2024 was the worst and best year of my life
3 learnings that will change your life like magic
Reading time: 2 min
January 2024: a long-overdue bomb explodes in my home: we're separating. Not from a lack of love or desire to be together, but because our dynamic had become so unhealthy and unsustainable that we were literally in a race to the bottom.
If we hadn't hit the brakes, we would probably have damaged us in irreversible ways.
At the same time, in the previous months, I had been walking a never-ending road of lack of sense of direction, motivation, and professional perspective. Despite running my own consultancy business for years, I had completely lost my drive. With only a few projects (and sometimes none), I had no perspective of growth. I had no energy for it. My home environment, and the way I engaged with it, had the life sucked out of me.
2024 was one of those years when life happens all at once and leaves you with no room to breathe, with no glimpse of perspective that things will be different any time soon.
But the good thing about reaching the bottom is that, if you have a little bit of awareness, the only way is upwards.
When you have nothing else to loose, you begin to open up. You start leaving the bottom, not because you're flying upward, but because you're growing.
These last 12 months were an intense crash course on life. The culmination of years trying to figure things out until things finally clicked.
While I learned countless lessons, I think they all fall somehow into one of these 3 categories:
I learned how to feel my feelings, which I have to say it was the foundation of everything:
I learned how to parent myself, in other words: how to take fully responsibility for my life and well-being
✨ Emotionally (i)mature parents and your brainI learned to relate better in relationships because I learned to relate better to myself
✨ Our emotional brains and the beliefs it carries
✨ Two versions of a conflict and how to pick wisely
This year, I also regained a sense of identity, broke down negative beliefs about myself, and dove headfirst into seeing everything I do in life as an experiment rather than a goal to be achieved.
Just like magic
The crazy thing (or not so crazy, actually) is that when I started changing the way I relate to myself, the world around me started to change.
Our relationship to ourselves is the lens through which we relate to the world and other people. When we change how we relate to ourselves, we change our attitude, and we experience different results.
Like magic, after months apart, my partner and I found our way back to each other. This time it's an entirely different relationship because we each became different people by working on ourselves first.
As I connected more deeply with myself, I discovered a renewed sense of purpose in my professional life, moving forward in ways that feel more authentic. I haven't felt this excited about my work in a long time.
My message and reflection at the end of this year is:
If we want to have better relationships, we must start with improving the relationship we have with ourselves.
I'm still learning
I don't have everything figured out yet, and I don't think I ever will.
The good side of it is that it will always give me material to write about.
I don't think there's ever a moment when one can say "I know this and that's it." I think there are milestones in life where you look back and you're able to say "Oh, now I understand," and you take these understandings forward into your next challenge.
For the year ahead, I wish that you can be kind to yourself, that you can be proud of your learnings, that you can experiment with things that excite you, that you build better and healthier relationships around you because you learned how to love and parent yourself well.
I'll see you in 2025, with more complicated feelings, relationship challenges, and learnings, but also with abundant love and kindness toward ourselves first ❤️
With love,
Nat
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