2025 was probably one of the most significant years of my life.

As some of you know since I’ve brought it up before, I’ve been suffering from severe health issues across the past decade of my life. A lot of it involved physical problems, such as chronic fatigue that left me bedridden, incessant physical pain that tortured me continuously, and many more issues that made it hard to live a regular life. But at the core of it all, so much of it was caused by a complex post-traumatic stress disorder caused by harsh childhood abuse, one far more severe than most average cases.

Over several years though, I always held the desire to never give up, to overcome both my mental and physical health issues. Through years of work on therapy, medical work, and personal life improvements, I kept making progress, even if the journey took many years and many setbacks. However, this past year, I feel I made the most considerable step in my life. Despite some lingering issues, I was starting to see results, starting to live a life in which I didn’t live spending every day in constant fear. Thanks to that, I’ve been able to achieve incredible things this year, including getting to travel cross-country across Japan, work on personal life projects such as learning how to draw, and more than anything, just learning to live in peace. Quite frankly, during this year I felt the best I ever have in my adult life. It’s been incredible.

Unfortunately, over the last months of the year, I had the misfortune of suffering from a couple of health incidents. Things that aren’t very serious or permanent medically speaking, but that I feel unfortunately caused that trauma to stir again, which resulted in a serious relapse of my health issues as my trauma reactivated again. Thanks to all the work I had done, this didn’t hit as quickly or as strongly, but sadly it still aggravated itself to the point of now being in a state where I keep having daily panic attacks and feel so emotionally disassociated that it’s hard to keep things in balance, on top of the physical symptoms.

Medically speaking, it makes sense: for all the progress I’ve made I’m still only halfway in my healing journey. And momentary relapses, especially under misfortunate circumstances like these, can happen. But emotionally speaking, I can’t deny the frustration that it is to have achieved such incredible highs this year and yet being unable to appreciate them now during its closure. Like previous times it’s happened, relapses like these are such a tough blow to motivation because it gives the false illusion that it’s an inescapable cycle of suffering. And the thing is, I know it isn’t, I know I’ll get better again, but it’s hard to really have confidence in that when you’re stuck in the toxicity that is the negative headspace caused by constant anxiety on a clinical level beyond normal control.

As a result of this situation, you may have realized that a few of the latest videos have struggled a bit in their release schedule. Similarly, projects like the map, which is practically near completion, have also been delayed as it’s hard to work on anything at the moment. This has been adding extra stress, because while I don’t want to force myself to make content if I don’t feel well, lowering ad revenue and financial struggles burdened by rising costs make it so that it’s harder for me to not put out videos, which is all the more frustrating. Still, I hope you can be patient if there will be delays or other issues over the coming weeks because of my current condition, and I’m grateful for your understanding.

What this year has taught me more than anything else, is that happiness and peace in life don’t come from reaching a point where everything is perfect and all your issues vanish away. But it’s about learning to let go of trying to control everything and accept that things will happen in life, good and bad. That real joy isn’t about achieving a perfect utopia, but learning to enjoy life even when things don’t go right. So for as harsh as this period has been, I want to keep believing that things will continue to improve, and that even among this struggle there are things I can cherish and look back on. For as much as the mental negativity within me would have me think otherwise, I believe in the strength that took me this far.

So I hope that, whatever struggles may befall you, that you can continue to believe in that hope as well! And I hope as things improve again, that I can continue creating a lot more over the coming year and beyond, as there’s still a lot of ideas I have in store and would like to share! Thank you for your endless support across time and I hope that we can continue this journey together until the end, and beyond!

~Artur 1/1/2026