Treading Water in Open Ocean (*January 1, 2026*) 2025 went fast in that specific way where you know objectively that things happened, significant things even, but when you try to reconstruct the narrative it all blurs together into this compressed sensation of constant motion without clear milestones, like I was running but forgot to look up and see where I was going. I made progress on goals I've been nursing for years, the kind of incremental gains that should feel satisfying but instead just revealed how much further there is to go, and some things went well while others crashed spectacularly, though I'm still not sure I can properly categorize which was which because the chaos of it all made success and failure feel like adjacent states rather than opposites. The year was stressful, successful in its own weird way, but mostly it was just a lot. I didn't improve everything I wanted to but that's become almost a predictable refrain at this point, the gap between intention and execution is maybe just a permanent feature of being a person who wants things. What bothers me more is this sensation of not being present, of moving through days like they're obligations to complete rather than experiences to inhabit, I'm not focused and I'm not giving 100% and I know this about myself but knowing doesn't seem to translate into doing differently. It's like I've lost the plot somewhere, misplaced my red thread, that sense of narrative continuity where one decision leads logically to the next and you feel like you're building toward something coherent rather than just accumulating capabilities that don't quite cohere into a direction. The thought of giving up visited me often this year, not in a dramatic way, I'm not suicidal or anything, but more like a background hum, this quiet wondering if I could just stop trying to figure out the next thing and let the current carry me wherever it was going anyway. I'm grateful though, genuinely, for what I learned and how I grew even if I can't fully articulate what those lessons were yet, even if the growth feels more like weathering than development, but gratitude and exhaustion aren't mutually exclusive and I held both constantly. There's something lowkey destabilizing about being more capable than you've ever been while simultaneously feeling the most directionless. What I [[Looking back on my career so far|wrote before]] shifting from "what do I want to do" to "what impact do I want to have" feels right in theory but I'll be honest it's also kind of a cop-out, a way to reframe paralysis as patience, because the truth is I don't know what impact I want either and asking a different version of the same question doesn't necessarily get you closer to an answer. The questions about deepening expertise versus staying generalist, about what problems excite me, they're good questions but they also feel like I'm trying to think my way out of something that might just require sitting in the discomfort of not knowing for a while longer. Maybe freedom and paralysis are the same thing from different angles. I want to find my vision again but I'm also suspicious that maybe I'm just nostalgic for a clarity I never actually possessed, that the sense of direction I remember from earlier in my career was really just the result of having fewer options and calling that constraint "focus". I'm hoping 2026 is the year I figure out what this freedom is actually for, or at least get more comfortable not knowing. Maybe the real issue is that I'm treating this directionlessness like a problem that needs solving when it might just be the actual state of things right now, the water I'm in rather than something to escape from. Writing this doesn't make anything clearer, doesn't suddenly produce a vision or a plan, but there's something to the act of naming where you are even if where you are is fundamentally uncomfortable and unresolved. The ocean is open, I'm treading water, and maybe the move isn't to swim toward some imagined shore but just to acknowledge that treading water is also a form of movement, exhausting and directional in its own way, keeping me afloat while I figure out which way the current is actually pulling me.