We are about two seconds away from a new year and I can feel the combination of emotions mixing up in my system like a reflection cocktail. While I have been reviewing the year internally throughout its entirety, I really understood what this year was all about for me when I had an end-of-year check-in with my long time therapist a couple of weeks ago. After seeing Aleyda consistently for 8 years I decided I was ready to stop coming in for regular sessions around March this year. She was about to move to a different part of the country and I felt like I had squeezed every last drop of transformation out of our time together so it was the right timing for both of us. However when she came to New York in December and offered to do a session with me, I was SO excited to see her again and make some sense of all that had transpired since I had last seen her over 9 months ago.
I sat down in her office and when she asked me “what’s been happening since I last saw you?” it all hit me. I replied and said “I changed my life this year.” She, knowing me more than I know myself at times, could feel the truth in what I was saying in the deepest parts of her heart and we both just smiled at each other for a moment. I let out a deep sigh of relief knowing that after all I had been going through for years, I was finally ready to claim my strength and honor the months and months of time I had invested in making my health, my heart, my work, my community and my life as a whole, the best it could possibly be.
If you’ve been following me since at least 2016 then you have probably read some of my blogs where I have laid it all out on the table for you. I have shared what happens on mornings when my heart is completely broken and how hard it’s been to find a love that fits and lasts ever since my divorce. I have shared how my health was flaring up in a way that brought me to my knees with pain and fear, having no idea if I could ever get my body to a stable place. I have also shared how my career just wasn’t working the way I had hoped for close to two years, no matter what tricks and manifestation techniques I had tried.
In 2018, I got so fed up and tired of all the pain and suffering I felt I kept having to experience for one reason or another, that I refused to take it anymore. It changed me and I am so deeply grateful for the year I had because of it. The thing I believe that caused the greatest change was my willingness to be honest with myself and others. I became unapologetic about acknowledging the Truth. After ignoring multiple signs in past relationships with guys I have dated and friends I have loved, I just knew it was time to cut the crap and listen to the truth in my heart. It’s right there if we carve out even just a few moments a day to listen for it and honor it and if we get the courage to stop questioning our truth so much.
This year started better than the last couple as I landed my 6 month contract to work with Dove on a new skin care line on January 2nd. However I didn’t really make a significant change in my life until the beginning of May. I had stopped dating someone I had grown to really like around my birthday in early April and it sent me into a spin cycle that I was all too familiar with. Beating myself up, letting go of my self-care practices, feeling disconnected to my work and purpose and being in a complete fantasy about what was really going on with my finances. The thing is that this guy and I had barely even dated so unlike other times, I didn’t have the significance of our time together to blame my emotional reaction on. Not this time. While he didn’t show up in a way that was very kind and I did start to like him, the intensity of my feelings pushed me to acknowledge that it was ME that was out of alignment and the fact that the experiences in my life weren’t adding up to be the way I had imagined them to be was something that I had to take ownership of. If I wanted my life to change I needed to be willing to make those changes. The good thing was that I was so over all the nonsense in my life that I was willing to be as disciplined as I needed to be.
I started to pray, get quiet, spend a lot of time alone and ask for help and support from people who were living their lives in ways that felt healthy and inspiring to me. This is also where the honesty came into play. After days of doing an internal inventory of all of the things that were out of alignment for me I was able to see that I was in a complete fantasy when it came to money and men in my life. Somehow I never really landed in reality when it came to either area and while I knew something was off I wasn’t really able to understand it until I made the commitment to change in these two areas.
In order to heal around my romantic relationships I put myself on a dating hiatus from May until September which was incredibly liberating and one of the kindest things I have ever done for myself in the area of love. And even though my dating break has been over for several months now I still have taken the pursuit of dating off the table. No apps, no forced matches, no desperation. Just deepening the truth of who I am, what I want and my desire to be alone over settling for the wrong fit. It feels hard in moments, I will admit. I have fleeting thoughts of being further in to my 30’s than I had ever imagined as a single woman. But I have a lot more peace and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
Where my finances were concerned, holy moly I had no idea just how out of it I was in this area. There had been one too many weeks where I found myself not able to pay for some of my most basic needs and move throughout my life in a way that I felt was truly a reflection of who I am and what I am worth. I found myself making large sums of money with big contracts and incredible partnerships but then months later I would have nothing to show for it. After many conversations and reality checks I realized that I lived in this sort of fantasy world when it came to money. While I would get money from time to time, a lot of the time I would get emails from my agent or from partners about the money that was coming without really having a grasp on the money that was actually there. Once I realized this, I sat down and created an master Google Sheet that has me tracking every single true thing that happens on every single day in my business. I track how much money actually gets in to my account, how many emails I sent, how many connections I made or events I attended. I kicked my butt in to the truth, not the fantasy world that had been so appealing yet incredibly depleting for so long. I also enlisted the help of a dear friend who is a financial advisor and she helped me create a plan for my finances in terms of savings, paying taxes and even planning for some big expenses I had coming up.
We all have different things that will work for us and maybe the methods I used aren’t your ideal methods. But what I will say is that getting connected to the TRUTH of what is going on versus what we hope, dream or think is taking place is the healthiest thing I think we can do. In fact I became so obsessed with finding the truth and acknowledging it that I started to realize how much of a deficit there is with people being able to handle the truth in their lives and have straight forward conversations about it. I know the truth can feel daunting and too painful to face at times but I have found that if we have the courage to face it, the pain might be intense at first, but the relief is completely worth it and will change your life.
That’s a big part of why I decided to create my podcast which officially launches on January 6th (YAY!!) and shares stories of triumph, courage, pain and most of all the truth. My show is called The Point of Pain and it is one of the most exciting projects I have created in a while. I interview some of the most incredible people I have had the privilege of knowing or admiring from afar and we go IN. We talk about the truth they each have discovered in the highs and lows of their lives and if they have found a point to it all. I have already interviewed some of my favorite people including Deepica Mutyala, Katie Wilcox, Reshma Saujani and more. For the first episode my dear friend Blair Badenhop interviews me and I share stories from my life that I have never shared publicly. I also share images from when I was the most sick in my life which I have been literally hiding in a closet for the last 17 years hoping that no one will ever find out how sick I looked, fearing they could never love me if they really knew. I had a lot of fear and resistance around this project but now that it’s here, I can’t wait to share this with you my loves. The introduction episode is live already so you can listen to that here.
Now I want to hear from you! What lessons did you work through this year? How did you do it and what was the most rewarding part of the process? Or you can share what was challenging and ask for support. I absolutely LOVE hearing from you and it’s my favorite part about having a blog so I can’t wait to read your comments below. Happy New Year angels!
PS – For those of you who are new to podcasts, when you go to my show page on my website you can listen to the show there but my recommendation (and preference) is to click the Apple Podcasts link under the player and have you subscribe and leave a review if you’re inspired. That helps the show SO much and I would be so pumped to see what you think about it. Either way, I hope it supports you on your journey.