2025 in the Rear View Mirror

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I find myself thinking of Sarajevo around Christmastime. Trans-Siberian Orchestra is a Christmas mainstay for my whole life, and their biggest track was inspired by the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. The song was inspired by Vedran Smailović, a cellist who played every day in the town square for 22 days during the Siege of Sarajevo before he was able to escape. The Sarajevo String Quartet also played during the siege, with their performances occurring during the entirety of the siege. It makes me think of how people in besieged Sarajevo still held beauty pageants (as chronicled by the U2 song “Miss Sarajevo”).

We do not talk much about the awful wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s in the west (something which I intend to correct in an article next year). We’re rather shortsighted when it comes to our own sacrifices, let alone those of others. We lose sight of the humanity in these awful situations. It’s so easy to boil down losses and casualties to statistics that we forget every person who experiences trials and tribulations is a person. That every soul afflicted by war, forced to live under gunfire and explosions is a person with hopes, dreams, wants, fears, concerns, complaints, memories, and a story just like the rest of us. No matter if they are in Gaza or Ukraine or Darfur, or a thousand other conflict zones across the world. The very least we can do is to recognize the terror these people are subjected to. We can do so much more, like pressuring our leaders to use every tool in our array to stop the senseless violence which infests our world. Especially now, where we are continuing to commit it ourselves for no discernable damn reason.

But it also makes me think about how these people, under the most horrid of conditions, still find ways to retain their humanity. To strive for normalcy. To feed their souls when they live every day at the risk of an unfair death. It’s a reminder of the cruelty of humanity. But it’s also an example as to why we should never give up or give into tyranny. Defeatism dishonors the memory of everyone who looked despots and monsters in the face and said, “To hell with you, you will not rob me of my spirit.”

Even in times as dark and dire as these, we need to find what will pull us through. We need to lean on each other. We need to feed our souls as much as we can even while we continue the struggle. We need to be at our fighting best for those who cannot fight themselves. We cannot give in, but we need to bolster our spirits so that those of us who have the safety we so often take for granted never feel like giving up.

I don’t want to talk about politics right now, though that has cast its ugly shadow on every facet of life. No, I have spent far too much time and energy with the rage and anguish and despair. I will feel those things. I will not look away. I will continue writing until they silence me. But I do not want to offer all of my ground or this place to that which I hate. I built this as a place to showcase what I love, what is important to me, and how I feel about this life and the world I live in. I try to write when I have something worthwhile to say, too much complaining will dissolve into static and become ignored. The truth is, I struggle sometimes trying to solve the world’s problems or at least come up with a solution precisely because I understand I got extremely lucky with where my life started and who I started it with. I can turn away, and I’m safer than a lot of other people in America, and I don’t want to ever not recognize that but I have to remember that I am a single person, and a person is not all-powerful.

This year has been an abysmally depressing year if you go by the news. Setting aside institutional bigotry turned into unfathomable cruelty, this year has been filled with miserable headlines. AI is on the rise and distorting reality with no end in sight, the economy defies basic logic in such a way to hurt as many people as possible, our media is consolidating under the leadership of the absolute worst people possible, and we’ve seen so many icons taken from us. Frankly, a lot of the headlines should give some form of distress, I think. It shows our basic humanity is still intact and that we don’t want to let the worst among us chart the course for everyone. It amplifies how lost all of us feel as to how we can fight back. For ourselves. For our families. For our neighbors. For the people we don’t even know.

As part of this insanity, there is a piece of me being nostalgic for the pandemic. It was a time of great struggle, and pain, and suffering. But there was something heartwarming about the sense of unity that spread across the world. That we all faced the same great challenge together. When we were locked in our homes, we had to find creative ways to reach out and feel connected. We shared art, we created things because we had the time and the energy, we discovered new things about ourselves. And I recognize again that I was lucky to be in the position I was to experience all of this during such a dark time.

And I don’t look back with rose colored glasses. The daily body count was tremendously high. Our leaders parroted anti-science talking points which got people killed. I think, more than many things over the last decade, that the pandemic makes a sharp reminder to trust accredited experts in the fields. That the war on science, academics, and competence being waged right now is extremely dangerous. We must be vigilant of falsehoods, misinformation, disinformation infecting our world and altering our perception of reality. We must maintain our dignity, our grace, and anchor our souls to what matters to us so we can keep from being taken under this stormy ocean of history unfolding.

Personally, this year wasn’t actually all that terrible. I’ve kept up posting on this website for an entire year, weekly, even if I got in work that was a little sloppy or didn’t quite hit what I wanted to. And I did that while working my day job. I traveled. I reconnected with some friends I had drifted from. I bought a new guitar. I experienced live music I wanted to for a long time. I played a video game that affected me as a person. I had a lot of revelations about myself that I needed to come to grips with. This has been a year of reckoning with myself and the ghosts.

Above all, I wrote a freaking novel this year. I haven’t done that in a very long time, and this is the first one that I think (despite being a first draft) is worthy of being read by people. The genesis of October Sun, November Seas is in a story (with a shared piece of that title) which I read over ten years ago. On some obscure little corner of the internet, I found a story which spoke to me and I messaged the author with an idea. She loved it, and asked if she could use it. We began talking daily and she became my best friend in the whole world. Time wore on and she abandoned the story until ten years ago, I had the brilliant idea for the two of us to rewrite it together. I was a terrible writing partner and kind of dominated the whole project because I really wanted to see it happen, and eventually our respective lives whittled away at our friendship. I regret that friendship’s loss to this day. There was a lot I could have done better at the time, and I’ll carry that with me until the end of my days.

In the years since, I tried to develop other stories set in small towns, sometimes with a mystery, sometimes about the regular part of modern life. Still, despite numerous revisions and ideas and half-baked summaries, nothing seemed to gel. I kept hitting the same roadblocks on each of these ideas, in that none of them were comprehensive enough to sustain a whole story. Eventually, I was left with this desire to write this story but at a loss for the ideas to actually execute on it. So, I revisited my notes from the old November Seas days, and all the great ideas I had for the story in the years since my friend and I stopped working on it. I discovered the missing pieces to the story I had been trying to write for years upon years at this point. I took characters from all over my creative map and my own life and set them in a situation where I had conflict and messy emotions to explore. Then I was off to the races.

I told the story I wanted to tell about someone who felt somewhat similar to me. Really, I imbued my characters with different aspects of my personality to try and explore some of my own flaws, while having them live existences which come nowhere near my real life experience. Like holding a mirror up to real life, but at a bit of an angle. It was therapeutic for me in some ways, being able to process mental angst without it being my specific mental angst. I also got to use characters which I have been trying to bring to life for ten years in some form or another.

More than that, I was dedicated to finishing this because I felt that some of the work we did all those years ago needed to be out in the world. And I needed to pay tribute to a friend who carried me through some of my darkest hours. Making October Sun, November Seas was a labor of love in many different ways, but I’m very proud I stuck with writing this book all year long and hit my deadlines. I have so much more to add to it and edit it, but I think it’s something with legs.

Also this year, I played some incredible games. I wrote about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 shortly after its sweep at The Game Awards. But I also got into the Ace Combat series for the first time, which inspired a series of short stories I’ve been writing on this website. I like exploring what the darkness of war hanging over our heads could look like from the skies. I buy into the ethos of Ace Combat summarized as ‘War bad, planes rad.’ I also felt many of the poems I wrote dealt with conflict in some way. And my Paris short stories, which sprung from a dark sentiment I uttered back in the spring, “I’ll be dead before I see Paris.” There’s a darkness inherent in a lot of my creative writing this year which has allowed me to ease some of the unrelenting pressure of the negative headlines while the novel itself explored some of the lightheartedness. I honestly cannot tell what next year’s work here will bring, but I promise that it will continue.

2025 felt like it was primarily about laying groundwork. There were a lot of things I worked on this year, both in my personal development and in my writing, that were lacking glamour but rich with purpose. I think 2026 will hold much of the same. I have several novel or series ideas which I have been toying with that now have seen much larger progress than I have before. I have worked to confront and make peace with many of my ghosts and negative personality traits which have haunted me for years.

We are continuing to watch the world unfold as it will. As predicted, it was not easy. It was filed with hardship and struggles. But we have faced this adversity together. We will continue to face it together. We will share our laughter and tears. We will triumph and fail together. We will persevere together.

My favorite time of year is the Monday before Thanksgiving through January 2nd because this is a time for people to come together, to spend time with loved ones and celebrate the joy which comes with family, whether it’s family by birth or family you have found along the way. I love New Year’s Eve because it’s something special in all of this, a day to say, “Whatever has happened this year will be carried with me, but it does not define me, and I have a whole new chapter of 365 pages that starts in just a few hours to do something new with.”

This life is not easy, but I am grateful for what I have and the perspective it has granted me. I enter this next year with trepidation. However, I am ready to face the challenges to come with poise and dignity. I would like to model grace under pressure as the storm worsens. These are tremendously dark times. One of the biggest changes I made in 2025 was being more comfortable with using my voice to speak truth to power and shed light on evil lurking in the darkness. I aim to continue this work in 2026.

I appreciate every last one of you here in my life. Friends, family, longtime readers, or recent additions to this caravan, no matter how we know each other or how you found your way here, I want to say thank you. This place would probably still exist without you, but it would be nothing more than me shouting into the void. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for letting me do what I do and staying around to check it out. I love the all of you.

Happy New Year!