this is all it has to be

reflections on 2025

This is all it has to be: the building blocks of a life.

Taking my cat on her morning walk, affixing a long rope to the end of the ute, watering the garden beds, pulling out weeds, harvesting vegetables.

Making a batch of pesto from the garden, using up the rest of a jar of nuts, packing it in the van alongside homemade chocolate caramel slice in a biscuit tin, and a silver foil slice of camomile tea cake. Driving to the south coast to play Scrabble on fold-out chairs in front of the sapphire sea.

Watching B plaster the walls of our kitchen, watching our home space come to life in tangible ways. In the ways of hands-on tools, tools in buckets, buckets on floors covered in dust.

Taking a breast milk White Russian cocktail from an outstretched hand on the dancefloor, pouring it into my mouth as the doof lights ricochet off the cliffs above.

Hiking into Rock Ribs. Sitting under a waterfall in the nude with two friends. Hiking out in hail the size of golf balls. Running for cover in a cave while the sky heaves with pleasure.

Taking a dexamphetamine, cranking ABBA in the headphones, deep cleaning the house.

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It’s funny, in the space of the most career uncertainty, when capitalism tells me that no, this isn’t all it should be, I feel so assured that in fact, this is all it should be. I need a job to pay the bills, and I am busy reading job boards. But I feel this sense of peace that I will no longer need to identify with ambition. I won’t need a role that catapults me to new heights. I will just need a role that I can pay my bills with, one that leaves room for the building blocks, and one that doesn’t grind my teeth down in the middle of the night.

I have watched the contentment that can bloom in this space, with a father that has worked for minimum wage my whole life. He would often say, “as long as I’m home for breakfast, as long as I’m home for dinner, as long as I know your friends’ names.” I have never resented him for that choice, but for a long time, I believed that capitalism, in its true form, could give you both. But it can’t. At one point, you have to put your foot down and say, not now. Not anymore.

~

Could I earn money writing? Ha! What a laughable idea.

~

I sat in my therapist’s room a few weeks ago, the two of us, legs crossed beneath our thighs. Our sessions are on Zoom these days, but I was in the area, and so we had the opportunity to run across a foyer and embrace with a familiar joy and tenderness. Sometimes I forget how much this person has seen of me, how our unconventional relationship has forged a bond and sense of safety entirely new.

Midway through my reflections on the year, she smiled. She leant over, put her hand to her cheek, and said the best words I’d heard all year.

‘Ruby,’ she said. ‘I think you’ve healed.’

Healing is not linear, and there will be chapters of my life where the beasts that haunt me reappear, but this felt like a line drawn in the sand. I am well. My goodness, I am well! Five years of sitting in discomfort, paying someone to press on the bruises of dissociation that I was good at hiding from. Five years of curling up on her floor, my head in her lap, sobbing. Five years of, ‘Can I just challenge you there for a second, Ruby?’ and, ‘I think that’s bullshit and you know it.’ Five years of broken relationships, repaired relationships, and new ways of approaching connection. I have written tens of thousands of words about my experience in therapy and once upon a time I wanted everyone in the world to read them. Now, they live happily in a Microsoft Word document in a folder, in a folder, in a folder and that is where they will stay. The words were simply the paddle with which to row through the current of mud, and why tell you about the paddle, when I can tell you what clear water feels and tastes like?

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I am writing, however. I am writing fiction! It feels like the craziest thing I have ever done. I get to memorialise all the people who hurt me, and make up new storylines for them (such revenge!). I get to breathe life back into the scenes of my youth that have somehow stayed with me. I am reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Come to Me and it’s brilliant and inspiring. I feel that in this season of joy I can make art. It doesn’t just have to come when I’m a miserable sack of shit.

~

I genuinely don’t know what this year will hold. My bags are packed, and I’ve checked into a flight to New Zealand, where I will spend a week or so sailing and hiking volcanoes with a friend I met in Bali a decade ago. When I return, I’ll get to work. Doing what, I’m not sure. Trust the process.

These are the seven rules I am tucking into my back pocket and taking with me into 2026:

1. Dismantle the armour of ambition

2. Outgrow the story of yourself

3. Write as if you are laughing

4. Age boldly and shamelessly

5. Make art for an audience of none

6. Love with open pockets

7. Let joy make you cry wholeheartedly

I hope wherever you are, you have a few things to tuck into your back pocket, too. Building blocks, rules to live by, goals for the year, pockets of peace you can curl into and access when you need.

Stay well, x