Last year

Last year was the year I learned:

just HOW resilient I am... days where I would get up and try to make the choice to not to disappear when I was 6ft under 6ft under...

The realization that some things

I kept trying to fix were never broken: they were simply finished.

This year asked me to look directly at what stayed

when I stopped chasing what wouldn’t.

It taught me that love can be real

and still leave.

That effort doesn’t always invite return.

That being chosen by myself was not a consolation prize

but a recalibration.

I learned how grief hides in ordinary moments.

In grocery aisles.

In running routes.

In the pause before reaching for a phone

that no longer lights up the way it used to.

But I also learned this:

my capacity did not shrink.

It clarified.

If forty-five had a shape,

it was a woman standing upright, bracing for impact.

This was the year I didn’t become someone new.

I became someone softer because I was broken by hands of people I trusted.

But also this: 

I'm proud of myself. My life. Who I've become. Who I will be. What I want. 

That the way you do one thing is the way you do everything and the way I do everything is passionately, with love, balls to the wall, I'm all in. 

All in.

And if you don't like that about me, you're not for me.

But, more than anything, if you want to know the most important thing is when I'm present. There. With you. 

My gift is my time, but your gift is your presence. And I'm grateful, and I'm in heaven.

That I want everyone and everything I've ever lost to come back to me.

That everything can be an adventure, especially a grocery store in a foreign country.

That traveling alone is both release and catharsis. I love it, but I’d rather travel with someone. 

That I never let the grass grow under my feet. There's too much world even where I live to see.

That I’m funny. 

That love is underrated and most don't know how to do it right because they don't care enough to learn about how to get it right. But should. But when you accept the love you think you deserve and love comes along and you don’t want it? Maybe you don’t deserve me. Because I do it well. 

If you want to know me, understand me, get me--five things I think and live out every day:

1. The way I do one thing is the way I do everything. Passionately.

2. Love. It's everything.

3. Today? I didn't wake up to be mediocre.

4. I believe everything is rigged in my favor and everything I'll ever want can be mine if I go after it.

5. Eternal optimist.

So I'm here. Believing that this year, 46, will be even better than the last.

Because when you believe in magic and the magic of your own life and can imagine what dreams may come, it's passionately everything. 

Today as I turn 46, I am less impressed

by intensity and more devoted to and crave consistency.

I am grateful so much for sunrises and sunsets and the people in my life who pour into me.

I trust what shows up.

I trust what stays soft without disappearing.

And that feels like as good as a place to start on day one of a new year...