The past 12 months have crawled by in a blink. That’s how this year has felt to me, in many ways; my personal pace downshifting a couple of gears while life rushes on around me with the same frenzied impatience as always. Every December I like to look back over the year and share some personal insights, what’s been going on behind the scenes, as it were. Most of my blog has been focused on adult toy reviews and sex advice, but today I’m carving out a little space for my 2025 reflections.
2025 feels harder to sum up than the years which came before. Usually I’d be full of enthusiasm about my achievements, whether professional or personal, excited about what the year ahead holds and signing off with dramatic flair and energetic flourish. This year, the energy has gone. My voice is quiet, but still full of resolve. Determination which used to be a resounding battle cry is now a whispered promise to myself: don’t give up.
How It Started
I started 2025 full of that New Year, New Me energy. I was still fighting my way through perimenopause, but I’d almost made it out of that deep hole, clawing my way back to the sunshine of a healthy, active life. I was eating healthily, walking long distances regularly, even running three times a week. My HRT had been adjusted to a point which felt right for my body. Finally, I was beginning to feel like good old me again.
At the end of May, my husband and I visited the UK Games Expo at the Birmingham NEC. I knew there’d be a lot of activity over the three full days of the event, so in the couple of weeks leading up to it, I exercised daily and did my best to keep or even improve my good fitness level. I was walking the local hills and sprinkling a few 5K runs through the week, too. During the event, I thought everything was going well, but I started to feel dizzy and tired as time went on. The exhibition halls and NEC surrounds were packed with loud, rushing crowds, and there was so much to see and do. At some points I felt faint and even had to take myself off to the side and sit on the floor until the room stopped spinning quite as much and I could carry on.
I thought it was just another symptom of perimenopause. It wasn’t.
Chronic Illness
After returning home on the Sunday night, after being so busy and active in Birmingham since the Thursday, I slowly started to feel worse and worse. During the night on Sunday, after going to bed thinking a good night’s sleep would cure all, I felt so ill I had to get up and be sick several times. My head was spinning and I felt like someone had knocked me sideways with a baseball bat. In the morning, after a terrible night, I felt worse than I had during the worst of my drinking days’ hangovers. I couldn’t tolerate any light at all. Lying down with my eyes closed didn’t seem to help, it just made me want to vomit. My whole body felt like someone had run me down with a truck then reversed over me several times. I had to hold on to the furniture and the walls to get from room to room without falling over.
This lasted for over a week.
Did you know that perimenopause can trigger M.E.? I didn’t. I do now. In my late teens I developed glandular fever, making me more susceptible at this later stage of life. There’s a lot of hormonal turbulence during perimeno, with an exhausting cocktail of brain fog, burnout and so many other symptoms it’s easier to ask what isn’t related to perimenopause than what is. It’s doubtless much more scientifically complex than ‘perimenopause can trigger M.E.’, but long story short that’s how M.E. changed the course of my life this year.
It isn’t a case of physical deconditioning; I was exercising regularly and intensely all the way up to my major crash after the UK Games Expo. Since then, I’ve had to learn a different way of living. A slower pace – much slower. I’m still struggling with this. I’ve swapped my Fitbit for Visible (#notanAd!), which is a wristband and app which helps people with chronic illness to track their symptoms and manage pacing to avoid PEM (post-exertional malaise) and crashes. After an initial analysis over some days, Visible gave me a daily budget of 14 ‘pacepoints’ – units of energy which are used up at varying speeds depending on whether my heart rate is in my personalised rest, activity or exertion zones. As someone used to rushing around doing all the things, and attempting to use as much energy as possible, this complete 180 on how I move around during the day and complete tasks has been… challenging.
For so long I felt like it just can’t be M.E. I must just need a little rest, then I’ll be ‘fine’ and back to ‘normal’ (whatever that is, after the past few years struggling with the ups and downs of perimenopause). Several months and several harsh lessons later, I have no option but to admit that I do, in fact, have M.E. My GP agrees, and I’ve been referred to my nearest M.E. clinic for support, and I hope in time to have an official, clinical diagnosis. It’s difficult, because I’ve had all the blood & urine tests, ECG, CT scan, everything – but M.E. can’t be diagnosed with a simple blood test, it’s often a conclusion reached by ruling everything else out.
What is M.E.?
Myalgic encephalomyelitis (M.E.) is a long-term neurological illness that causes profound fatigue, energy crashes after even small amounts of activity, cognitive issues like brain fog, and a kind of physical shutdown called “post-exertional malaise” (PEM). It isn’t the same as being tired; M.E. affects the body’s ability to recover from effort, whether physical, mental or emotional. People with M.E. live with a very limited “energy budget,” and pushing through that limit can lead to days or even weeks of a “crash” with severely debilitating symptoms.
I have had to dramatically change how I approach every aspect of life. M.E. has forced me to be gentler and kinder with myself, instead of harsh and punishing like I was in the past. I cannot simply ‘push through the pain’ or ‘carry on regardless’. My expectations of myself have softened, and I have to accept that tiredness and many other physical symptoms are a part of my current reality, and I don’t know if, when or how that will ever change. I hope it does, but for now, this is how I must live. Slowly, patiently, showing myself kindness and releasing all my previous demands. Reminding myself that my health is simply how it is, not a personal failure.
One of the biggest struggles I’ve had is giving up exercise. A big surprise is how much I miss the psychological effects of exercise, rather than just the physical fitness part. Heading out for a 90-minute stomp over the local hills, or pushing myself to beat a 5K PR, had my heart racing, the endorphins flooding my body and made me feel healthy and fit, but I hadn’t realised just how much I needed it all mentally. I miss it so much it hurts. The grief is deep, and difficult.
Therapy
Speaking of mental health, I’m pleased to report a big positive step this year: I started therapy. Taking a moment here to recognise my privilege, as I am able to access private therapy sessions. I love the NHS, but I know there’s a huge demand and wait for mental health services through them.
I visit my therapist every week, on a Saturday morning. I wasn’t ready for therapy until this year. In my early 20s I tried, while living in the south of Ireland. I just wasn’t receptive, wasn’t ready, I was too full of rage and angst and bitterness and thinking I knew better than everyone else. From mid 20s until recently I was distracted and busy raising my children. And using that socially accepted method of easing any psychological distress: alcohol. Wine o’clock culture is pervasive, especially amongst mums. I quit booze entirely in February 2023, and this opened me up to feel all of my feelings fully, painfully, without the softening, numbing effects. I learned to sit with my feelings, good or bad. And the bad came forcefully, with vengeance, screaming in fearsome clarity after being drowned out for so many years with a tsunami of wine.
Through 2026 I plan to share some of the causes of these internal angry tirades and how this pain manifests in my day-to-day life. For now, it’s enough to say that I had a LOT to throw at my poor therapist when I started going to sessions in late May. I’m finding the therapy sessions more helpful and healing than I ever thought possible. She suggested writing daily (if possible, or just whenever I felt able) about my feelings and whatever came to mind in a handwritten journal, to support my healing journey. It helps me (and her) understand my issues and their root causes.
Recently she recommended a book to me, that I’ve started reading: Why Love Matters, by Sue Gerhardt. It isn’t a light read, but it’s excellent and extremely relevant.
Changing Family Life
In more personal, hormonal and family news, I’ve gone from having two sons at home to three sons at home (adopting my husband’s son that he had with his now deceased ex) to only having our youngest son left at home, in the space of a couple of years. What a rollercoaster of emotions. My eldest is now 20, and neurotypical. Middle son (adopted) is 19, autistic and ADHD along with other personal issues. My husband and I’s youngest is 13 and level 3 autistic, attending a wonderful “additional needs” secondary school. My husband is also autistic. As you can see, there are plenty of challenging aspects to our family life, yet richly rewarding, too.
2025 hasn’t been a year of strength in my usual understanding of the word, but my understanding of strength, as well as my understanding of plenty of other things, has been forced to change this year. Strength doesn’t have to scream a war cry from the rooftops. It can be a quiet, daily renewed persistence. A promise of gentleness to self, and refusal to give up. Moving forwards slowly is still moving. Progress is being measured by other metrics than numbers on a scale, measuring tape or fitness app. Priority is being given to patience and understanding, learning more about myself while demanding less.
None of this adjusted progress is linear. I fuck up regularly. I’m writing this after 12 days of going over my Visible pacepoints budget every single day, resulting in a painful PEM crash yesterday. Resting remains a frustrating challenge. Nourishing myself with healthy food, rather than the old comforts of quick fix junk, is a goal I aspire to but very rarely manage to maintain over the week. My present and the future, for now, looks different to how I imagined and hoped it would at this point in my life. But I have to accept it, work with it, set different yet somehow more meaningful and personally rewarding goals.
New Year, New Outlook
What will 2026 look like for me? I usually espouse some grand hopes and schemes at this point, set goals that by next December I’ll be able to tick off as achieved with loud pride. Not this year. I will carry on living, as gently and as patiently as I can, with the hope that my physical health will one day be restored to what it used to be, but if that isn’t the case, this new way of living could be a lot worse.
It’s slow and painful, incredibly challenging and frustrating, yes; but I am doing my best to find glimmers of positivity in the darkness and focus on the many things I am grateful for in my life. A husband and three sons who love me, who bring indescribable happiness in their different ways, access to healing therapy, an outlet here on my blog where I can share & connect with my valued readers, and a new, slower pace of life which enables me to find joy in things I would have previously missed in the frenzy.
Here’s to a peaceful, healing 2026 for all of us.
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