One year ago today, I launched this personal blog. One year later, and I've published nine new blog posts, excluding this one, ranging from health updates to my favorite birthday tradition. The past twelve months have been a rollercoaster ride, but as my second year of writing is just kicking off, I want to share a few highlights from this past year.
First, I could not compose a list of highlights without mentioning To Date, the post that started this all. If it weren't for my wanting to share my condition, I don't know where I would be today. To Date is the reason that I started this blog, and without it, I'd probably still be on Substack with the same two posts that I released in 2024. If you haven't read To Date yet, it's where I wrote about everything that I've experienced medically in life so far, from my parents' struggles to conceive, to my in-utero stroke, my intense vomiting in middle school that made me miss months worth of school, and my most recent diagnosis, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Even one year later, it's still a phenomenal piece and a foundation for some of what I've written since.
However, undoubtedly, I would say that my biggest highlight of the past year is my Surgery series of posts. On April 2, my mother received a phone call from my orthopedic specialist saying that I needed surgery on my Achilles tendon to intervene on the rapid damage that my in-utero stroke was creating for my body. Since the original announcement, I've published three follow-ups: one about my recovery, another about my cast removal, and the latest about my first post-op appointment with him in December. If you haven't read the series yet, I recommend it. I plan to release the finale, about my experience in physical therapy, this year, so now is a great time to catch up. As an aside, an interesting statistic is that the original Surgery post is my most-viewed post of the year.
Finally, I want to highlight my favorite post of the year. It's Birthday Traditions, my final blog post of 2025, and my first annual birthday blog post, about my favorite birthday tradition that my parents and I have kept going for as long as I can remember. It's a great post for the holidays, and my favorite thing that I've written yet.
Plus, since this time last year, as I briefly alluded to earlier, I retired my The Writings of Matthew Brewer Substack in favor of a single destination for all my writing. As part of the transition, the two posts that I had previously published there have been archived here with the rest of my posts. In How Bluesky Works (explained for the average person), I explain how the AT Protocol, the underlying technology of the new social media platform Bluesky, works in a way most people can understand. I wrote it with assistance from my good friend Jack, who is well-versed in the protocol and helped me get it right. Special thanks to him, as always. And in I've made the plunge away from Gmail, I wrote about my switch from Gmail as my email provider to HEY, a relatively new provider from the people behind the product management software Basecamp. They're both still wonderful posts if you haven't read them before.
As for this next year of writing, I'm excited to see where it takes me. Thank you all for reading my posts over the past year, and I hope that you'll continue to read what I publish in this second year.