From Celebration to Freedom

Another year in the books.

My word for 2025 was celebrate - and as I sit here reflecting, I can honestly say there was so much to celebrate. Not just the shiny things. Not just the wins that make sense on paper. This year, I practiced celebrating everything.

I celebrated the rewriting of old stories - stories born from wounds that once ran the show. I celebrated the slow loosening of survival patterns that had lived in my nervous system for decades. I celebrated taking risks - many of them imperfect, many of them unfinished.

I started and stopped what felt like fifteen different projects this year. And for the first time, I didn’t make that mean I was flaky or failing. I let it mean I was learning how to jump without a safety net. Because this year wasn’t actually about things coming to fruition. It was about learning to leap.

I celebrated visibility - repairing old wounds around being seen. Showing up. Putting myself out there in ways I hadn’t before. Not because I had it all figured out, but because I was finally willing to try.

And yet, when I look back, the greatest celebration of this year wasn’t professional or creative at all. It was relational. It was maternal. It was sacred.

2025 was the year of a reunion with my daughter. Or maybe, more honestly, the year I met her for the very first time.

When you carry unresolved trauma in your body - on a nervous system level - there is nothing it doesn’t touch. For years, I didn’t truly see Scarlett. I saw my own scared parts, my lonely parts, my unhealed wounds staring back at me through her eyes.

This year, something shifted. It was as if a veil began to lift. A wall I didn’t even know was there started to come down.

And suddenly, I could see Scarlett Elizabeth. Fully. Clearly. Softly.

And she is magic.

I remember writing on a piece of canvas in her nursery when she was a baby - something like: Sweet Child, you’ve come to change everything in the best possible way.

At the time, I had no idea how prophetic those words would be. She has been my greatest teacher. My greatest mirror. My invitation back into my body.

There are no neat words for the lived experience of motherhood - the beauty tangled with exhaustion, the joy brushing up against old pain, the way love can crack you open and remake you all at once.

But this year, I felt it. I felt the joy of being her mother - not just performing it, not just surviving it, but inhabiting it. I saw her shine. I saw myself reflected back through her eyes - calmer, happier, more at home.

This year, I didn’t just parent her. I met her. And in doing so, I met myself.

As I step into another year, my word for 2026 is freedom. Freedom in heart. Freedom in mind. Freedom in body and soul. Freedom in finances. Freedom in authenticity. A year of breaking chains - especially the subtle ones. The lingering, niggly patterns that no longer belong.

And woven through that word is another: worthy. Worthy has been my companion for years now - first as a whisper, then as a practice, and now as a book coming into being. Completing my memoir Worthy feels inseparable from this next season of freedom.

It’s as if finishing the story is also finishing a cycle. And stepping into freedom is simply telling the truth out loud.

Years ago, I randomly began taping up images of women onto my office wall - friends, mentors, sisters - with simple words written above them: for the girls. I didn’t know then that I was already writing this story. I didn’t know I was gathering threads.

This freedom I’m stepping into isn’t just for me. And it isn’t just for Scarlett.

It’s for the girls.

For the ones who were taught to survive instead of celebrate. For the ones learning to trust their leap. For the ones remembering who they were before fear took over.

Another year in the books.
And somehow, it feels like life is just getting started.