Meditations: Living inside what's opened

In my meditations, I reflect on moments during my dance journey, volunteering work in dementia care, work as a psychologist, and more.

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As the year is soon flowing into a new one, I find myself comparing it to the one before. Strangely, 2025 feels like a year in which I barely achieved anything. When I sit with that feeling, it confuses me, because the facts tell a very different story.

The year prior was loud in its milestones; 2024 was a year of firsts and visible breakthroughs. I picked up the guitar again after years and within weeks I was asked to perform, eventually even abroad. I graduated from my Master’s and started my first full-time job as a psychologist. I stood on a big stage again after years, performing Bharatanatyam for the first time. It was a year that looked like progress from the outside, and it felt like one too.

That year also marked the end of a long phase of preparation. I said goodbye to being a student, to part-time jobs, to constantly working toward something that always felt just out of reach. In many ways, that phase had started decades earlier. With my first piano lessons at seven. With my first dance classes at twelve. With years of studying, training, and quietly nurturing something I could not yet show. In 2021, I consciously chose to pursue a bigger dream and committed myself fully to becoming a professional dancer. I trained for years without performing, trusting that the moment would come. In 2024, it finally did.

Looking back, I now see 2024 as the year everything that had been forming inside me found its way out into the world. It was the year of emergence. Of stepping into the light. Of being seen. It felt intense and overwhelming, but also deeply affirming.

Then came 2025. And suddenly, nothing seemed to happen.

There were no dramatic firsts, no clear thresholds crossed. No obvious moment that signalled “this is the next chapter.” Compared to the year before, it felt quiet. Almost empty. And looking back, I realise I mistook that quiet for stagnation.

Only now do I slowly begin to understand that 2025 was not about opening new doors. It was about staying inside the ones that had already opened. I returned to the stage within months. I performed in theatres I had once only dreamed of. I continued composing music, joined a music group, and deepened my work as both a dancer and a psychologist. The growth was there, but it was subtle. Less spectacular. More embodied. 'Dancer', 'musician', 'psychologist', before I realised the same titles I never felt ready to carry became an identity I felt like I always had. The work shifted from becoming to being. From reaching to sustaining.

What I mistook for a lack of achievement turned out to be the life I'd been preparing for years. Maybe that's why it felt so strange. Achievement is easy to recognize when it announces itself. But how do you keep seeing her afterwards? When the door has been opened already? I see the path before me slowly illuminating. It invites me to walk further, to inhabit, to prove that I can live inside its opening.

Rooms by the Sea, painted in 1951 - Edward Hopper