2024 was the biggest year of my life.
I got married to the love of my life.
I started my company.
I moved to Germany.
I got everything I’d ever hoped for.
But it was also the year I wrestled with something real:
Grief.
The kind that comes with knowing not everyone you love will follow you into your new life.
At the start of the year, I had to say goodbye to a relative I loved. Not physically—we’d already been estranged for a long time—but I had to let go of the hope that we’d ever reconcile.
I didn’t even like him, if I’m being honest. I found him slimy, odd, unbearably depressing. But he was family, and I cared about him in the way you care about family.
Now, he’ll never be family again.
And that feels like a tragedy.
Not just because of the relationship we’ll never have, but because his bad choices didn’t just affect him. They cast shadows of shame and hurt over everyone I loved.
It was a trainwreck we all had to watch—one we couldn’t stop or even acknowledge.
That shook me.
Because I realized: it’s possible to have everything in life – “make it” financially and lose it all through your own unhealing.
That was the lesson 2024 drove home, again and again.
I watched others—angry, bitter, and unaware of their own power—take out their existential battles on innocent bystanders. Hurting the people who cared most about them.
It’s a vicious, horrible cycle.
And I’ve thought about it so often because any one of us could become like that.
Angry. Bitter. Ignorant of the ways we harm others.
I can’t watch it anymore. And I refuse to become it.
People like that are terrifying because they make you question every good thing in the world.
But if they have a purpose, maybe it’s this:
To wake us up.
To force us to tend our gardens with more care.
To relentlessly and unapologetically commit to our own healing.
Grief is real, and it’s transformative.
So for me, 2025 will be the year I let this grief transform me.
If possible: I want to become a creative energy for good.
I spent 2024 mourning the past.
It’s time to let that knowing soften me, make space for new beginnings, and cultivate the light in my life:
Better relationships.
Deeper healing.
More meaning.
Because the truth is, no one becomes a horror overnight.
You slide into it over years when you forget to honor and nurture the light within you.
But as long as you still got it – you can still light it.
I hope to find ways to light the flame every day.