Goodbye 2025

Taken as a whole, I've had better years.

It would be easy to just dwell on the negatives. It's now almost 12 months since a still-undiagnosed health condition has had a large impact on not only my physical health, but my mental health.

I could also meditate on how this year has been, if not a struggle, certainly financially more difficult. There seemed to be a lot less work around, not just for me and WAO, but for everyone I know.

That's the negative story, or part of it at least.

But looking at 2025 in a different light tells another story. In some ways it's been a year of growth. I am a different person at the end of 2025 than I was at the start: perhaps slightly gentler, more aware of my own limitations, and more tolerant of those in others.

Starting to be kinder to others starts with being kinder to oneself, and that's something I've had to learn this year. I can be hard on others, or at least I have been in the past, and that stems from being hard on myself.

Being hard on myself, in turns out, is hard on my autonomic system. Or at least that's the current theory, my major organs having been tested and given the all-clear. The autonomic system regulates our body's response to internal and external stimulii, and it seems mine could be out of whack.

That, in turn, has meant I have had to rest. This is not something I am very good at as I have a low boredom threshold. I'm learning to live a less stimulated life – which means being less caffeinated, for sure, but also just being more aware of the natural and human life around me, rather than my own needs, desires, and impulses.

Less stimulation means more reflection. I realised that I wasn't particularly happy. I've previously relied on running to help maintain positive mental health and, without that available to me, I sought help from my GP in the form of a low-dose SNRI.

I explained in this post that, since October when I started taking this new medication, my internal world has been much better place to reside. As I said to my wife, I don't really care if I'm getting pharmaceutical help to get through winter or through the rest of my life. After all, just as I didn't choose to have extremely blue eyes, nor did I choose to have the kind of brain chemistry that means I have a chronic lack serotonin when the nights draw in.

So, goodbye 2025. There's plenty I could say about work, about family life, and about some of the creative endeavours I've engaged with this year. But, to be quite honest, they all fade into the background compared to being alright “in myself.”