Reviewing 2025.

2025 was dominated largely by personal development and growth instead of creative output that I could showcase.

It's not that I didn't do anything: my task tracker tells me that I've completed over 800 tasks and I only started tracking in March. Averaging at three intentional tasks per day, not taking all the smaller things into account that come up in between, I am yet again surprised by the amount of things I seem to be doing.

Three aspects took up most of my focus in 2025:

Divorce

By far the most mentally and emotionally taxing challenge was to deal with the aftermath of the 2023 breakup with my 15 year long partner and mother of our now 12 year old son. After two years I finally managed to push through the divorce — a long, frustrating and painful process that I am so glad to have put behind me.

This process also made me realize again how incredibly lucky I am for having a support network and financial stability — a priviledge that cannot be overstated. But I am also proud that I asked for help when I needed it. And I needed a lot.

But I also grew a lot: I trained in non-violent communication and learned to identify emotional triggers and how to untangle hard-trained toxic relationship dynamics. I learned how to respond, or rather not-respond, to attacks or what my system interpreted as attacks, how to better set boundaries and how to de-escalate interpersonal conflicts. It's been incredibly challenging at times, but just as much educational.

I am thankful for all the good things that emerged from this relationship — just as much as I am happy to close this chapter of my life.

Community Housing

The second biggest topic of the year was that of my new relationship(s) and our common dream of building a community living space by renovating an old house.

This dream became reality surprisingly fast by the beginning of the year. We were able to aquire a beautiful village house built in 1887 with a particular speciality: it has a 200 square meter garden with almost 20 large trees making it a proper little forest in the middle of the city.

The house will host a small community of eight people and is built on common values and beliefs.

While social housing has a long tradition in Vienna, community building projects have only come up in the last century or so and they usually are newly-built structures. Many of the regulations and subsidies don't apply for older structures and the bureaucratic jungle surrounding them with it's winding paths and occasionally arbitrary ends are a beast to tame in its own right.

Luckily I completely underestimated the time and effort it takes to build such a place, otherwise I might have re-considered — hah! In earnest though, I again feel incredibly fortunate to be part of such an endeavour and to have a group of lovely humans who support each other. It is with much enthusiasm that I look forward to the steps we will take in this coming year.

Our forest garden in spring.
The summer meeting room.
One of the few livable areas of the house.

Shiatsu

The third major focus last year was my Shiatsu training. I completed the second of three years last summer and continued my practice in regular intervals throughout the seasons.

I started building a personal wiki for the vast amount of knowledge that accompanies the training. While there is much left to do, I am content with the progress that I made.

It was the beginning of autumn — I started the third year of Shiatsu training and had just completed a nine day silent retreat — that I noticed that I was regularly feeling severely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to take care of and spend mental and physical capacity on. In this state I was hardly able to function: I felt frozen and numb, couldn't identify my needs or wants or make decisions based upon them. I lost my agency to take care of myself and in extension of others. Essentially I dissociated.

It was a dilemma: I knew I had to reduce capacity cost but felt utterly unable to make decisions, let alone major life decisions. All the things I was doing felt vitally important and thinking about the consequences of not continuing to do them just made things worse.

My sister seems to be going through curiously similar life phases parallel to me, told me of a simple strategy she used to deal with this sort of overwhelm: instead of looking at the bigger picture, she tried to scale any action down to the smallest steps involved.

Instead of asking "Should I continue training Shiatu?" I scaled down to "Do I want to participate in this weekend training in another town?". And when I couldn't answer because I was feeling conflicted, I scaled down further: "Do I want to pack my things? Do I want to buy a train ticket? Do I want to sit with others and have input?" And there I noticed that the majority of answers were simply "no". And so I didn't.

This form of small-scale decision making led to the bigger decision making itself: I paused the training in November. While a part of me was quite dissappointed in myself, it was quickly drowned out by the joy of returning capacities — being able to understand and express my needs and and being able to act upon them.

I continued to practice Shiatsu and will also continue my formal training when the time is right. For now, I am enjoying feeling like myself again.

Me, not feeling like myself.

Bullet Points

Community Housing

Shiatsu

Other

Personal Stats and Highlights

Travels

Favorite Books

Favorite Albums

Favorite Movies/Series

Other Things I enjoyed

Personal Lessons & Realizations

Next year I would like to