Peculiar Sister

The Peculiar Sister at Plato’s Feet (And Out of The Cave)

What I Learned in 2025

If I had to name 2025 in one honest phrase, I’d call it my year of looking behind the curtain.

Not in the paranoid way, not in the “everyone is out to get me” way, but in the quieter, braver way, the kind that takes time and patience and a willingness to admit you might have been wrong about a few things, including yourself.

I used to move through life assuming I understood people. I could read a room. I could predict moods. I could sense danger. I could feel the emotional weather shift before anyone else noticed the wind had changed. I thought that meant I was wise, or strong, or at least prepared.

But in 2025 I started to realize something humbling. Some of what I called “reading people” was actually old survival. It was childhood training. It was the coping strategy of a little girl who had to scan for the next explosion, the next rejection, the next silence that meant something worse was coming. I had spent decades trusting that instinct without questioning what it cost me, or how it shaped the way I interpreted everyone’s face and every sentence that landed a little too sharply.

So, I slowed down.

And when I say I slowed down, I don’t mean I became some serene monk with perfect posture and a candle burning in the corner. I mean I took the long route through my own mind, day after day, sometimes with tenderness, sometimes with disgust, sometimes with a weird sense of awe that I had survived what I survived and still managed to keep a soft spot in me at all.

I began to look at my life the way you look at a house you’ve lived in forever, the kind of house where you know which floorboard creaks and which cabinet sticks. You stop noticing it. You just work around it. You think, “That’s just how it is.”

But 2025 made me stop working around myself.

I started asking the questions that don’t give quick answers. Why do I react that way. Why does that particular tone flip a switch in me. Why do I sometimes feel the need to explain myself into the ground. Why do I either over-function, or go silent, or vanish emotionally when I feel cornered. Why do I treat love like something that can be lost if I breathe wrong.

And the more I asked, the more I began to see the machinery underneath. Cause and effect. Not as an excuse, not as a free pass, but as a map.

It’s strange, the things you notice when you finally stop running from your own history. You start seeing patterns not just in yourself, but in other people too. You start recognizing that most adults are basically walking around with invisible luggage, and they bump into you with it, sometimes hard, sometimes without even knowing they’re doing it. Their sharpness is often fear. Their control is often panic. Their stubborn certainty is often a bruise they’ve built armor over. Their cruelty is sometimes just their own pain looking for a place to go.

In 2025, I spent a lot of time unpacking baggage, mine and other people’s. Not to excuse what anyone does, because harm is still harm, and responsibility still matters. But to understand motivation. To understand how a person becomes the person standing in front of you, saying what they’re saying, doing what they’re doing, convinced they have no other choice.

That changed me.

It made me less quick to judge, and also less quick to blame myself for everything.

Because here is another thing I learned, and it surprised me more than it should have. I wasn’t the only one who came out of a dysfunctional house.

I know that sounds obvious, but it didn’t feel obvious inside my body. Inside my body, it always felt like my story was uniquely warped, like I was marked somehow, like I was the one who didn’t come with the standard instruction manual. I carried this quiet belief that other people had normal childhoods and normal parents and normal emotional toolkits, and I was the odd one out, trying to pass as human.

In 2025, that belief started to crack.

I began to see the scars in other people, too. Different shapes, different stories, sometimes hidden behind a smile, sometimes dressed up as competence, sometimes disguised as being “fine.” I saw coping strategies everywhere. Perfectionism. Avoidance. Addiction in a thousand acceptable forms. Rage turned into humor. Grief turned into productivity. Loneliness turned into control. I saw that most people are doing their best with whatever they were handed, and a lot of them were handed broken things.

That didn’t make me bitter. It made me softer.

Not softer as in naive, not softer as in letting people walk on me, but softer in the way that matters, the way that says, “I see you. I recognize the way pain travels. I recognize the ways we become sharp to protect what is tender.”

And oddly enough, yes, the political atmosphere played a part in this, but not in the way people expect.

2025 was loud. It was a year where the country’s tension didn’t just live on television, it seeped into conversations, families, friendships, and the general emotional climate of daily life. It made me pay attention to power. It made me pay attention to language, to manipulation, to what greed looks like when it wears a suit, and what desperation looks like when it grabs a microphone. It made me notice how easily people are steered by fear, and how often moral certainty is used as a weapon instead of a compass.

Watching all of that did something to me. It didn’t just make me mad. It made me more morally awake.

It made me ask, “What kind of person do I want to be in a world like this.”

Not what side do I want to win, not who do I want to be proven right about, but what kind of soul do I want to carry through this life.

And that question led me right back to my own house, my own childhood, my own patterns, my own regret.

Because I have regrets, real ones. Not dramatic regrets, not performative regrets, just the plain truth that when you’ve lived long enough, you can see the places you handled things poorly. You can see the people you loved who got your rough edges instead of your tenderness. You can see where you were defending yourself when no one was attacking, and where you were attacking when you were really just afraid.

The difference in 2025 is that I stopped using regret as a weapon against myself.

I stopped turning it into a courtroom where I prosecuted my younger self forever.

Instead, I started treating it like information. Like a teacher. Like a light in a hallway that shows you where you tripped so you don’t keep breaking your own heart on the same corner.

That is the part I think of as coming out of the cave.

Because once you see the patterns, you can’t unsee them. Once you understand that your reactions have roots, you stop calling yourself “crazy” and start calling yourself “conditioned.” Once you recognize the difference between who you are and what happened to you, you finally get a little room to breathe.

And let me be clear, this wasn’t one magical day. This was many days. A whole year’s worth of days. 365 quiet reckonings. Nights where memories surfaced like old ghosts, and I didn’t slam the door, I let them speak. Moments where I realized, “Oh, that’s why I do that.” Conversations where I listened instead of reacting. Pauses where I chose dignity over defensiveness. Small choices that added up to something bigger than I expected.

By the end of 2025, I felt cleaner inside.

Not perfect. Not healed in some glossy, inspirational-poster way. Cleaner in the sense of having less clutter, less self-deception, less need to perform toughness. I felt more hopeful, and not because the world suddenly got easy, but because I started trusting my ability to live inside reality without losing myself.

I think that’s the best version of the Plato joke, honestly.

Not Plato understanding the universe, because who are we kidding.

Plato has this famous metaphor called the Allegory of the Cave. The idea is simple, and kind of brutal. Imagine people chained inside a cave their whole lives, facing a wall. Behind them, there’s a fire, and objects moving around, and all they ever see are the shadows those objects cast on the wall in front of them. The shadows become their whole reality, because it’s all they’ve ever known. Then one person gets unchained and turns around, and it’s painful at first because the firelight hurts his eyes, and everything looks strange. But eventually he walks out of the cave into the sunlight, and he realizes the shadows were never the full truth. They were only a piece of it.

And that’s what I mean when I say 2025 felt like “coming out of the cave.” It wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was a long, slow turning. A whole year of learning to look at what I thought was reality and asking, “What else is here. What’s behind this. What have I been mistaking for the whole story.”

It’s me, finally understanding my own inner universe, and realizing it’s been running the show for a long time.

And now that I can see it, I can live differently.

And maybe the best part of stepping into that light is what it did to my heart. I stopped bracing for the hidden thorn in every kind gesture. I stopped treating love like a trap I had to outsmart. I started learning how to accept it the way it’s actually offered, imperfect, human, sometimes clumsy, but real. I learned how to love people with my eyes open, including the complicated parts, the tender parts, the parts they try to hide, because I finally understand that everyone is carrying something, and most of us are doing the best we can with what we were handed.