I was going to write a determined, forward-looking 2025 wrap-up entry today but when I woke up my country had committed a high-profile extrajudicial kidnapping and now I’m just like… eh, what’s the point? I did not exit 2025 feeling determined or forward-looking, I exited it feeling tired and overtaxed and sorry for myself.

In my mind I’ve been calling 2025 “the year I sucked at everything I care about.” I failed at so much important stuff in 2025. On paper I accomplished a lot (Bought a house! Moved across the state! Got married a second time! Kept my job and didn’t allow large swaths of it to be replaced by AI! Hired people! Maintained my relationships despite all the stress and change!), but in my head I feel like I only made it through by the skin of my teeth. Every metric by which I usually measure my worthiness (health, writing, finances, relationships) is worse than I want it to be—in 2025 I wrote fewer words (~40,000 words total, a novella and a chunk of a new project), submitted fewer things for publication (one. I submitted one thing.), bounced my first check (my property taxes, ha ha), lifted fewer (read: zero) weights. I have less money in the bank and more pounds on the scale than I have had at any point in my adulthood prior to now. I don’t feel healthy. I feel stressed out and exhausted and like I’m doing badly at everything I care about.

But the thing is, no one gives a shit if you feel like a failure. Your job still needs you to show up, your partners still need you to be present with them, your body continues to age and decay, your pets need feeding, your budget needs balancing. The engines of adulthood churn on, and if you stop to wallow too much, not only do you create a rut for yourself to stick in, you let the people who matter to you down. Hating yourself is not an avenue that gets you to good neighborhoods. Self-loathing is a dirty fuel that burns too hot.

I get a lot of mileage out of the belief that happiness is not a state of being, it’s the result of worthy actions. I suppose it’s easy for me to believe that because I’m not a naturally happy person—I’ve had mild-to-moderate depression my whole life. I have the diagnostic code and everything. My determination to imagine better futures, positive outcomes, better-than-worst-case scenarios comes from having trained myself to do that. I’m a tactical optimist because I’ve taught myself to be. With my brain, waiting to feel happy as an indicator that I’m doing well at anything is a stupid thing to do. Satisfaction is more within my control—regardless of how the rest of the day goes, I can feel satisfied that I wrote 1,000 words, or that I got to the gym, or that I nailed a challenging conversation at work. Emotions are like weather, but satisfaction, the positive assessment of value, is usually measurable regardless of how my mood is. Over the years, trying to measure satisfaction has actually made me less hard on myself, because in order to identify satisfaction, I have to know what really matters to me.

I am satisfied with 2025, more or less, but I’m more relieved. I feel like I got away with something, getting through 2025. I thought 2024 was going to be the hardest year of my life (and it still reigns supreme as the most traumatic in terms of ‘terrible shit happening out of the blue’), but 2025 was also very bad. I feel lucky to have gotten out of it, the same way I felt lucky to get out of 2020. And usually this is where I’d sign off with something pithy like ‘onward and upward! here’s to a better year!’ but life’s a dice roll and determined, forward-looking sign-offs don’t matter any more than laying in bed all day feeling sorry for myself would.

Right now I’m laying on my couch listening to the wind blow the latest storm front in from the Cascades. When I was a little kid, the wind would gust through the cracks in the windows and all night long the light fixture on the exterior wall outside my bedroom window would rattle. It kept me from sleeping. I was always afraid of the wind. 

I live in a concrete house now. Tonight I’ll sleep just fine.