What Stays When Everything Else Goes: My 2025 Reflection

A 2025 Reflection on Grief, Gratitude Without Surrender, and Keeping Moving

Content note: This piece includes grief, prolonged stress, medical uncertainty, and mental exhaustion. If you're in a tender season, feel free to skip this one.

What this is: It's my 2025 reflection, what stayed useful when my usual tools and optimism didn't.

January 2025: The Morning I Didn't Want to Start

Three weeks into January 2025, I woke up, and my first thought was: I don't want to do this anymore.

Not suicidal. Just done. Done with the weight of opening my eyes. Done with the performance of being functional. Done with hoping a quote, any quote, could do miracles on a year like this, when I couldn't control whether the people I loved kept breathing. I lay there for twenty minutes. Maybe thirty. My wife was already up. I could hear the coffee maker doing its little gurgling routine, that sound that usually means the day is starting, whether you're ready or not.

I got up anyway.

Not because I wanted to. Not because some meditation app told me to practice gratitude. I got up because lying there felt worse than moving, and that's the best reason I had.

The Year the Hits Didn't Arrive All at Once

We lost someone in early 2025. I'm not going to tell you who or how because that's not the story; the story is what happens after, when grief becomes a low-grade fever you can't shake, and then other things pile on.

Health scares. Test results that come back concerning. More tests. Waiting rooms that smell like anxiety and hand sanitizer.

People love to describe hard times as the universe throwing a single asteroid at your house, with one big, dramatic impact.

Mine wasn't that clean. It was more like a meteor shower: not one cinematic strike, but a steady pelting of smaller impacts. Enough to keep you braced, flinching, scanning the sky, never fully unclenching.

Here's what nobody tells you about extended hardship: it's silent. Not in a peaceful way, in a grinding, repetitive way. The same worries in a loop. The same conversations. The same middle-of-the-night spiral where you run worst-case scenarios like you're getting paid for it.

What Helped (And What Didn't)

The journal

I journal, not because I believe in journaling as a spiritual practice, but because I needed somewhere to put the thoughts that wouldn't stop.

One entry just says: "Tired of being the person who asks 'how are you feeling today?'" Another: "If one more person tells me everything happens for a reason, I'm going to lose it."

Not profound. Just real.

It reminds me of my favorite journaler,  Marcus Aurelius. He wasn't writing down commandments; he was writing in the dark to stay human. Less "control what you can control," more: keep your footing long enough to make the next decent choice.

Meditation (the unglamorous version)

Meditation helped, but not the way the apps promise. I didn't find inner peace or connect with the universe. I just learned to sit with discomfort for ten minutes without immediately reaching for my phone to make it stop; being slightly less afraid of my own brain.

Exercise + reading

Exercise helped because it's hard to catastrophize when you're trying not to throw up during training.

Reading helped because other people's stories reminded me that consciousness is bigger than my current crisis.

Talking.

The thing that actually kept me afloat: saying it out loud. Telling my loved one "I'm scared" instead of "I'm fine."Calling my friend and admitting, "I don't know how to hold space for everyone else's fear when I'm drowning in my own." Letting people see me not cope. This goes against everything we are taught about resilience, strength, and not being a burden. But pretending you're okay has a cost, too. It isolates you right when you need connection the most.

At least when you admit you're struggling, someone can actually show up.

And if you don't have people to call, if your support system is thin or non-existent, please, and I mean this without condescension, find a therapist. Call your doctor and ask for a referral. It's not a weakness. It's plumbing. When the pipes are broken, you call someone who knows how to fix pipes.

The Joy Didn't Cancel the Fear

In that same year, my little sister got married.

And when I say "little sister," I mean the one we helped raise, the one who still lives in my head partly as a kid, no matter what her driver's license says.

My wife and I weren't there. Circumstances kept us away, and that's its own kind of grief: missing a moment you can't get back.

But we saw the photos. Watched the videos. And here's what I saw: she was happy. Really happy. The kind of full-body joy you can see even through a screen.

The universe didn't pause the hard stuff to make room for that happiness. The grief was still there. The fear. The test results pending. But so was this: her, radiant, starting a life with someone who makes her happy.

Both things were true at the same time.

I cried. Probably more times than I wished for this year, spoiler: I'm only human. Gazing at those wedding photos, I cried again. Couldn't tell you if it was happiness for her, sadness at missing it, or just exhaustion from holding too many feelings at once; All of it, probably.

What 2025 Taught Me

You don't get to choose between good and bad. They show up together, uninvited, and the work is learning to hold them without trying to cancel one out with the other.

Gratitude Without Surrender

What kept me grounded? Gratitude.

And I need to say this clearly because people get it twisted: gratitude isn't surrender. It isn't "accept defeat," or "pretend this doesn't hurt," or "stop wanting things to get better."

For me, gratitude was closer to attention management.

It didn't erase suffering. It gave me somewhere to put my mind that wasn't constant threat-scanning. It wasn't the opposite of pain. It was a counterweight to the brain's habit of treating fear like a full-time job.

Notice that your kid sister is happy, even when you can't be there in person.

Notice that love doesn't stop just because everything else is hard.

Notice that the coffee still tastes good.

That your partner still makes you laugh.

That you're here, reading this, still breathing, still trying.

That's it. That's the practice.

Why I Launched MindTheNerd in 2025

I launched this blog in 2025. I started writing because I needed to make something when everything else felt like it was falling apart.

Some of you subscribed. Some of you stuck around even when my posts got weird, preachy, or too honest.

I don't know if you're here because you like what I write, or because there's something strangely human about watching someone think out loud in real time, but either way, thank you. It matters more than you know.

We're not out of the woods yet. There are still test results pending. Still hard conversations ahead. Still mornings when getting out of bed feels like a negotiation.

But I'm here. Still writing. Still trying. Still learning that the point isn't to fix everything, it's to keep moving even when you don't want to. Especially when you don't want to.

I'll share my plans for 2026 in Part II. For now, I'm just grateful we're all still here.

Stay kind. Stay honest. Stay.
Ed Nite.

Tiny disclaimer: I’m not a therapist, just a nerd with a laptop and too many thoughts. If “doing nothing” ever feels heavy or isolating, don’t go it alone, talk to someone who can help you sort the noise.

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