The Year I Tried to Outrun Pain

 The clock hasn’t struck midnight yet, but the year already feels like it has collapsed under its own weight. I sit here with my pen and paper, staring at the silence of the room, trying to name what this year has been. And all I can come up with is this: a long, frantic attempt to escape the thing that would not let me go—my pain.

2025 was supposed to be different. I swore it to myself last New Year’s Eve, when I clinked a glass to the air and whispered that I would rebuild. I had promised that the coming year would be my chance to rise, to finally break free from the shadows of grief and loss that had been trailing me like a second skin. I thought I could outwork my ghosts. I thought I could outdream them. I thought if I just kept moving, I wouldn’t have to feel the ache that lived in my bones.

So I did what I’ve always known how to do: I built.

I opened notebooks with business plans scrawled across their pages, bullet points and strategies and sketches of what the future might look like if I could just hustle hard enough. I registered names, drafted logos, researched markets, bought domain names as if buying little pieces of salvation. Every idea felt like a door I could walk through, a doorway into a new life where pain wouldn’t be able to follow me.

At first, it worked. There’s a high that comes with beginnings. The rush of vision, the spark of possibility—it’s intoxicating. For a while, I felt alive again, buzzing with the energy of creation. People asked me how things were going, and I smiled. I said words like “busy” and “excited,” when what I really meant was “distracted” and “desperate.”

Because the truth is, I wasn’t chasing success. I was running from myself.

And the thing about pain is—it’s faster than you. It doesn’t matter how many projects you stack on top of it, how many late nights you drown in productivity, how many times you tell yourself you’re moving on. Pain doesn’t sit quietly while you try to outmaneuver it. It waits. It watches. And when the lights go out and the room goes still, it sits beside you, reminding you that you can’t leave it behind.

There were moments this year when it caught up to me so suddenly, I could hardly breathe. In the middle of a meeting, staring at a spreadsheet that meant nothing to me, my chest would tighten and I’d feel the hollowness rise like a wave. Or at night, when I closed my laptop, the silence would hit harder than any deadline ever could. I kept thinking I could drown it in work, but all I did was exhaust myself into a deeper kind of emptiness.

By summer, the cracks started showing. The businesses weren’t taking off the way I had imagined. The numbers didn’t add up. The people I thought would support me disappeared. The excitement of the beginning soured into anxiety, and anxiety curdled into shame. I told myself to push harder, to grind longer, but no amount of effort was enough to quiet the truth: I was running a race I was never going to win.

Because it wasn’t about the businesses. It was never about the businesses.

It was about the wound I kept trying to cover.

And by the time the year began its slow descent into winter, I had to face it: I had failed.

Not just failed to build something that worked, but failed at the deeper level—failed to confront what was really going on inside me. I failed because I thought pain was something to escape, something to outwit, something I could lock outside the door if I just slammed it shut hard enough. But pain has keys to every room. It slips under doors. It seeps into your skin. It doesn’t go away because you don’t want to deal with it.

And maybe the hardest part of all was admitting that to myself.

The end of this year feels like standing in the wreckage of all my attempts to rebuild. Ideas abandoned. Plans half-finished. Energy drained. Hope bruised. I thought I was going to spend 2025 proving that I was unstoppable, that nothing could hold me down. Instead, I spent it being reminded, over and over again, that I am human, and humans break.

But maybe—just maybe—breaking isn’t the worst thing.

Because as much as this year feels like failure, it also feels like truth. For the first time, I can say it without choking on the words: I am not okay. And maybe that honesty is a kind of beginning in itself.

I wanted 2025 to be the year I outran my pain. Instead, it was the year I finally realized I couldn’t.

And so here I am, on the edge of 2026, with nothing shiny to show for the past twelve months. No thriving business. No neat success story. Just me, sitting in the quiet, writing this down because I don’t want to hide from it anymore.

Maybe that’s my resolution. Not to run. Not to build for the sake of proving I’m okay. Not to stack distractions high enough to block out the ache.

Just this: to face what hurts. To stay with myself, even when it feels unbearable. To learn how to live again, not as a ghost in my own life, but as someone who refuses to disappear.

2025 was the year I failed.

2026 will be the year I learn what that failure has to teach me.