6/19/26

One year ago today was one of the best days of my life.

I’m not yet ready to say exactly why, but one day I will. Less than a handful of other people know the magnitude of this day’s significance to me.

I’ve had many intensely vivid wake up calls in every shape and size. Some I knew immediately, others took days, even years to come to understand what a situation was highlighting/teaching/demonstrating, etc.

On this day one year ago, there was no delay. It was felt that day, throughout the day, growing stronger until the end of the day, of which I could not sleep because of the sheer joy and gratitude of how the day progressed and what I put into it in the weeks and months before that led to it, and how other things unfolded in surprising spontaneity.

I was on many cloud nines. I did not want to sleep even though I knew I would have to, eventually.

Though I didn’t want the day to end, it had to.

Once sleep was had and the next day began, the previous day’s opposite started before I got out of bed, faster than the progression of rises from the day before.

Those cloud nines were replaced by dark and dreary clouds of every precipitation paired with every natural disaster.

Crashing down to earth wasn’t it. It was a deep sting, the rude confrontation of my current reality.

I allowed what was ahead of me to become the heat that incinerated instead of the heat to motivate. Sadness and frustration led to overwhelm about not having a light or direction of how to get where I needed to be.

The few years of operating on an initially hopeful foundation was becoming an obvious dead end. But what I learned about myself while on it happened faster and better than anything else I could have done.

In the present moments it felt like too long before I found the resolve to reverse course to figure out how to steer myself back to where I was one year ago today and stay there, then go further.

It took six months of working through intense stresses and triggers amid a lot of uncertainty and very little support, yet handling them and other sudden adversities better than any point in the past.

It wasn’t until a few of them in succession that I realized another path was slowly being built by me without my conscious knowledge, revealed to me in how well I dealt with those stresses and adversities. And not just any path. This was the path to the best possible foundation I could have for now and the foreseeable future.

Some of that support helped tilt my eyes to a fuller vision of what that path could be. From there I found it, put myself on it, and was granted access where permission was the only way in.

During these six months of being on this foundational path, I’ve been ambushed by more untimely and brutal pains than I could have imagined.

Today there’s only a sliver of distance from them. They really weren’t untimely—nothing is. We are just never ready to get smacked in the face very very hard from the least likely of places.

My nervous system was on constant high alert, my body a vibrating hum. Today it’s only a little less so.

Though weakened, there is still no one better than me to advocate for myself despite the devastating triggers of being invisible in both presence and voice while flushed with overwhelming emotions that clashed with real uncertainties.

The nerves have been most acute in my fingertips and stomach and eyes while touring the rest of my body less intensely yet still sharp.

But, like I always have and always will, I have been finding ways to make the most of it. Unlike many points in my past I’ve been making sure to find healthy and sustainable ways to stay on and improve the path and smaller paths that combine and collaborate with each other.

As final as that may seem, it’s barely more than specks and I have so much ahead of me to add to this foundation and expand it.

I have managed to also feel the needed momentum, understanding it won’t be linear and I’ll fail a lot until I succeed. That used to terrify me. Now, I relish the chances to learn and improve.

What’s different now from last year’s sudden awareness of progress is that I’m even better equipped to handle these adversities than at any other point in my history.

I still struggle with bitterness, yet I should keep just enough to keep the wheels greased, if you will allow me another metaphor. I just can’t let that grease get under my feet, or evolve into a pool that I drown in.

Onward—back to how I felt one year ago—and upward.