Word of the Year for 2025- Recap

 Last year, I chose healing as my word of the year. At the time, it wasn’t aspirational—it was survival. I didn’t choose it because I felt whole. I chose it because I was carrying more than I knew how to hold.

Midway through the year, I went to Colorado—the first time back since my sister passed. I thought I was ready. I wasn’t. The trip cracked something open in me, and by the time I came home, I was barely standing. The grief I had been carefully holding together finally demanded to be felt. That visit nearly broke me.

Not long after, I was diagnosed with burnout and placed on leave from work. What started as a pause became a reckoning. After three months, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life and stepped away completely. Letting go of work felt like another loss, but it was also an act of honesty. I could no longer pretend I was okay when I wasn’t.

Then October came—and with it, more heartbreak. I lost my brother-in-law. Grief, once again, rearranged everything. Losing them fifteen months apart changed me in ways I am still discovering.

From June to November, I was off work—unmoored, grieving, healing in the quiet when no one was watching. It was a season of uncertainty, fear, and deep inner work. And through it all, healing showed me something I had long struggled to believe: it is okay to put up boundaries. It is okay to say no. It is okay to step back, to protect my energy, to choose myself without guilt. Boundaries weren’t walls—they were necessary care.

And then, unexpectedly, I was offered a job that felt almost too good to be true. Not because it erased the pain—but because it met me where I actually was.

Healing didn’t look like progress the way I once defined it. It looked like stopping. It looked like boundaries. It looked like choosing my well-being over productivity. It looked like grief, courage, and trust—sometimes all in the same day.

As this year closes, I can say healing did its work—not by making me untouched, but by making me truer. I am softer. Stronger. More honest with myself. Healing wasn’t a straight line—it was a surrender. And somehow, through all of it, I am still here. Still becoming.