The number one thing this year taught me to loosen my grip on is control.
Just the simple, difficult act of letting go — letting God, letting situations be what they are, letting people be who they are, and letting myself be who I am. I realized that while we get autonomy over pieces of our lives, most things aren’t ours to force. Life is fate and chance and faith. It’s God and the universe and the quiet, invisible currents that move us whether we want them to or not.
For so long, I confused survival with identity. My whole sense of self was rooted in what I’d survived: cancer, ongoing health conditions, being a twin mom to kids with developmental delays, a cryptic pregnancy, Irish triplets, and the relentless curveballs life kept throwing at my family. I held all of that like it defined me. Like surviving was who I was.
But unlearning showed me something different: we don’t get through things just to survive them — we get through them to thrive. And releasing that survival identity took breaking down. It took isolation. It took removing people, patterns, and versions of myself that I had outgrown. It took honesty.
When I stop performing the version of myself that 2024 kept asking for, I find someone I genuinely love. I love who I am, how I look, how I think, how I see the world — the good and the bad. I created 224 exactly how I envisioned it. I found friends who feel aligned. I released the ones who weren’t good for me (and the ones I wasn’t good for). I stood up for myself. I stood my ground. I let go.
Unlearning, in my body, feels like relief and grief at the same time. Something still unfinished but somehow softer. Quiet and loud at once. Yin and yang. Mostly, though, it feels like a weight sliding off my shoulders — a kind of freedom I didn’t expect.
I’ve spent almost all 365 days of this year sick. Still sick. By most definitions, I’ve lived in survival mode. But somehow, that survival mode became the very thing that allowed me to thrive beyond anything I could have imagined. I didn’t just get through the year — I grew through it.
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