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We are heading into highlight-reel season.
Soon, everyone will be posting their curated year-end recaps on social media, spotlighting the best moments of their year.
Promotions, marathons, trips, babies, weddings, concerts. New jobs, new houses, new bodies. Goals smashed, personal bests crushed, challenges completed, lists ticked off. All Ws, no Ls.
This isn’t a new year-end phenomenon, it just used to come in the form of the annual holiday letter.
And like the annual holiday letter of yore bragging about the new car in the driveway, the Disney vacation and the amazing college that Suzie got into (clearly, I associate the holiday letter with suburban, multi-kid American families in the ’80s lol), the highlight reel can make other people feel bad.
Especially since we’re consuming hundreds of what are essentially annual holiday letters from strangers whose lives look better than ours.
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I make highlight reels, too. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with celebrating the good stuff that happened this year, or accomplishments you’re proud of. It’s a bit of a sneaky gratitude practice dipped in a sour-candy coating of humble-brag.
But may I suggest the strangely validating, we’re-all-in-this-together power the lowlight reel?
This isn’t my idea; an Instagram post by a creator named Jess Bolton titled “normalize 2025 lowlight reels! Here’s mine” caught my eye, and I watched a few other lowlight reels inspired by hers.
Now, I’m not saying it’s pleasurable to watch other people’s misfortunes and life-plan plot twists that range from emergency surgeries, grief, infertility, illness, layoffs and divorces to two whole subgenres I will call “grievously injuring self in dumb way that will be very funny later” and “tragic haircut.”
But lowlight reels illustrate two important ideas that tend to get lost this time of year: no year is going to be 100 per cent good or 100 per cent bad, and everyone (everyone!) has stuff — sad, confusing, frustrating, enraging stuff — they’re dealing with. We just don’t always see it.
Lowlight reels make those struggles legible. And relatable.
Toxic-positivity types will say that it’s unhealthy to focus on the negative. But it’s not “focusing on the negative” to admit — and share! — that the negative exists. It’s a reminder that we’re all humans who will experience painful challenges, setbacks and losses in our lives.
When I watched some of these lowlight reels, my first thought was, wow, what spectacular run of bad luck.
But my second thought was, wow, look at all you’ve survived. You lived all that. You’re here to post about it.
That’s more inspiring to me than the perfect reel of the year’s most beautiful moments. I want to live a full life, not a perfect one. And a full life includes some mess.
My 2025 lowlight reel definitely includes losing a whole body part in surgery, being diagnosed with Stage 4 endometriosis and the whole horrible onboarding of a hormonal medication to deal with said Stage 4 endometriosis. Oh yeah, and the symptoms of endometriosis.
But when I look back at spring 2025, I also see people who took care of me when I was recovering, a medical team that believed me, and people who listened to me when I felt scared or discouraged or sorry for myself (which actually, hot take, having self-compassion is fine!).
And I also see me: a gal who still tried to show up to her life every day.
There’s a highlight reel in the lowlight reel, too. It’s a highlight real.
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