Hey.
I’ve been sitting here for a while, watching the cursor blink like it’s waiting for me to find the right beginning. Every December, I tell myself I’ll make this short, but there’s something about endings that always makes me linger. Maybe because before we move forward, we need to really see what we’ve survived.
This year was not gentle.
It came with noise, endings, and the kind of questions that change the way you breathe.
Back in July, I lost my job. It was one of those quiet implosions, no dramatic music, no grand story, just the stillness that comes after something certain disappears. For a while, I kept moving like nothing had changed. You know that kind of pretending? Where you think if you stay busy enough, you can outwalk the ache? But eventually, it catches up to you.
The loss forced me to stop, not by choice but by necessity. I had to look at everything I had been building and ask, Was I even building the right thing? And if not, what would it mean to start again from nothing?
In the months that followed, I found myself in and out of Manila. I wasn’t living there, but the city felt like a mirror for everything I was going through. The noise, the rush, the small pockets of quiet you have to fight for, it was chaos in motion, and somehow it made sense. I’d sit in cafés, watching strangers move through their own versions of survival. And in that noise, I realized how many of us are quietly trying to rebuild something invisible.
There were nights when I opened my laptop and just stared. I’d pretend to write, but mostly I just sat with the weight of uncertainty. There’s a kind of grief that doesn’t announce itself, it just stays, quietly rearranging you until you stop recognizing who you used to be.
I filled the spaces with small things: journaling, long walks, reorganizing my Google Sheets like they could somehow hold the pieces of my life together. It sounds funny, but sometimes structure is all we have when everything else feels out of place.
And then, slowly, things began to shift.
An opportunity came, a new job. Not the kind that you take just to survive, but the kind that reminds you why you care about the work in the first place. Something aligned with what I love, storytelling, communication, the quiet craft of helping something meaningful reach the right people. It wasn’t just a paycheck; it was a pulse.
That’s when I realized: maybe life doesn’t reward control. Maybe it rewards courage.
This year felt like a long conversation between loss and becoming. Between the person I was when it began and the one who’s writing this now. And somewhere in that mess, between spreadsheets and sleepless nights, laughter and breakdowns, Manila traffic and late-night clarity, I found a strange kind of peace.
So tonight, instead of wrapping the year neatly, I want to raise a glass.
Here’s to the year that tried to break us, and to every version of ourselves that refused to stay broken.
Here’s to the jobs we lost that reminded us how much more we were meant for.
Here’s to the burnout that stripped us down until all that was left was what mattered.
Here’s to Manila, in all its chaos, for reminding us that movement and meaning often share the same noise.
Here’s to the friends who stayed, the ones who left, and the ones who quietly found their way back when we needed them most.
Here’s to the systems that failed, the dreams that cracked, and the courage it took to rebuild them anyway.
And here’s to you, yes, you reading this now.
You’ve been here, through the drafts, the experiments, the silences, and the comebacks. You’ve turned this little corner of the internet into something that breathes. Every message, every quiet read, every moment you shared your time here, it mattered more than you know.
You reminded me that storytelling is never a one-way act. Even when I write from solitude, I’m never really alone. You are the echo on the other side of the words. You’re part of the heartbeat that kept this space alive when I wasn’t sure I could keep up with it.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that beginnings rarely look like we imagine. They often start in the wreckage, in the confusion, in the mess. You don’t recognize them because they don’t look like hope yet. But they are. They always are.
So, wherever this letter finds you, whether you’re ending the year with clarity or still figuring out where you stand, I hope you give yourself credit for making it this far. You’ve done more than you think.
Next year will ask for more of us, as it always does. More courage. More presence. More honesty. I don’t know what shape it will take, but I know it’ll be worth it. Because even when things fall apart, something inside us still reaches toward creation. And that impulse, that quiet, relentless pull to keep trying, that’s everything.
Here’s to another year of becoming. Of finding the beauty between the mess and the meaning. Of staying soft in a world that keeps asking us to harden.
Here’s to the art of continuing.
Here’s to the ones who stayed.
Here’s to you.
Happy Holidays.
And thank you, for everything.
— Drew
