It’s almost impossible for me to know if I’ll ever escape this vexation I have with the concept of growing up, but then again does one ever truly know anything?
2025. The year of disillusionment. By definition, and in a nutshell disillusionment is the process of snapping the fuck out of it, it’s putting the the Kool aid down, removing the blinders off from your iris, making all those beautiful colors you were seeing under the misleading lenses somber and monochromatic, like an upset grey sky just pregnant with rain – the rain being your tears in this analogy.
This is not to say up until the past year I hadn’t been disillusioned, but I suppose per my makeshift-but-still-accurate-in-a-nutshell- definition above, it’s a process henceforth it happens in bouts. So needless to say, I somewhat began having these bouts of disillusionment somewhere in my early to upper mid 20s, and I suppose most of us begin there because this is typically the post uni period where the next period of your life is transitioning into the world and being an active member of the economically active and independent demographic.
All bets are off with the bouts in this period, because whether you’re employed or not, these bouts of disillusionment will literally feel like someone’s just throwing water filled balloons in your face. It might have a slow start but as time progresses these mofos will become more constant pushing you to a breaking point whereby you can either breakdown in a psychosis of some sort, or get so damn mad you’ll wanna scoop up spilt water and somehow get back at the dead balloons. Both options seeming like different spectrums of some psychosis.
In order for my 2025 to make sense to you, there’s need to provide context from ’24.
’24 started off as an interesting year for me. Professionally there was no growth but I moved seats, I suppose you’d say I made lemonade, but it was bitter lemonade.
Socially, I lost a person whom I thought was a dear friend of mine – no RIP on that one because this man is alive and well somewhere, we’re just people who used to know each other now. I ended up spending the rest of the year trying to heal myself from that situation and then just when you think you’re about to go out quietly, two months before the year kicks the bucket, bam another friend break up.
A few days after that I meet this boy who had me unequivocally vexed and sprung and for what reason I simply cannot explain but in retrospect ultimately if I had committed to this fireball tornado of a guy that would’ve been one hell of a mistake, it would have been my reckoning. In true me-fashion, spent all of 2025 getting over and healing from that situation.
As 2025 started, just before the close of the first month I suffered a deep and painful loss. The loss of a grandmother, and a very beloved one of that matter, is one of the worst things anyone can ever go through. It’s a kind of irrefutable, permanent and heart shattering loss that just never goes away as I still carry it today almost a year later.
Ten days before she parted, Mac Miller’s Balloonerism had just dropped and I remember listening to it, in some dark, weird but poetic way I suppose it served as a foreshadowing record to her death, the project definitely felt different from when I listened to it before I’d lost her and after. Certain songs, such as Funny papers just became harder to listen to without streams flooding down my cheeks, because in as much as I loved it the first time I heard it, musing and pondering on lines like “didnt think anybody died on a Friday”, they took on a different meaning after the loss of my beloved grandmother, rest her soul.
Writing this, being forced to reflect, I come to the realization that I ultimately suffered quite a lot of significant losses these past two years, and two of those losses as impermanent as they were foreshadowed the impending deeper, permanent heartbreaking loss of my Gran. In the words of Kendrick Lamar: “Life is one funny motherfucker, a true comedian you gotta love him.”
The genius in that line is, the relationship between the general public (and even the press) and comedians has always been a pretty polarising one. True comedians do their job well, and often that means pissing some people off, but at the same time these motherfuckers are so smooth and funny at some point in your not liking them, you forget you actually don’t really like them. Like a rat’s bite, they bite and blow. This is the type of character Kendrick personifies life to.
To sum it up, here’s a few important lessons I’ve learnt I’d like to share from my journey of disillusionment:
1. When people/situations let go of you, open your palm wide open and don’t fight it. And certainly don’t chase.
2. Love is blind, learn how to read braille.
3. Time is of the essence. But also allow it to do its thing, time reveals all things.
4. Always choose you because nothing else matters more in the end. All things come to an end.
5. No matter what happens or what you do, forward motion only.
6. Your life is tailor made for you, stop wearing it like uniform and flaunt it like the gown it is.
7. This is it, we’re in the livestream of life, it is not a dress rehearsal to your Christmas school play. So when the camera tilts to film you, try not to fuck it up.
8. Emancipate yourself from the shackles of mental slavery. Read a damn book goddamnit!
