Peter Pan effect
No matter how old I get, there are certain ideas my mind refuses to upgrade beyond a strict binary setting. Endings, for instance, remain utterly intolerable (ironically, this year was full of endings that I mainly learned to accept).
Take the yoga studio on Primrose Hill, my long-standing ritual. The familiar faces at the desk who know my name, the casual updates about their mischievous cat, the small but deeply appreciated act of handing me a towel every time I’ve forgotten mine (nearly always). Then one day the sign changes. The brand has shifted. The atmosphere, too. The walls stay put, but the heart of the place has clearly left the building. Something inside me quietly cracks, as if the world failed to consult me before moving on.
People do this disappearing act as well, in and out of our lives like it’s the most normal thing imaginable. One moment, you’re sharing entire days and jokes only two people understand; the next, their name comes up at a dinner table and you struggle to feel anything at all. Perhaps this is the grown-up definition of “letting go.” If so, I’m not convinced I’m a natural at it.
Labelling something as an ending has always felt too abrupt, too administrative, like stamping a form and filing it under “Over.” Life isn’t tidy enough for that. I’m not bothered by my own years piling up, but watching the people I love age feels like a slow, unannounced curtain call. A gradual fade that hurts more because it’s happening in real time.
So I take photographs. Moments that would otherwise slip through memory’s cracks, preserved with the hope that time might hesitate just long enough for me to catch my breath. Ordinary snapshots of ordinary people, my ordinary people, turned into quiet evidence that we were here together once.
Somewhere along the way, I swapped the word endings for evolutions. It’s gentler. More honest. Less of a cliff-edge and more of a path curving just out of view. Change still happens, but it’s allowed to happen softly.
So here’s to another 365 days of evolution: to the people who remain close, the many freelance detours, and the story I stepped away from which somehow grew into a book without a final page.
This is everything I gathered from you, 2025, before any of it changed shape again.
