyone?

I tried to address some of these questions and more in meaningful conversations, many of which were with my therapist (with whom I started talking in the spring). One of the key pieces of learning from these conversations has been my increased openness to the knowledge that people demonstrate love and care in different ways.

I knew this intellectually a long time ago, but it's something I've struggled to believe in it emotionally. I've had many swathes of distress— even heartbreak with no underpinning logic— over the years because I've believed that people I loved didn't value me, like me, love me or care about me in any way.

My rigidity around how I recognise and receive love and care is something I started to unravel in the second half of this year— and my life is much happier as a result. Instead of 'if they don't say or do x or y, then it means they don't care' and getting upset about feeling unloved or disliked, I'm more open to the different ways people express themselves and show care or affection in various ways.

Relatedly, I thought a lot about the idea of reciprocity. Different people might want to give and receive different things in a relationship. What I 'give' to someone might not be 'given' back to me in the same form. That doesn't mean that I, or the other person, is doing anything wrong. I'm not embarrassing for being me: speaking the way I speak, texting the way I text, using tons of metacommunication because I need it to feel safe, experimenting with unmasking different aspects of myself with people who make me feel safe enough.

In other words, I've been accepting on a deep emotional level that human beings have different emotional architectures and, for that reason, the way I love, care about and value someone might not be the exact way that they love, care about and value me. The meaning someone has to me might not be the meaning I have for them: and maybe that's life and maybe that's okay. Relationships don't have to be exactly reciprocal mirrors for them to be beautiful, loving and valuable to all parties. Is the way a mother loves a daughter the same as the way a daughter loves a mother? No, so why should it be the same way for romantic partners or friends?

As bell hooks expressed eloquently in her book All About Love: New Visions, to love is something one does, rather than solely feels. Relationships continued to be something about which I not only read and wrote, but something I tried to do: '[T]o love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds', wrote hooks. As Sophie K Rosa writes, 'the idea that being in a couple should fulfill all our intimate needs leads to desolation for many.'

This year, I poured enthusiasm and care into the many kinds of relationships in my life. People poured these back to me by the bucket load. I felt, and feel, my life is overspilling with love. Naturally, I want this to continue into 2026.

In 2025, I completed the writing of my second book and worked with my publisher, Jessica Kingsley, to finish all the edits. The Talking About BPD Workbook: Reflections and Creative Prompts for Exploring Your Life with a Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder is out in February 2026 and is available for pre-orders now.

I'm really proud of this book and writing it has, undoubtedly, shaped my thinking about my life, myself and my relationships this year. I hope it may shape yours too if you're looking for a comforting, warm, supportive read that will help you think about what it means to you to live (and live a fulfilling, meaningful life) with a stigmatised diagnosis like BPD.

The book has opened me up to a few different kinds of conversations with a few different people. It has also opened me up to conversations with ideas and with myself, specifically the way I want to pull up a chair for myself at tables discussing neurodiversity and neurodivergence.

If people with BPD have significant differences in the ways they process and feel their emotions, then surely the word neurodivergent is potentially a relevant one to explore in relation to ourselves? If we are liable to experience relationships and the social world differently and/or if we need interpersonal communications to be a little different, then perhaps a neurodivergent lens when thinking about accommodations or adjustments could be productive?

This is something I may explore with more writing and, who knows, perhaps even in another book.

I feel low and bleak at this point in the year, even though I acknowledge that there have been some lovely moments this Christmas and indeed over the course of this year. I have a (big) problem that I can't fix right now and I'm fraught with uncertainty about when (or even if) I will be able to make it better.

I'm immensely grateful to people around whom I can unmask. In the words of Hanna Keiner in her Substack post on '20 Ways to Neuroqueer Friendship', 'reclaim your capacity to give more full expression to your uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.'

I think 2025 has been the first year in which I started this reclamation. Writing my book, and the thought of it landing in the hands of readers early next year, has been a key part of me taking ownership of my 'uniquely weird potentials and inclinations'. In 2025, I showed more of myself to people I thought I could trust than ever before. I want to continue this more in 2026, but, as always, my questions are: how much is too much? How do to do this safely? When? With whom?

There are things I want less of next year, such as: change, upheaval, domestic chaos, worrying about myself and my relationships, second guessing my communications (too unconventional, too emotional, too wierd, too intense?).

Equally, there are things I want more of next year including: more stability, more calm, day trips with my husband and little girl, time at the beach and in nature, thought-provoking books, interesting conversations, time to write.

As this old year comes to a close and the near year comes closer, I want to thank everyone who has been there for me, embraced complexity, allowed me to feel my emotions (conflicting, ambiguous, painful or intense), stayed curious and open. Today I read a post on Mia Mingus' 'Leaving Evidence' entitled 'Access Intimacy: The Missing Link'. For her, 'access intimacy' is 'that elusive, hard to define feeling when someone "gets" your access needs'.

She writes that when she, and others she knows, are around people who 'have an automatic understanding of access needs', she is able to start from 'a place of steel vulnerability'. 'Steel vulnerability' is the place from which I want to begin next year. I will be reading more by Mia Mingus, Oumou Sylla and other thinkers and writers who are opening my eyes to topics like care justice, community care, radical mental health and radical mental health first aid.

Before I tie up this post, I want to thank you, the readers, for being here with me this year. This time of year can be particularly difficult I feel and I hope you get everything you need to weather any emotional storms that pass your way.

Rosie x