This has been a year of magical thinking.

Not in the dreamy, lighthearted way we sometimes imagine magic, but in the way Joan Didion wrote about grief and loss: raw, disorienting, and completely transformative. A kind of magic that pulls you apart and remakes you, piece by piece.

This past year, I've been a caterpillar.

And when caterpillars are becoming butterflies, it’s not soft or simple. Inside the cocoon, they dissolve. They literally turn into liquid before they are re-formed into something with wings.

That’s how it felt for me.

Parts of my identity, my relationships, my expectations , all began to dissolve. Sometimes willingly, sometimes not. There were days I felt suspended between what was and what’s not yet clear. I questioned everything. I held grief in one hand and hope in the other. I lived in the tension of becoming without really knowing what I wanted to become.

But even in the discomfort, especially in the discomfort, there was magic.
The kind of magic that comes from seeing your strength when everything else falls away.
The kind that reveals what really matters.
The kind that teaches you how to stay with yourself when you're unraveling and to still offer your heart with tenderness.

It was a year of letting go, over and over again.
Letting go of plans, identities, old versions of love.
Letting go of roles, relationships, expectations,
the stories that never loved us back.
Letting go of timelines I thought I should be on.
Letting go of needing to have it all figured out.

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It was a year of losses too.
Of people, pets, of illusions, of certainty.
Of the person I once thought I was.
Each loss left an opening — tender, hollow, honest.

It was a year of sitting with the part of me that wasn’t ready to change.
Of learning how to love her, not push her.
Of saying, “When you’re ready, I’ll  be here.”

A year when I wasn’t always my best.
A year when I often didn’t feel my best either.
Where I felt ashamed of being this liquid, shapeless being.
Not knowing where to land or who to be.
And still, I kept going. I kept showing up.

I don’t think transformation ever feels as graceful as it looks from the outside.
But maybe that’s the point.

Maybe healing isn’t meant to be tidy or predictable.
Maybe the mess is the initiation.
Maybe the magic is in our willingness to meet it all,
the grief, the growth, the unknown , with presence.

I’m not who I was a year ago
and there’s a quiet relief in that.

Because this year, I became a little more myself.
Not a shinier version.
But a truer one.
A softer one.
A braver one.One who knows that becoming doesn’t always look like progress,
Sometimes it looks like stillness. Like mess. Like falling apart.
But beneath all that… something sacred is taking root.

I’m not quite a butterfly yet.
But I’m no longer just liquid either.
I can feel something forming — something real, something steady.
I am becoming.

And maybe that’s the most sacred part of all.
Not the arrival.
But the becoming itself.