You were never what I expected and a welcomed gift just the same. You will forever be the year I received little I had wanted or planned yet, an abundance of what I needed. It has been a trial by fire. My spirit has been forged in ways I wouldn’t have, couldn’t ever have, even begun to imagine. My thoughts, narratives and behaviors all interrupted and intervened upon. I’ve said many times, “the universe came and got me on this one!” about many things that have changed this year.

On this cold Thursday December 31st with the sky clear above me and the stars lighting the concrete below me, I leave behind not just a year but a life. A life I had built around being a wife. I leave behind a deeply etched fantasy of what I thought life would be like today and embrace the wild unknown of what exists before me. Life, when I least expected it has both ceased to exist as I knew it and begun again.

2020 felt like a greatest hits album of all the darkest demons I had mistakenly believed I had already fought. Each one brought an opportunity to fight for myself once more. The result of these battles has been to truly see myself. As each pattern, habit, thought, action, choice, narrative, belief, was intervened upon and interrupted, all that was left in the end was my spirit. My relentless loving spirit whose true north has always been to find the joy in living.

It’s been excruciatingly painful and in the end, 2020 provided the hindsight and clarity I didn’t know I wanted and needed. Hindsight truly is always 20/20.

Cheers to the new year

To the end of what I had mistakenly believed to be writers block

To the end of carrying burdens that were never mine

To the end of the life as a blindly devoted wife

And finally, to: