Cheers to 2025!

Do You Remember Who You Were Before the World Told You Who to Be?

Do You Remember Who You Were Before the World Told You Who to Be?

Charles Bukowski asked that once. Not as a comfort. As a confrontation.

I didn’t have an answer for most of my adult life. I was too busy responding. Building. Explaining. Staying visible. Staying useful. Staying ahead of whatever came next.

2025 was the year I stopped long enough to notice that I’d drifted.

This wasn’t a year of expansion. It was a year of subtraction. Of removing noise until something true could speak without competing for attention.

It was the year I left most social media.

I made a brief announcement before I went. It felt necessary. Social media had been a real part of my life and career, not incidental. I built relationships there. Opportunities came from it. Some people knew me only through that lens. Walking away without acknowledging that would have felt dishonest.

Then I deleted my accounts.

What surprised me wasn’t who reached out, but who didn’t. And more surprising than that, it didn’t bother me. There was no sting, no sense of abandonment. Just clarity.

That lack of reaction told me something important. Not about them, but about me.

I realized I may not have been there for people who needed me either. I’d been present in flashes, visible but not consistently available. I likely disappointed people. I probably hurt some, unintentionally, by convincing myself that activity counted as care.

Social media makes this easy. It rewards appearing connected while quietly eroding the work required to actually be so.

Without the constant scroll, I noticed how reactive I’d become. How much of my attention had been trained around response instead of intention. How my nervous system lived in a low-grade state of alert, always waiting for the next opinion, comparison, or manufactured urgency.

Leaving wasn’t about being above it. It was about being tired.

And honest.

That quiet created space. Not always comfortable space. Silence tends to invite things back in, especially the ones you’ve been postponing. My body was one of them.

Looking more closely at my health led to answers I hadn’t expected, including surgery. I’m still recovering as I write this. Recovery has been humbling. Slow. Completely incompatible with pretending everything is fine.

It forced me to stop negotiating with my limits.

Health stopped being theoretical this year. Not wellness-as-brand or discipline-as-identity. Real health. Sleep. Boundaries. Eating like care instead of control. Moving gently. Letting rest count. Accepting that healing does not rush to meet timelines or aesthetics.

Burnout doesn’t always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like functioning without joy. Productivity without presence. Being capable but disconnected.

Stepping away from social media exposed how fluent I’d become in the external world, and how quiet my inner one had gotten.

And then something else happened.

I started writing again.

Not in fragments or captions, but in sustained, uninterrupted stretches. The kind of writing that asks you to stay. To follow a thought all the way through instead of packaging it for consumption. That space turned into a book.

This year, I completed the first draft.

That still feels strange to say out loud. Writing became a place to put what I’d been holding. Not to perform insight, but to metabolize it. To tell the truth slowly. To let complexity exist without resolution.

Finishing the draft didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like proof that choosing depth over noise creates something real.

Bukowski’s question stayed with me throughout all of this: do you remember who you were before the world told you who to be?

I don’t think there’s a pristine version of ourselves waiting untouched underneath everything. We’re shaped by what we live through. But there’s a difference between being shaped and being overwritten.

This year was about reclaiming authorship.

Choosing attention over distraction. Health over urgency. Depth over visibility. Integrity over immediacy.

I didn’t disappear. I reappeared somewhere quieter.

As I look toward 2026, I’m less interested in scaling and more interested in connecting. Real conversations. Shared meals. Rooms where people look up from their phones. Reconnecting with people I love and meeting new ones without an algorithm in the middle.

Less broadcasting. More presence.

If I take anything forward into the next year, it’s this: attention is not neutral. Where you place it shapes who you become. So, I’m choosing carefully. Choosing fewer surfaces and more substance. Fewer spectators and more participants. Fewer explanations and more lived truth.

You don’t have to vanish to remember yourself. You just have to stop outsourcing your sense of self to the loudest room you’re in.

Here’s to healing that takes its time.
Here’s to writing that tells the truth.
Here’s to connection that requires showing up.
And here’s to 2026, not louder, not faster, but deliberate.