I meant to comment on this on or right after July 1st and then got side-tracked. So here we go:

January-June 2025 was the best half-year of my entire life. 🙌

It’s possible if I think really really hard, and comb through lots of diary entries, and try to piece together various timelines in my mind, I might come up with an even better half-year I could point to. But it’d be a challenge. Certainly I can say with full confidence this has been the best half-year since before Covid times.

Now when I say “best” that is of course a very subjective statement. What I don’t mean by “best” is “easiest”…because there’s absolutely no way I can claim January-June 2025 was the easiest half-year of my entire life. In a variety of ways, life has been quite difficult on many occasions. (And *gestures wildly in the air* there’s obviously plenty of news here in the U.S. every day to become severely depressed at the awfulness of it all…)

What I mean to impart is that it’s been the most self-actualizing half-year in recent memory. The most fulfilling and rewarding due to a whole string of deliberate choices I made to, in essence, alter my day-to-day reality. I decided to discard thought patterns which no longer served me and adopt new ones. Because of that, I literally make different decisions now than I would have a year ago given the same circumstances—certainly far different than three or four years ago. And the results are in: I feel like a whole new person. 😌

I don’t mean to sound new age hippie vague, but it’s hard to get into specifics without, well, getting into specifics. And that’s a whole series of essays unto themselves… Suffice it to say, I went into this year knowing in advance I was going to Change My Personality. I wanted to get out of a toxic stew of mental ruts I had found myself in, and I wanted to embrace a swashbuckling sense of daring-do in the choices I made about how to live my life. And I’m proud to say, in the first six months of this year I accomplished what I set out to do.

Will July-December go as well? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Even if it doesn’t, I don’t care. I had the best half-year of my entire life. And who can ask for more than that?

#lifehacks