Goodbye, 2025. You Won't Be Missed.

Hello 2026. We've got so much to do.

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2025 was, without question, the worst year of my life.

The year opened with my wife talking to me about a possible divorce before the 2024 Christmas presents were even all put away, continued through nine months of grief and angst and struggle, and ended with me sitting here in my own apartment, separated and awaiting the news — which I fully expect, based on what I can observe — that this will become permanent, not temporary.

This comes on the heels of the loss of my lifelong Catholic faith, my career, and much of my former closeness with my family of origin, all of which came apart beginning in late 2020 to early 2021.

It was a crap avalanche, and every time I started to recover a little, a new domino fell.

But nothing hurt like this year. Not even close.

The emotional pain, the grief, the confusion, the loss, the identity rupture…I wouldn’t wish a year like this on anyone. There are times I would like to share access to the pain briefly so certain people could understand what it really feels like, but this is the kind of thing a lot of men don’t survive, and I won’t sugarcoat how awful it’s been. Nobody should have to go through this.

That said, I have endured.

I have traversed the deepest darkness, and I am beginning to see the dawn.

I’ll have been in my new apartment for two weeks tomorrow. As I have settled into the place, I’ve begun to stabilize. My emotions, which were a constant roller coaster, have quieted into something more like an interstate. I’m still moving through them at speed, but it doesn’t feel nearly so tumultuous. Every once in a while I have to take a pit stop off some random exit, but then it’s right back on the highway.

Yesterday, I found myself crying out of grief after some realization or memory surfaced — I don’t even remember what it was specifically — but the wave came and went fairly quickly. It didn’t stay and drown me and ruin the rest of my night like it has done so many times before.

Although I experienced countless nights in recent months where I dreaded going to bed, I have finally stopped aching over sleeping alone. Or eating alone. Or even spending several days in a row totally alone.

Yes, I would prefer more human contact. I don’t think this much isolation is good for me in the long run. But for now, it has become tolerable enough that it’s no longer the hindrance that it was.

I will never stop worrying over what this will do to my kids, and I miss the organic opportunities for hugs and talks and jokes and tuck-ins and the late night laughter of teenagers who are supposed to be asleep but are talking or playing a game together instead, but I also no longer take our togetherness for granted. When I visit them, I am intentional and focused. They have my full attention. They see less of me, but they get more of me when they do. It’s a small consolation, but it’s not nothing.

I don’t think the marriage should have ended, but I am coming to understand it also couldn’t have continued the way things were. Not for either of us. Being gone has shown me what I couldn’t see from inside. After all, I was with her for more than half my life.

But now, I’ve had to start learning to take care of myself.

To believe in myself.

To handle my own affairs, even when they’re uncomfortable.

I don’t get to live mostly in abstractions while many of the details are seen to by someone for whom they come more naturally. I have to do both. I can do it at this scale — just me — better than I could have for a large family. I still have my limitations. I won’t be winning any awards for executive function any time soon.

But the only behavior I can change is my own, and I’m working on that. I am no longer trying to run back into the flames to try to save things. I’ve done what I could. Instead, I am focusing on rebuilding what has been burned down.

That’s what 2026 will be about for me.

It’s about turning this into the best worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

That doesn’t mean I’m saying, “this is for the best.” It means that I am choosing to metabolize a tragic experience into something of worth. And sometimes the scale of destruction defines the possibility of rebirth. It’s one thing to remodel a kitchen. It’s another to gut a house to the studs and start over. The more that gets torn down, the more control you have over the rebuild.

I’m sure I have many challenging obstacles to overcome, because much of the life I’m now living does not come naturally to me. I’ve actually never lived alone. Always with family, friends, roommates, my wife. There was always a sharing of responsibilities and maintenance and presence. This is new and strange for me.

But I can feel the growth starting already.

It’s like when a seed finally sprouts and in the first couple days after it clears the surface it suddenly races to an inch or two of height while you weren’t looking.

It’s still new and fragile, but it’s also vital and hopeful.

I don’t like the idea of a middle road between thriving and deciding life isn’t worth living at all. If all I get from this is a perpetual state of mediocre survival, what’s the point?

But that is the exact thing my brain has been screaming at me about for months. “There’s no version of life worth living after this.”

I was having a hard time seeing it any other way.

But then, quietly, something shifted inside me. Maybe there is, I thought. Maybe I just can’t see it quite yet.

But finally, I am beginning to sense the possibility.

The way I see it, either I’m going to make something of myself despite the loss, the cost, the grief, the humiliation, the feeling of failure, or I’m just going to start dying slowly from this point on out of apathy and lack of self-care.

The second option is always a real danger, but I am choosing to pursue the better one.

When I first started learning about healing from trauma and behavioral therapy techniques and all the rest of it, it felt like doing chores. It was so much work, so much focus on the negative to get to the positive. I often couldn’t make myself sit and watch another podcast, another video, read another article, attempt another book, because I was already exhausted from the emotional labor of just trying to get through another crappy day.

But what I am discovering is that when the environment and circumstances are correct, a lot of healing happens on its own. Like a laceration or a broken bone, once it’s been stitched or set, you need to check on it occasionally, but you don’t have to obsessively attend to it every day. Your body knows how to mend even deep wounds. It just needs time, and for the damn thing to stop being re-injured over and over again. I still have plenty of intentional work to do, but I have been surprised how much has changed in me without the application of focused effort. That gives me hope that this process won’t be as arduous as I feared. That there’s something organic at work.

Some of you commented that you’ve noted a change in my tone. More upbeat, more confident, more clear. That’s real. I’ve noticed and been surprised by it too. I’ve got a long way to go yet, but things are moving in the right direction. The more I prove to myself what I can do one time, no matter how difficult, the more I believe I can do it again.

And nobody is telling me otherwise.

Nobody is telling me what I’m not, how I failed, how I don’t measure up, where I’m falling short, why I’m not good enough. Not even me — and I used to. If I make a suboptimal choice, I simply course correct, and try to learn from it.

The need for external validation isn’t gone, but it’s shrinking a bit.

And I won’t let anyone else rewrite my story of what happened. Even if that’s a story I will never tell fully in a public setting. I was conditioned for most of my life to take all the blame when things went wrong. I have come to realize it’s an injustice to take accountability for anything except my share of it.

I said it the other day, but I want to say something again: all of you were a bigger part of my surviving this than you know. You subscribed to my Substack, giving me a sense of mission and purpose, keeping me writing as I navigated these tumultuous waters. Your comments, your prayers, your messages, they all helped. Some of you gave me places to stay or meals to eat while I went on my trip as I attempted to ground myself with new perspectives and tried to stop the world from spinning. Many of you gave me financial support when I was too broke and too crushed to work — and you made it possible for me to do basic things like get an apartment and fix my car and help out with some of the expenses for my family.

I wanted to thank you all individually, but Venmo and Paypal and Stripe make it exceedingly difficult to just pull a clear transaction list with all the pertinent info so I can email people individually. And there were hundreds of you. So please know, if I didn’t acknowledge you directly (and I tried to in those apps wherever I could) I am forever grateful to you. You kept me alive. You kept me fed. You kept me going. You gave me the time I needed to process this and start standing on my own feet again. I cannot overstate how huge that’s been.

I’m not going to make any specific predictions about 2026 in this post, but I think it’s going to be a very electric year. A lot is going to happen. A lot is going to change — both in the world, and for many of us personally. By this time next year, I am going to be a very different man than the one who sat down with his coffee to write this today. I hope I will have a number of previously unimaginable successes to share with you then.

But I am no longer merely in exile. I am building a new life. Not because I wanted to, but because the only other choice is death, in one form or another, and I choose life.

Sometimes I feel like I’m doing something wrong when I’m not grieving. Like I haven’t paid my full respects to the tragedy that’s still unfolding. But I am coming to realize that I can celebrate the new wins without betraying the ongoing losses, as long as I don’t pretend that there wasn’t an exorbitant cost. I won’t euphemize what’s happened away. I won’t couch it in language that anesthetizes the pain.

I just don’t have to drown in it anymore.

I need to walk with it, knowing it will always be with me.

So here’s to a gratuitously better 2026 than any of us have the right to expect.

Let’s make this year count.

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