To show how seriously I’ve taken this, I can finally reveal how I’ve worked to do better for the past 14 months: 1. I committed to my first full year of sobriety. I had become dependent and posted like this through the drug withdrawals. This was a wake-up call. I went cold-turkey in 2025, though allowing drinking at events. When I crossed 14 months for the first time in my life, I felt I proved I could quit when I wasn’t sure before. I don’t think anyone deserves to feel that way and wish the best for anyone else quitting a substance. 2. After the summer of 2025, I spent half a year directly calling victims I had written about, driving across states, and flying to their hometowns to apologize in person. At our first August 2025 meeting back in office, I apologized to our crew to describe how I regretted what I’d done and my mission to do better. 3. Importantly, I’ve been going to therapy, because how I used social media meant my social behaviors needed to be addressed. It was my responsibility to confront my issues like emotional regulation and context blindness, but I also needed to be better educated by neurodivergence experts. 4. I was deemed a candidate for ASD testing in the process. Since therapy in childhood, I’ve always lived as someone on the spectrum, even if I never revealed it. When I wrote about autism, I always identified with it. It reflected my own insecurities, pride, self-image, and difficulty at the time to ask for help. Getting confirmation again on ASD has made things I’d struggled with privately make so much more sense. Therapy has helped me understand those struggles and handle it the right way. 5. This is why I’m continuing to educate myself. While I already meant to come back to Berkeley, I changed focus in May by enrolling in ethnic studies, sociology, and the social effects of media so I can learn to do better by my audience. I started this plan in July 2025, with no one requiring me to, and I plan to continue.