On letting go, the wisdom of fall, and the beautiful irony of becoming who we’ve always been.
My word for 2026 was Freedom.
Little did I know.
I’ve spent much of the past few years writing Worthy, a memoir unfolding through the four seasons of my own healing and becoming.
Fall. The Unraveling. Winter. The Descent. Spring. The Reclamation. Summer. The Resurrection.
Somewhere along the way, I began to realize that the seasons weren’t simply a way to organize the story. They were teaching me how to live. How to let go, surrender, trust the darkness, and welcome the light. And perhaps most surprisingly, how to stop trying so damn hard to become someone.
Because what if the whole point was never to become someone else? What if it was to remember who we were before the world taught us who we needed to be?
There is something almost comical about the way this year has unfolded. And by comical, I mean the kind of divine comedy that has you laughing and crying on the bathroom floor.
Because freedom, as it turns out, hasn’t looked anything like I imagined. It hasn’t been a triumphant arrival at some enlightened destination. It has been messy, brutal at times, and heartbreaking. There have been moments of such profound grief that I wondered how one human body could possibly hold it all. There have been things I thought I understood about myself that have been turned completely upside down. There has been what I can only describe as an unraveling of identity. An undoing. An ego death of sorts.
And yet, running underneath all of it, something extraordinary has been happening.
I’ve been getting freer.
Not because I’ve finally figured out how to be better, more beautiful, more successful, more healed, or more worthy, but because, little by little, I’ve been letting go of the belief that I needed to be any of those things in the first place.
I’ve spent so much of my life trying to become. And now, perhaps for the first time, I’m learning how to simply be.
In A Course in Miracles, there is a beautiful teaching about removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence. Not manufacturing love, earning it, or becoming worthy of it. Simply removing what stands in the way of recognizing what was already there.
I keep coming back to that because I’m beginning to wonder how much of what we call healing is actually a process of subtraction.
The identities we constructed to belong. The masks we wore to feel safe. The expectations we inherited. The impossible standards we held ourselves to. The stories we told about who we were, what we deserved, and what made us lovable.
Some of these stories began long before we had the capacity to question them, and some became so deeply woven into our lives that we mistook them for the truth.
But what happens when we begin to loosen our grip? Who are we without all those stories? Who are we when there is nothing left to prove?
I recently finished writing the ending of Worthy. And I’m not about to give it away before the book is published. (Nice try.)
But I will tell you this. I could never have imagined how the story would end. Or how something I believed was an ending would turn out to be another beginning.
And now, as I enter fall, I find myself standing in the middle of a story that is apparently still being written.
It’s almost as though life is gently, and sometimes not so gently, asking: What else are you ready to put down? What else were you never meant to carry? What if you no longer had to hide behind anything at all?
There is something both terrifying and exquisitely liberating about those questions. Because somewhere beneath all the layers, the striving, the protecting, and the becoming, there is a self who has never needed improving.
A self who simply wants permission to exist.
And lately, more than anything, I want to give her that.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that, as all of this unfolds, I’m preparing to begin my first Worthy Women’s Circle.
A small, intimate pilot gathering of women who are curious about what it might mean to date themselves through the seasons. To slow down, become curious about their own company, and listen to what nature has been teaching us all along.
Because fall doesn’t apologize for letting go. The trees don’t cling desperately to their leaves, trying to prove they’re still beautiful. They release. They make room. They trust the season.
And perhaps we can learn to do the same.
This first circle isn’t about fixing ourselves or adding another self-improvement project to our already overflowing lives. It’s about creating space for reflection, curiosity, laughter, and tears. For the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten, abandoned, or simply never had the chance to know. For discovering what might happen when we stop chasing our lives and begin inhabiting them.
I won’t be arriving as someone who has all the answers. I’ll be journeying alongside these women, curious about what the seasons have to teach us. And I have a feeling we’re going to learn quite a lot.
So here I am. A new season, a new chapter, and a new invitation to surrender.
A genius is a person most like themselves.
Thelonious Monk
And the irony isn’t lost on me that, after a year of some of the most extraordinary inner work of my life, I find myself wanting something remarkably simple.
To rest. To play. To laugh. To live. To be in my own skin without constantly wondering whether I should be different. To stop negotiating with the world for permission to be myself.
Perhaps that’s what freedom has been trying to teach me all along. Not how to become someone worthy of love, but how to let go of everything that convinced me I wasn’t.
And maybe that’s what this season is inviting all of us to remember. That beneath the identities, the expectations, the stories, and the striving, there is something exquisitely whole. Something that was never lost, only covered over.
And perhaps the most courageous thing we can do is begin to uncover it, one season, one surrender, one beautiful, ordinary moment at a time.
Here’s to the freedom of being ourselves.
Wild & Worthy.
Ava Soleil