Learning to Navigate the Hard Seasons

Seasons

I want to share something personal with you today. This past year, 2024 into 2025, has been one of those seasons that tests you in ways you never quite prepare for, no matter how independent or strong you think you are.

It started when my landlord passed away. The new owners didn’t want to lease the property, so suddenly I had to move, pack up a home, find a new place, uproot everything with little notice. A month later, my mother passed away. And now my father is in assisted living, declining faster than I’d like to admit.

I’m at that age. You know the one. Where loved ones start moving on to a better place, and you find yourself standing at more goodbyes than hellos.

Being independent doesn’t mean life isn’t hard. It just means I’ve had to learn how to be strong enough to deal with it on my own. And I’ll be honest, I’m not always graceful about it. Some days are messier than others. But I want to be a learner. I want to grow through this, not just survive it.

Living alone has given me something unexpected, time and focus to write. And with all this loss has come something else, a cathartic therapy that only happens when I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Writing has become my way of processing, of holding what hurts, of making sense of what doesn’t make sense.

This past year, my publisher released Murder On the Rocks, a fiction book about a detective woman who has a lot of my traits. Creating her, walking through her story, watching her navigate her own complicated world, that was therapeutic in ways I didn’t anticipate.

And this November, Where Light Bleeds Through will be released. It’s a memoir. It’s more raw, more real, more me.

I’ve learned something important through all of this, the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, they’re all jumbled together. That’s just life. You don’t get one without the other. The light bleeds through the cracks, but only because there are cracks to begin with.

I’m still learning how to navigate it all. I hope more gracefully as time goes on. But for now, I’m just showing up, writing through it, and trying to be honest about where I am.

I wanted to share this with you, not because I have it all figured out, but because maybe you’re in a hard season too. Maybe you’re learning to navigate your own losses, your own unexpected changes. If that’s you, I see you. And I hope we can keep learning together.

Thank you for being here, for reading, for walking this road alongside me.

With gratitude,

Author