The year 2025 will likely be remembered as when AI began dominating workplaces. When Trump took reign of the US government. When 67 was still a thing.
For me, 2025 will be remembered differently. It'll be a gaping pothole in a bumpy road. A missing book from a row in my bookshelf. A forced vacation right as my job was ramping up.
It was the year I moved back home to recover from a csf leak. When I was thrust into the medical world of procedures and scans, then thrust back into bright lights and back to back meetings. It was when I extricated myself from stressors and stability, and started pursuing my dream, whatever that was. A roller coaster of a year that made me so dizzy that I became numb to the nausea, not worrying about where I was being carried to, just trying to enjoy what I could. Eventually, the clouds parted. The sun peeked out. Even though I didn't recognize where I was, there was still a pleasant warmness to my life from having made it through.
Here's a recap of my year broken into quarters.
A week before 2025 started, we had just welcomed in Cary, a small orange kitty, a family first. Two weeks before that, I said goodbye to Seattle and moved home via a 3-day train, where I was stuck in a rickety pullout bed.
My horizontalness continued at home to varying degrees. Initially, I was barely able to eat by myself and use the bathroom, but I started doing tests to see how long I could remain in the vertical world before my head started hurting. Ten minutes, half an hour, a whole hour of standing.
My parents and I obsessively tried to learn about csf leaks, joining WeChat and Facebook groups and listening to lectures. We bought a reclining lawn chair and tried directing the sun's healing rays onto my lower back. My dad performed moxibustion on me, and I was fed weird Chinese medicine shipped from China.
After all our attempts at healing failed, we decided to have me try complete bedrest. My parents would drive home during lunch to feed me and empty my pee bottles. My lower back would cramp from pain and my neck stiffen. During my once-a-day trek to the bathroom, my feet would tingle and ache. At the time, we didn't know how damaging complete bedrest was.
Despite not leaving the house for months (save for the occasional neurology appointment or MRI scan), I wasn't bored. I had discovered podcasts and spent several hours a day with them, and for the first time in my life, I had ample time to tackle my gaming backlog on my Steam Deck. I also religiously followed the NBA, was baffled by the Luka AD trade, watched way too much YouTube, and started counting my screentime and meditating in an attempt to regulate my botched dopamine system.
The most memorable moment from this ordeal came from learning Japanese. I was reviewing hundreds of Anki flashcards a day and learning grammar from LingoDeer, but I wanted more immersion. I researched ways to read news articles or books or games in Japanese and automatically create flashcards from unknown words. There were complicated setups with several pieces of software needing to run together (that I would later try and use), but most of these required being at a PC.
The system I settled on was this: I had a game called Ni no Kuni running on my Steam Deck in Japanese while I laid down, and had my phone beside me opened to the Google Translate photo mode. I'd play the game until I came across an unknown word or phrase, then set the Steam Deck onto my stomach while angling my phone to capture the target text. If I didn't understand the grammar, I would prompt an LLM to help me understand, and then create flashcards from whatever unknown words there were. Each hour of gameplay took me 4 hours to get through. It was awesome.
In mid-March, I had the surgery. The Blood Patch. The thing that is supposed to patch the leak, that might need to be done several times before it works. My back was pumped with 30 mL of blood from my left arm, and I was sent home to rest.
Week 1, I was mostly on bedrest and felt pretty normal. Week 2, started standing and ramping up the uptime. Week 3, I was able to stand for several hours and use my computer. I was still sweating and feeling head discomfort after about an hour of continuous standing, but I guess I had to be ready.
Week 4, I returned to work.
At the start of the second week of April, I returned to work for the first time in 4 months. At the end of the workday, I had headaches galore and wanted to quit. Immediately switched to a part-time schedule. Still felt pressure (both internal and external) to work more than my health permitted.
I was tracking every minute that I was upright, and felt in both the numbers and body the sudden increase in vertical time. The first couple hours usually felt ok, but by lunch, I would have headaches, or at the very least, my head would feel heavy and uncomfortable. Each day was a stressful battle between squeezing enough work out of myself before I could rest. Each time I laid down was a break in concentration that disrupted my workflow. Each meeting, I flopped into bed with my work laptop balanced on my chest, the only person with their camera off.
My projects were meticulously tracked with deadlines upon deadlines given the tight release schedule. I'd be asked to estimate how long my projects would take, when I myself didn't even know if I should be working at all. For some reason, I accepted responsibility of lowering our app's crash rate. I did a pretty good job, but at the expense of my health as I constantly monitored and fought fires.
Not all was bad. I had days where I flew through my tasks and flowed into coder's high, completing week-long projects in a day. Those pristine diffs would then be rationed over the next days to theoretically let me rest more, but my yearning for acceptance onto my new team often had me working even more.
The team, however, was nothing but supportive. They acknowledged my part-time schedule in planning, and my manager was a saint, giving me the space I needed to recover. But there was an undercurrent of urgency with daily standups and biweekly deadlines and leadership breathing down our necks. There were also a few coworkers that didn't know of my condition, and kept asking me to help them with tasks, and I often wasn't strong enough to say no.
The whirl of project planning and fire-fighting and work-health balance culminated in a sense of disorientation. My sleep suffered, and my head constantly felt heavy and aching. I started questioning if it was due to my csf leak, or if my body was overworking. Or maybe I was just imagining my symptoms since I'd been so used to vertical sickness for over half a year. Or maybe I just really didn't want to work and my body was manifesting these sensations as an excuse. I couldn't tell what it was.
Either way, I was forced to acknowledge the severity when, after a serene 4-day weekend, my headaches came roaring back the next workday.
And so, in mid-June, for the health of my body and mental, I quit.
Quitting was not a light decision. I knew that many would consider me crazy for leaving a mid-six-figure job where I was working part-time and had excellent career opportunities. At times, I did feel crazy for quitting. Even still, I could not deny the peaceful bliss I felt lying on my bed, no nagging need to check my work messages or plan my next project. No leadership to cater to, no deadlines to sprint for, no restraints on what I wanted to work on or learn.
I'd honestly been wanting to leave the corporate world even before my csf leak. Startups had been my dream since college, and while I needed to re-evaluate that dream, I did still want to pursue projects on my own. What exact projects in what exact fields, I didn't know. There were too many interesting things. And even with my csf leak forcing me to bed, I was fortunate enough to be able to try most of them.
And so I devised one of my overly ambitious plans that I never stick to. I'd immerse myself in each of the 6 hobby-interests I managed to cut my list down to for 2 weeks each, interspersed with smaller explorations as reprieves. Then the next 3 months would be a deeper dive into 1-2 of the hobby-interests I felt the strongest pull towards.
I started off by making chiptune music (aka 8-bit music) in FamiStudio. My dad also started teaching me taichi, which I did every morning to help my body reaccustom to moving. Then I spent an entire week meditating and reading about meditation, and got distracted mid-way ordering PC parts for my brother's graduation gift.
Next, I took a stab at blogging and wrote the most I ever have in a month. The blog posts were posted on my website that I then revamped. My dreams of becoming a YouTuber took flight as I edited a gaming montage and travel video, then those dreams were put back on the shelf as I got distracted gaming with my brother who had just moved back home.
Once we were gamed out, I found a new way of gaming by trying to make my own. Using the chiptune music I'd created during the first couple weeks, I started working on a Snake roguelike game. Making this game also required me learning pixel art and game design, and reminded me of working at a startup, where you wear many hats and do whatever you need to get a product out the door. I really enjoyed that about game dev.
Over the course of exploring these hobbies, there were two constants.
Throughout my life, whenever I've had an extended period of time without school or work, I've always been susceptible to getting addicted to a video game. This period was no exception. Each hobby exploration was accompanied by a fair amount of Overwatch. Since I was already exploring hobbies, I decided to try and get good at Overwatch. I'd always been Silver or Gold (bottom 50%) and felt like no matter what I did, I couldn't climb out. And so I started deliberately drilling skills and watching VOD reviews and educational content. A few months later, I hit Diamond (top 20%). While I always feel a little guilty playing Overwatch instead of investing in a more "productive" hobby, it's brought about a lasting fulfillment and satisfaction that my other shorter-term hobbies haven't been able to match.
The other constant was, of course, the main villain of the year: my csf leak. Although for this quarter, it was more like an annoying sidekick rather than the main antagonist. The headaches and discomfort almost immediately improved after quitting, and though I still spent almost half the day lying in bed and occasionally had headache-filled days, it wasn't nearly as frustrating as when I was working. I was on my own schedule now, and my headaches were my own. It was now a part of me and my life, and, somehow, felt more akin to an annoying yet almost endearing sidekick than a villain.
The final hobby I explored in this period was digital art. I had bought a cheap tablet to draw on and planned on completing 31 days of Inktober, a challenge where you draw something based off a word for each day of October. I made it 4 days before something shinier caught my eye.
The Beginner Game Jam was a small jam with only 15 entries, made for people with less than a year of game dev experience. I discovered it while browsing Reddit, and asked my brother if he wanted to try it out. The theme of the game jam was "Health," which was quite relevant to my situation.
After brainstorming and discussing several ideas, we settled on a game where you play as someone stuck in bedrest with only 10 seconds to walk around a house each day. As you improve your health by brushing your teeth and working out, your uptime also slowly increases until you're able to run down a long hallway to win the game.
For two weeks, I immersed myself in tutorials and code and designing rooms and drawing pixel art brainstorming mechanics and items and workshopping the music with my brother. My days alternated between being in front of my computer building this world and being in bed living that world. Eventually, the game jam ended, and we submitted what we had. We ended up winning.
Winning your first bout of competition in any new hobby is a dangerous, addicting drug. It got me into poker in college, into several games that I played for too long, and now it got me into game development.
After the Beginner Game Jam ended, I immediately signed up for another jam. Baudo's Jam. This one was only a week long, but I still worked the same 60 hours that it took to make the first game. I was obsessed, opening up Godot right after getting out of bed. I pushed my body and mind and newly acquired game dev muscles, and made The Witch's Carrot, a puzzle platformer. It got 4th overall out of 71 entries.
The next jam was the Comfy Jam. Another 60 hours and 2 weeks later, LeaFairy was born, an incremental game about catching falling leaves. It got 6th overall out of 98 entries, and 1st in the gameplay category.
I joined 2 more game jams right after the Comfy Jam ended. However, even though I was working on my own schedule and on something I loved, I realized that I was starting to burn out. I ended up investing 25 hours into a "Wave"-themed card game and another 17 hours into a 3D Metroidvania (with 2 others), but didn't finish either game. After 2 months of sprinting while still injured, I had burned myself out and decided to take a break from game dev.
I started playing more Overwatch afterwards. More deliberate practice, more VOD reviews, more climbing in ranked. I decided that I wanted to try something new and looked into joining a team to play coordinated matches against other teams. Right when the holiday season was picking up, I started trialing for a few different teams and got my first taste of Overwatch team-play, and I loved it.
I reached out to more and more teams to trial for them, and started studying and practicing more. Most of this momentum carried over to the new year, but I thought I'd mention it in this year's recap since it was an important part of the end of my year.
Another important part was my health. Sometime in November, I had my first day since August of last year where I didn't need to rest in bed at all. I had recovered. Well, mostly recovered. I still got exhausted after light exercise or hour-long outings, and still had random headaches.
My next goal was to condition my body and start going outside more and socializing to build up my endurance. I worked with an LLM to create a detailed workout plan that involved building up the muscles that had weakened during my bedrest but didn't strain my lower back or involve heavy weights. While meeting up with high school friends, I then honed that workout plan with two of my friends that had become personal trainers. Just after a couple weeks, I already felt stronger and better.
I also met with my high school friends a few times a week and played Overwatch with online friends. All the activity that would normally render me incapacitated from exhaustion slowly felt better and better, until I go could out for a few hours and only feel a normal weariness afterwards.
I started playing pickleball and basketball and running. I went to DC with my brother to visit the Smithsonian. I cooked tikka masala and bread for the first time for my family, and got into making mocktails. I binged books and documentaries and started consistently playing guitar again. All without needing to lie in bed. After nearly 1.5 years, I finally had my normal life back again.
Even though I had resumed "normal" activities, and even though I felt immense pleasure from being able to move and interact with the world, I realized that I didn't need this. I realized that even if I were still stuck in bed, that I would be content and happy with what I had.
When I was first bed-ridden, I wasn't too upset as I knew it would quickly pass by. When it didn't, the frustration and the "what if"s started to creep in. I counted all the things I lost, the Seattle friends, the travel I had planned, the progress in my hobbies, the life that I was starting to love. Light depression became a bedside companion as I was stuck in the cycle of my health improving, then suddenly worsening, my confidence and hope taking a hit each time.
But it could always be worse. Others leak for years before they even know they have a leak. Others don't have family that they can move in with and be taken care of. Others don't have financial stability or Steam Decks or Cary. This didn't mean that my suffering should be discounted, but it did help me realize that I still had so much to be grateful for and to treasure what I had in case it also gets ripped away.
As I started to improve and regain function, everything felt so familiar yet different and special. Walking around the neighborhood and experiencing all the colors and smells felt like a privilege. Going to the grocery store was overwhelming and exhausting but I could choose what I wanted to eat. Resuming my skincare and dental routines added another thing to keep track of everyday, but I'd be damned if I had more easily preventable bodily issues.
And so in 2025, I survived a medical nightmare and came out the other end stronger. I grew closer to my family and myself, and learned to appreciative what I have. I took my first step away from a traditional life and career, and ventured out to explore my interests. While I wouldn't say that 2025 was one of my favorite years, it's definitely been one of the most important years in shaping who I am and who I want to become.
Read Careless People, Dopamine Nation, Full Catastrophe Living, The Alchemist, Project Hail Mary, Elantris, The Lies of Lamora Locke, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The House in the Cerulean Sea, She Who Became the Sun
Overwatch, Clair Obscur, Silksong, Hollow Knight, Blue Prince, CrossCode, Hades 2, PTCGP, Arc Raiders, TF2, Ni no Kuni, Celeste, plus dozens of smaller games mostly played on my Steam Deck in bed