It’s been a hot minute! Writing hasn’t been on my list of priorities lately, I guess. It’s been a roller coaster of a year. I had moments of hope, moments of despair and everything in between but as I say hello to 2025 it means saying goodbye to 2024 - the year of trust.
Trust turned out to be a much bigger word than I imagined. When I chose it, it was with the idea that I wanted to learn to trust myself more - my intuition, my feelings - and trust the journey that I’m on. Trust that I was exactly where I was supposed to be at any given moment and that, even if the outcome wasn’t what I hoped for or expected, it was exactly as it should be.
Turns out, there was a lot of gunk wrapped up in that process. The biggest ick was in the moments I felt hope - specifically moments when I felt hopeful that I was learning to cope with my grief of losing Quin. Weird, right? I know. But let me explain.
The end goal is to learn to cope with my grief and keep from letting it take over my life. I know it will never go away completely because grief is simply love with nowhere to go and I will never love Quin any less, but it can’t consume me. I can’t allow it to ruin my life. There’s still so much to live for. However, in the moments when I could reflect on his life and feel grateful to have the time that I did with him, I also felt guilt. Sometimes, it was incredibly heavy guilt. Was I forgetting him? Would I forget him? Would I forget what a horrible tragedy his death was? Was I dishonoring him by not feeling sad constantly.. Because how does a parent think about the child they lost and feel anything other than sadness? Talk about whiplash.
I know that I’ll never forget him. I know that learning to live my life is not dishonoring him. But that’s the funny thing about feelings, isn’t it? There’s no room for logic here. Logic and reason don’t make sadness feel less sad.
So in 2024, I learned to trust the process. Trust that those feelings were necessary and that I needed to wade through them, sink into them, let them come in waves and trust that they would subside again. Trust that with each tsunami of emotion, I’d be better prepared to survive the next one.
It worked. The waves keep coming as I imagine they will forever but I’m so much better at staying afloat in the midst of them. I cry a lot, but I just let it happen because I know that I’ll get through each storm and knowing that seems to make the seas calm down a lot faster than before.
Beyond that, there were plenty of other wins surrounding trust in 2024. I trusted my intuition more. I had to seek some kind of balance between trusting my intuition, holding boundaries and also remembering that humans will be human - and I was successful in doing that. I trusted my decisions and stuck to them only to be shown later that they were the right decisions. The more often I realized that, the more confident I became in each decision and the less I questioned myself. Even if I did make the wrong decision, there was a lesson to be learned so I can always trust that, right or wrong, there’s something to be gained from any decision that is made.
So, here’s to closing the book of 2024, a successful year of learning and growth, and opening up the book of 2025 to the first blank page.
“We’re all stories in the end, just make it a good one.”
