San Francisco, California—

oh you thought i was on for another year in review post, didn’t you? well, i come bearing good news - no slogfest, will keep this one quick. 27 year young, memory not as sharp anymore though, so can’t recall half of the highlights from the year anyway.

with that said, i believe that the word “humbled” mostly captures my 2025 experience. a humbling year through and through, in every aspect of life. health, wealth, dating, work and purpose, relationships.

here is a graph of my step count over the year. the lows coincide perfectly with whenever i wasn’t having a good time and my mental was in the gutter. my propensity to keep my tech charged is embarrassing (shoutout to my friends who bear with me when my phone dies mid conversation - sadly not as rare of an occurrence). due to this, the dips are perhaps exaggerated, but overall the numbers paint the bigger picture well.

oh tennis, what a beautiful addition to my life

i don’t think i’ve fully processed some of the lessons and events from the year, at least not enough to write about them coherently. one thing i will say, though - the eeriest feeling is the realization that, for pretty much every aspect of life i noted earlier, i’m currently way off my all-time high. that’s the most humbling and grounding part of the whole ordeal - acknowledging that at some point i was way better at something, and now, i’m maybe just not.

a short story here: i used to be big into quizzes (quizbowls) growing up. my team and i would sweep the floor with the local competition. one fine day, however, we couldn’t even finish on the podium - my vice principal had a lot to say about it; she snarkily commented that we must’ve gotten overconfident and hence we fumbled the bag. one another day, after one of our typical wins, she remarked that i hadn’t celebrated the victory enthusiastically enough. first off - wtf bro? anyway, i knew not to take these comments to heart. i’ve always known myself to be pretty even keeled about the smaller wins and losses, taking them in without any undue attention, almost as though i’m budgeting my energy for moments that warrant a bigger reaction.

i bring up this tangent because i feel spent at the end of this year. one too many of these moments happened in a jiffy, and maybe i’m a little tired of the swings of the rollercoaster. 😅 i’ve mentioned this before - my dopamine receptors are cooked. at the absolute top of my list is to get better at enjoying slow progress in life. now time for an unrelated motivational banger:

i’ll be the first to admit - i don’t have it together. what i do have is an undying faith in myself to be able to do anything under the sun. this is me lying to myself btw, but i’m fine teetering on the edge of overconfidence - and perhaps pissing off a vice principal or two on the way - just to fake it till i make it.