2025!

I still don't understand much of this year but here are some of the things I remember.

2025 had me tossed and turned and dry-rubbed with exotic spices, then SMACKED, sautéed for a few hours, coated in raw eggs, heavily breadcrumbed, deep-fried in bubbly lard (twice, for good measure), evenly sliced, then thrown into a blender, unceremoniously glopped into a steaming pile of mush, and delicately garnished with a most refreshing piece of dill.

But if you’re familiar with the cry for help that was my 2024 reflection, I can promise a remarkably different outtake on a similarly chaotic year. 2024 was the beginning of my quarter-life crisis. I started the year in loneliness, lived the year in an unsettling liminal space, and ended the year in a health crisis with no signs of relief ahead.

Where 2024 felt like cruelty, 2025 felt like a curriculum.

figment

This was the year we “started a company.” Well, we did start a company. Figment Interactive Inc. incorporated in the state of Delaware - paperwork and lawyers and all. The only thing shielding me from feeling like 20 green amphibians stacked into a trench coat running the Figment show is the truly insane amount of effort being poured into this company in nearly every waking moment by both Eliot and me.

Figment had a proper gestation period this year. Nine months of quietly chaotic development, iterative mitosis and meiosis, with all the delicious nausea that a pregnancy entails. We went through a16z’s speedrun accelerator, experimented and pivoted, built a new kind of campy video editor, and started growing a lovely internet community. I’ve authored quite a bit on the topic of Figment on the interwebs, so I’ll keep it short here.

In short, I’m so grateful for this time in my life where I can throw everything I am into something I care deeply about.

If I could pool all my wishes into one big wish, the only thing I’d want for Christmas, for my birthday, for the new year, would be for Figment, once a fragment of a giblet of a seed of a figment of our imaginations, to properly take root in the world and flourish in the fertile soil of modern internet culture.

While the most well-publicized storyline of 2025 was undoubtedly Figment, Figment, Figment, there were many secret, mysterious, undisclosed subplots afoot.

moving

I moved from place to place a full 30 times this year before signing the lease for my apartment in the beautiful city of San Francisco. With each move came the shedding of past, ill-fitting identities, layered endlessly like a coat beneath a coat beneath a coat.

Constant movement gave me the opportunity to recognize and unseat the harmful assumptions that had been quietly governing my life. Years of accepting what my life was by default, without intentional and decisive shaping, had gathered a thick layer of dust on my windshield, distorting my view. Constant movement brought forth a gust of warm air that dispelled the gray haze.

It was a journey of unraveling and unlearning. By the end of the full 30 moves, I experienced a weightlessness I hadn’t known in years - like those mystical Indian nomads of yore who traveled the world in a simple loincloth, trading wisdom for alms. Except I donned an overstuffed Cotopaxi backpack plus a carry-on suitcase and traded cat sitting services for housing.

I spent most of my time hopping around different neighborhoods within the city of San Francisco, a practice I likened to “dating the city.” After ten months of getting to know new facets of a city I’ve lived my whole life beside (and briefly inside), I found myself deeply in love with SF.

While constantly moving served its purpose in unwinding an outdated identity, it was also preventing me from building on new learnings and solidifying into whatever shape could hold me next.

In one of the worst renter markets this city has ever seen, my new apartment came to me in November through a series of happenings that felt nothing short of magic.

With this new space as my anchor, I’m rebuilding my life with an intentional strategy of localized experimentation: trying out different formats for setting up my home and habits before settling into autopilot and ensuring there’s always a little room left for tweaks.

For the first time in many years, I’m starting to feel at home.

money

My relationship with money has always been a funny one. It’s derivative of the immigrant mentality inherited from my parents - frugality, optimizing for cost performance and value per dollar, and an inherent distrust of flashy, extractive restaurants that employ instagram aesthetics to overcharge you for bland food. Being “smart” about money has always been something I prided myself on.

My parents laugh about how I hoarded cash as a child until they discovered I was sitting on some $250 like a five-year-old kingpin. I remember fishing 44 quarters out of our family’s change bank to repay the school librarian with a clattering heap of silver after misplacing a hardcover copy of Geronimo Stilton.

To the miser who thought twice about spending a few extra dollars on shiitake mushrooms over baby bella, rent always felt like the most painfully wasteful expense - a quick and effortless way to burn thousands of dollars a year. I was so afraid of spending that felt unnecessary, extravagant, or dopamine-seeking (mentally equating rent with sports cars and designer clothes) that every expense came with a heaping side of guilt.

This year, working closely with someone who thinks very differently about money reshaped my attitude for the better. Instead of viewing every purchase as burning resources, I began to think of it as an investment that frees up my time and energy to put toward things that ultimately grow my resource pool.

Rent isn’t money that simply goes poof every month - it’s an investment in safety, security, and an anchor that deepens one’s sense of self. Money is a tool to help me design a life that fits me like a glove.

Best money investments of the year

• Opal app blocker - actually kicked my social media for cheap-dopamine habits

• CapCut subscription

• Cursor subscription

• ChatGPT subscription

• My apartment

• Uber-ing around and not having a car in SF

• Hiring a TaskRabbit when I need house help

• Buying high-quality secondhand goods off Facebook Marketplace + using Lugg and Uber Concierge for delivery
  

Ongoing experiments

• CorePower Yoga subscription

• Testing various meal prep services
  

Best time + energy investments of the year

• Installing a keypad lock on my front door

• Learning to make content

• Curating my social media feeds for learning + inspiration over entertainment
  

adhd

I’ve struggled with on-and-off cycles of burnout and depression since the sixth grade. In late 2024, I lived through one harrowing month of not being able to sleep more than one to three hours a night. In early 2025, I lived through another heavy month where I could barely get myself out of bed. This led to that, and eventually I landed in front of a psychiatrist who pieced together my life story well enough to sniff out ADHD, 26 years into life.

I’m actually incredibly lucky to be diagnosed this early. My story is textbook - women are often misdiagnosed with mood disorders like depression over and over until much later in life, when it’s discovered that it was cycles of ADHD burnout all along.

ADHD in women is a chronically misunderstood, elusive beast. ADHD studies were primarily conducted with men, where it tends to manifest as the hyperactive subtype (the stereotypical boy who can’t sit still). Women tend to present as the inattentive subtype (daydreamy, spacey, forgetful), which is far less visible, studied, or understood.

I made it through school with compensatory strategies, but the solutions of yesterday became the problems of tomorrow. I could only operate well under high-stress, last-minute, chaotic situations, relying on toxic perfectionism to mask my shortcomings. What worked in a competitive school system nearly killed me in the repetitiveness of corporate life.

ADHD is a missing puzzle piece that has silently governed EVERYTHING since day one. Getting this diagnosis has allowed me to revisit my past with clarity and navigate my life with a well-researched map, rather than relying on vibes and societal “shoulds” that don’t match my shape.

For example, my intuition knew corporate life smelled vaguely like death and that entrepreneurship was a better match. Now I know why.

I haven’t tried medication yet, but I’ve been learning a ton about ADHD strategies that are already making life much better. Having ADHD is like living with an EU plug in a world built for US plugs. Strategies are the adapter that lets me plug into modern society more functionally. Though ADHD is labeled a “disorder,” I don’t see it as a negative at all - it shapes where I struggle and also where I shine.

ADHD is simultaneously the most overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed disorder (I was skeptical of my own diagnosis for a while), so if you’re curious to learn more, I’ve been bingeing Dr. K’s YouTube channel and can’t recommend it enough.

outro

More than anything, this year instilled in me a renewed sense of agency and a deeper commitment to honesty in my life.

I now have a sharply reduced tolerance for environments where I’m told - explicitly or implicitly - to be someone I am not. I’ve lived there before, and no promise of external validation could ever entice me back.

This was the year I chose to intentionally DIY my environment from scratch, shaping it around my specific contours. It’s been a slow practice, one that began with solitude and required rebuilding nearly everything, guided by an unshakeable alliance with my intuition.

My plan for 2026 is to prioritize process over outcomes. I’ve tried yearly goals before - vision boards, target metrics, all of it - but binary success/failure states can be just as discouraging as they are motivating.

So this coming year, I’m taking a slightly different approach to remind myself what I’m working towards, and why. Here’s the framework I’m using.

You set your sun, moon, and stars.

The sun is your big, overarching goal for this season of life. For me, that’s building a sustainable living working for myself in a creative capacity. There’s nothing I want more right now.

The moon is something achievable within the next six to twelve months - a meaningful step toward your sun. My moon is finding a way to sustainably cover both my and my cofounder’s salaries through Figment within the year. Doing so would allow us to keep building without raising out of desperation from sources that might skew our incentives. Also, I don’t want to succeed into a life I hate. I want to love and enjoy my work as I’m building it.

The stars are more concretely scoped practices that move me toward my moon and sun. They aren’t goals to “complete,” but habits to return to: daily movement, settling into my home, improving our product, sharing more content, building community, and continuing to learn about ADHD.

I want to show up as a rawer version of myself with each successive day. I want to stay true to my inner world and allow it to be seen.

In 2026, I want to fall in love with the process of becoming.