The Year That Remade Me

28th July 2026

Two days ago I turned another year older.

I did not spend it quietly.

Bianca and I spent the day together celebrating, reflecting, sitting with everything the past twelve months have carried. The good and the hard. The breakthroughs and the losses. The moments that confirmed something was shifting and the moments that reminded me how far there still is to go.

It was one of the best days I have had in a long time.

And today, two days after, I am sitting with it all. Trying to find words for a year that refuses to be summarised neatly. Because it wasn't neat. It was full. Complicated. Costly in places. Astonishing in others.

This is my attempt to tell the truth about it.

I need to say something clearly before I say anything else.

This was not a year of arriving.

It was a year of becoming. Which is a different thing entirely.

Arriving implies a destination reached, a milestone crossed, a chapter concluded with something resembling resolution. Becoming is messier than that. It happens in fragments. It does not announce itself. You only recognise it when you look back across twelve months and realise the person writing this sentence is not quite the same person who wrote the first sentence of last July.

I am not the same.

That is not performance. It is not the kind of thing you say at the end of a year because it sounds meaningful. It is the honest assessment of someone who has spent twelve months being taken apart and rebuilt in ways I did not always choose and did not always welcome.

The year remade me.

I am still working out what that means.

The Birth of Something I Did Not Know I Was Building

Twelve months ago, Refined by Fire Press existed as an idea I had been carrying longer than I had been willing to admit.

This year it became real.

Not loudly. Not with the kind of launch that generates noise and attention and the particular validation that comes from external recognition. Quietly. Deliberately. Built from the conviction that there is a reader who has survived things they were never given language for and that reader deserves books written from the inside of lived experience rather than from the safety of theory.

Refined by Fire Press is an independent publishing imprint with a specific purpose. To restore and republish historically significant Christian revival literature. To give new life to voices that shaped the church in ways most people have forgotten. And to publish original work my own that sits at the intersection of survival, faith, and the kind of honesty that makes some people uncomfortable.

That is the house. That is what it stands for.

This year it stood up.

The Accomplishments I Did Not Expect to Count

There are things that happened this year that I know, objectively, are significant.

Kissed by Death: My Journey to Finding Life in the Darkness was my confrontation with mortality. The moment death stopped being theoretical and became personal. Meningococcal sepsis at eighteen. Organs failing. The specific quality of a peace that arrived when everything else was dissolving. That book told the story of what happened  honestly, specifically, without romanticising the suffering or performing the recovery.

It has been accepted into the Australian National Library. It is distributed internationally. It found readers I will never meet who recognised something in its pages that belonged to their own story.

That still moves me when I stop long enough to let it.

Refined by Fire: Finding God in the Furnace of Trauma came next. A smaller book. A devotional in form but not in spirit. It asked what suffering demands of belief. Not why pain arrives I have never been particularly interested in that question but what it builds in the people who endure it. Written in the aftermath of illness, addiction, and loss. A search for God that begins not in certainty but in the furnace.

These two books represent the first and second movements of a body of work I am still building. What happened. What it meant.

And then Letters Without an Address was born and will be published next year.

Thirteen letters addressed to the forces that shaped me. The Dark. Shame. Hospitals. The Body. Pain. Fear. Depression. Suicide. Numbness. Addiction. Anger. Death. And finally, a letter with no address at all written to whoever needed it most.

I did not write that book from a safe distance. I wrote it from inside the material. From the place where the wounds were still teaching me things I had not finished learning. Every letter was a confrontation with something that had spoken unchecked in my life for too long. Writing it was not cathartic in the tidy way people expect. It was surgical. Slow. Costly in ways I am still accounting for.

But it is done. And it is the most honest thing I have written.

Alongside the original writing, Refined by Fire Press has begun what I consider some of the most important work the imprint will do.

The restoration of Maria Woodworth-Etter's Holy Ghost Sermons, published in 1918, is currently underway.

Woodworth-Etter is one of the most significant and most overlooked figures in the history of Christian revival. A woman preaching with apostolic authority in the nineteenth century. A voice that shaped the Pentecostal movement before Pentecostalism had a name for itself. Her sermons were transcribed from live meetings raw, urgent, unapologetic. They carry the particular authority of someone speaking not from preparation but from conviction.

The existing editions are degraded. Poor OCR. Formatting that obscures rather than serves the text. Typography that makes sustained reading difficult.

The Refined by Fire Press restoration is being built to a different standard. Forensic OCR correction. Careful typesetting. A foreword that positions the work historically without diminishing its spiritual force.

This is preservation work. It matters because voices like Woodworth-Etter's shaped movements that are still shaping the church today and they deserve to be held in editions worthy of their weight.

This project is close to my heart in ways I find difficult to fully articulate. Restoring the words of someone who was dismissed, underestimated, and overlooked feels personal. It feels like the right work for a press built on the conviction that truth survives even when the systems that surround it do not.

I need to be honest here because honesty is the only register I know how to write in.

There were things I did not do this year that I should have.

Doors I saw and did not walk through. Conversations I delayed too long. Moments where the gap between who I am and who I am becoming was visible, and I stood in that gap longer than necessary.

I do not say this to perform humility. I say it because missed opportunities have a particular weight that accomplishments do not cancel. You cannot subtract one from the other and arrive at a clean number. They exist in the same ledger. Both true. Both real.

I have learned to sit with that without collapsing into it.

That is new. A year ago, missed opportunities became evidence. Shame would arrive quietly, as it always does, and begin its work of translating each missed moment into proof of a larger inadequacy. This year I am learning slowly, imperfectly, with considerable backsliding to hold missed opportunities as information rather than indictment.

I did not do everything I could have.

I also did more than I sometimes give myself credit for.

Both are true. Neither cancels the other.

This year was not without cost.

I will not itemise the pain. That is not what this entry is for, and some things belong in books rather than blog entries. But I want to name the reality without sanitising it, because performing ease would be a betrayal of everything I have learned to value about honest writing.

There was heartbreak this year.

There were seasons when the ground felt less stable than I needed it to be. When the distance between what I was building and what I was capable of carrying felt uncomfortably wide. When faith felt less like a foundation and more like a practice something I was returning to again and again, not because it came naturally, but because it was the only honest option available.

There were trials that arrived without announcement and overstayed their welcome.

There were moments when the accumulated weight of everything the writing, the work, the physical cost of a body that has been through more than most, the ongoing negotiation of health and endurance and recovery pressed down in ways that required more than resilience to manage.

There were dark nights of the soul that led me to staring at the ceiling at 3am wondering if life was worth pursuing.

I am not pretending otherwise.

What I am saying is that the heartbreak and the trials did not get the last word.

They got words. Significant ones. They shaped this year in ways that will take more time to fully understand. But they were not the conclusion.

Grace was louder.

What Grace Actually Looked Like

I want to be specific about this because grace has become one of those words that gets used so frequently in Christian circles that it starts to lose weight. It becomes abstract. Decorative. A word that sounds right without meaning anything precise.

This year grace was not abstract.

Grace looked like Bianca. Like someone choosing to stay present and steady through the seasons that would have justified distance. Like a relationship that carried the weight of the year without fracturing under it.on Sunday, sitting across from her, reflecting on twelve months of everything I was aware that what I have in her is not something I produced or earned or deserved through my own consistency.

It was given.

That is what grace looks like from the inside.

Grace looked like words arriving when I was not certain I had anything left to say. Like Letters Without an Address completing itself in ways that surprised me. Like Remember Me beginning before I had planned to begin it. Like the restoration of Woodworth-Etter's voice feeling like more than a publishing project feeling like obedience to something I had not fully named yet.

Grace looked like Refined by Fire Press becoming real. A press with a name, a philosophy, a catalogue beginning to take shape. Built not for the market but for the reader who has survived something they were never given language for.

Grace looked like mornings I chose to stay present. Like the slow return of something I would not yet call it certainty, but perhaps its quieter cousin, orientation. Knowing which direction to face even when the path was not entirely clear.

Grace looked like faith surviving another year of being tested by lived experience. Not faith that remained comfortable and unquestioned. Faith that was pressed. That had to be defended in the middle of the night against voices that preferred resignation. That was returned to again and again not because it had become easy but because the alternative a life governed entirely by what can be seen and measured and controlled felt smaller than the truth I had encountered in a hospital room at eighteen.

I have met something real. I am still learning to live in the light of it.

What I Am Carrying Into the Next Year

I am carrying the work.

Remember Me is three chapters into what I believe is the most significant thing I have attempted. A theological memoir built at the intersection of grace and lived experience. A book that begins in a hospital room and finds its way to a Roman cross and the five most honest words ever spoken to Jesus.

Remember me.

The Woodworth-Etter restoration is underway. The revival library is being built piece by piece not quickly, but correctly. Each title chosen because it deserves to survive. Each edition built to last.

I am carrying Bianca. The relationship that this year confirmed is not a coincidence. That is built from something more durable than circumstance.

I am carrying the faith that survived this year. Tested, pressed, complicated by lived experience, but present. Still oriented. Still returning to the same ground.

I am carrying the knowledge earned rather than assumed that I am capable of more than I sometimes believe. That the work is real. That the voice is mine. That the reader who needs these words exists and is waiting.

And I am carrying the gratitude.

Not the performed kind. Not the strategic kind that offers thanks in exchange for continuation.

The kind that rises without prompting. That arrives before thought has organised itself into language. That says, without agenda:

Thank you for the life I've lived.

Thank you for what this year cost and what it gave.

Thank you that I was able to walk through it.

On Sunday I turned another year older with the person I love beside me.

The year behind me was full. Complicated. Costly. Surprising. Real.

The year ahead is unwritten.

I am still here.

Still becoming.

Still grateful.

That is enough.

That is everything.

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About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 6.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

• Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
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• Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise