Up 15% after my first year investing, but this past month has me second guessing everything

Been investing for about a year, up 15%, but this last month has been rough. What’s going on?

I’ve been slowly putting money into the market over the past year instead of going all in at once. I’m still up around 15% overall, so I know I’m not exactly in a terrible spot, but the last few weeks/month have honestly been pretty frustrating.

A lot of the stuff I’m holding has been going down, and yesterday I bought more when things dipped. Looking back, I think I did it partly because I panicked a bit and thought “okay this is the dip, I should buy now before it bounces.”

Now I’m not sure if that was smart or just emotional.

I’ve been reading Reddit, Discord, and random market commentary, and everyone seems to have a different explanation. Some people are saying it’s because of the SpaceX IPO pulling money out of the market, some say it’s just a tech/AI pullback, some say profit-taking, some say the market was overextended anyway.

For people who’ve been investing longer than me, how would you look at this?

Is this just normal volatility after a good run, or does it feel like something bigger is happening?

Would you keep averaging in, or just stop buying for a bit and let things settle?

And how do you personally tell the difference between buying the dip and just panic-buying while something is still falling?

Not looking for anyone to tell me exactly what to buy/sell. More trying to understand how experienced investors think through this kind of situation.