There's a kind of momentum to suffering that nobody tells you about. Pain has velocity. It doesn't sit still. It carries you forward whether you agree to the trip or not.
I think about the passengers on MH370 sometimes. Hours of motion after consciousness, a body still strapped into its seat while the world keeps happening around it. Already gone, still moving.
That's what this year felt like.
I build things because building is forward motion. I ship code at 2am because the alternative is sitting still, and sitting still means feeling it. So I don't stop. Fifty-four commits in a day. Twenty-one hour sessions. The clean dopamine snap of something working, something deployed, something finished. And then the crash when I close the laptop and remember what's actually happening.
The plane keeps moving.
There's a version of productivity that's just sophisticated avoidance. You know it while you're doing it. The velocity feels like progress, but you're just being carried. You passed out somewhere over the ocean and your hands are still typing.
I built things this year I'm proud of. I also built things at 3am because I couldn't sleep in my own home. Those two facts exist in the same body, the same year, the same codebase.
Pain doesn't announce itself cleanly. It's not a single moment you can point to. It's accumulation: the flinch at a sound, the chest-tightness in a room you used to feel safe in, the realization you've been holding your breath. It's waking up and checking if you're okay before you even open your eyes.
Then you open VS Code because at least there, the errors are explicit. At least there, you can fix something.
This year taught me that survival and avoidance wear the same clothes. That you can be incredibly productive and completely numb. That the plane can keep flying long after you stopped being present for the journey.
I don't know where the impact is. Maybe I already hit it. Maybe I'm still over the ocean.
But I'm trying to wake up now. Trying to be present for whatever comes next, even if it hurts. Even if sitting still means sitting with everything I built to avoid sitting with.
The year of pain wasn't wasted. But it wasn't lived, either. It was survived. That's not nothing. But it's not everything.