2025 is now 3/4 of the way completed and for me, at least, it has been a really really good year.  It started rough.  2024 was not a good one for me.  I was happy to finally complete and release the album I had been working on for the better part of a decade, rebuild my recording studio, and revive the Nuclear Gopher label, but I was also extremely depressed, stressed, overweight, and just generally struggling physically and psychologically.  Politics, caring for my elderly, sick, dying dog, getting laid off from the startup I was working at, and a general cloud of negativity that I had been living under since the COVID pandemic started all caught up with me, culminating in a New Year’s day where I was mourning my dog’s passing and sick with a 103 fever, feeling fed up with life, the universe, and everything.

I was fat.  I was angry.  I was depressed.  I was exhausted.

While writing in my journal in the first week of January (the 6th, to be specific) I told myself to hit the reset button and start over.  Do things you want, don’t do things you don’t want to do.  Avoid things that make you feel worse.  Write more.  Hit reset.

One day at a time.  Just do a healthy thing, live one healthy day, let go of the shit you cannot influence or control, don’t wallow in negative news, stay away from social media, just live the life you wish you were living and start doing it now.

So I did.

It has been slightly over nine months since I mentally hit reset, and holy shit, it feels like I’m winning this round.  The last nine months feel like a two or three year span.  That January decision feels like it took place eons ago.

I’ve lost 30 pounds (another 10 and I’m back to where I was 20 years ago), I’m writing new music, I’m making plans to travel and be social and create, and most of all I’m feeling good.  I can even read the news and glance at social media occasionally without being drawn in and drowned by the negativity, insanity, stupidity, and bullshit.  I’ve stopped mindlessly consuming media and food.  I’ve stopped mindless collecting stuff I don’t need and started using the things I already have for creativity and personal fulfillment.  

The first three quarters of 2025 have been a fountain of youth for me.  When I think of how I was feeling this time last year, it’s night and day.  In fact, I saw a photo of myself from this time last year and I barely recognized myself.  

I don’t write any of this to crow about my accomplishments.  I don’t see this as an accomplishment or anything to brag about, it’s just a RELIEF.  I’ve been trying to find my personal mojo for the better part of the last 15 years in one way or another.  I’ve been struggling against depression and anxiety and anger and uncertainty and physical and mental bloat for so long that I had pretty much given up on the idea that I would ever feel good again.  I don’t even know what really changed, why this time when I told myself to reset my brain it actually happened, but I am just happy that it did.

Maybe I finally hit some sort of rock bottom and the only way onward was upward.  Maybe that is just how that works.  I dunno.  I have no magic pill or secret advice.  I have just somehow managed to start and maintain a virtuous circle for myself in which I am feeling better day by day instead of worse and I’m grateful.  I love having energy again.  I love feeling like myself.  I love being excited about the future for the first time in forever.  

I know that the world is trash.  We have psychotic sociopaths and oligarchs and deranged authoritarian Hitler/Capone wannabes and genocides and AI slop and cults and radically misinformed populations of dangerously armed idiots running around loose and a climate that is in all likelihood going to cause the end of our species at some point in the next century entirely because we are too fucking stupid as a society to be allowed to live.  I know all of that.  But, I am me.  I live my life, I wake up in the morning as one organism, one creature evolved on this planet who has to be what I am, and I am not any of those external things.  Those are realities of the time and place, the context in which I exist, but I get to decide how I respond to those things and while those factors cause me pain, I have to choose whether they also cause me suffering.

Since the start of this year, I have made better choices in the moment and those choices are making me a happier person.  It’s pretty great.