As I Look Back
Reflecting on a painful and beautiful journey.
As I close out 2025, I find myself reflecting on another tough and beautiful year in my life. Since graduating from college in 2017, my path has wound through extraordinary valleys and unexpected mountaintops. I’ve survived major surgeries and family fractures. I’ve reached new levels of education. I’ve grown more comfortable, more honest, in my own voice. There is much to be grateful for, and just as much to reckon with, especially where the path grew darkest.
This has been a year marked by separation and strain. Families have been pulled apart by armed forces roaming American cities like the standing army once feared by the framers of the Constitution. The cost of living continues its quiet climb. An atmosphere of racial, gender, and sexual prejudice has reasserted itself, not as something new, but as something old that never truly disappeared. Political violence now lingers at the edges of our civic life, no longer shocking, just present. People have lost their livelihoods not because they lacked skill or discipline, but because they refused to abandon basic commitments to human rights. Abroad, the world watches an American project that still struggles to confront its founding sins, and that failure reverberates far beyond our borders. Meanwhile, a generation comes of age burdened by debt and shrinking expectations, while a political center insists on not hearing them, mistaking endurance for consent.
My post-college life and career in political communications have been defined by the age of Trump. I spent years monitoring media that casually insulted my history and my humanity. I learned from experts navigating a world of partisan asymmetry, where common sense and good faith were often treated as quaint relics. I met extraordinarily brilliant people who pushed me toward new scholastic heights, if not always on paper, then mentally and spiritually. I traveled to distant nations and witnessed the beauty of cultural diffusion and global exchange. Somewhere along the way, I regained the ability to love the world, even while staring daily at some of its ugliest outputs.
There is still so much I need to improve upon: personally, spiritually, intellectually. But self-reflection, especially when guided by those trained in that work, teaches a vital lesson: the good and the bad are episodes in a beautiful struggle. They are not the whole story. We lose ourselves when we fixate on an unknowable future or drown in the murky ink of a past already gone.
To everyone who has supported this blog: thank you. Over the past few months, it has consistently ranked among the top 100 history Substacks, and we’re halfway to 100 paid subscribers. Knowing that more than 1,200 people choose to read my work is a feat in itself, and a reason to stay inspired, grounded, and true to myself.
You have made a difference.
You do great work. Keep it up. Best wishes for a far better 2026. 😎