There are stretches of time that are simply cruel—too cruel to dress up as something meaningful or poetic. The past year and a half has felt like that to me.
Since the summer of 2024, life has been like a fever dream, or one of those rapid flashes you see at the edge of consciousness. I kept wanting to get away from something, wanting to hold on to something else, and yet my own body and mind would not cooperate. In the end, I was left sitting among ruins of my own making, hoping the laws of physics had not abandoned me, hoping the sun would still rise the next morning.
I am writing this from a hospital, and I still cannot quite keep my eyes from watering.
It has been far too long since I last wrote anything, so this is a brief report on where things stand. Thank you to everyone who has cared enough to read.
I dropped out of my PhD program. Not for any glamorous reason—not to start a company, not to chase some bold new path. I simply could not continue.
Maybe I aimed too high without having the ability to match it. Maybe I was never really capable from the start. In any case, the program originally involved three degrees. I managed, awkwardly and with difficulty, to complete one of them, and then I hit a wall.
For nearly a year, unless it was a day when I had to go to the hospital or go to campus to meet my advisor, my sense of time and even of my own existence was blurred. At one point I explained my situation to him. He was kind, and I am sincerely grateful for that. But outside of those appointments, I was barely living.
Then I was admitted to another program, and for a moment it seemed that everything might finally be over in the spring of 2025.
But it was not over.
Because I changed fields and had to effectively study "backward," my application for a new study permit was rejected. I returned home and sought help from a visa agency. After an exhausting amount of effort, the visa was finally approved—but by the time I received it, enrollment had already closed. So I ended up stranded here.
Another year. As if it will never end.
It feels almost as though the world was too lenient with me before, and is now collecting its debt.
If I had not started taking medication again, I do not know whether I would have made it to this day. Or maybe I never truly succeeded in stopping in the first place. Maybe I only forgot—forgot to go to the hospital, forgot everything that had to be remembered.
Around that time, I also began to truly resent existentialism. I needed, even for a moment, somewhere to catch my breath—some reason to forgive myself. But it offers no such shelter. That, more than anything, filled me with despair.
So that was my 2025: a year in pieces.
If you ask what it taught me, I cannot bring myself to be that cruel to myself right now. Reflection can wait for another day. For now, it is enough to raise a glass and celebrate this much: I stayed alive for another year, and that is no small thing.
There was light, too. In 2025 I met five wonderful online friends who brought a little color into an otherwise chaotic life:
- Lemongrass Strawberry Jam (@[email protected])
- Yuyu (https://sevic.me)
- Mr. Wushi (https://fivest.one)
- Silicon-Based Cat (@[email protected])
- Ms. Natsumi (@[email protected])
My heartfelt thanks to all of them.
And with that, happy new year.
In the new year, and in every year after, may you treat yourself a little more kindly than the world does.