I can’t say I’m sorry that 2025 is behind me. Last year was the year of grief. A year I didn’t choose or plan for and certainly didn’t plan on.
At the end of 2024, both my husband and I lost our mothers. Two losses so close together that they reshaped the entire year that followed.
What came next was not just sadness but a full season of mourning, one that seeped into our days, our conversations, many of our celebrations, and even in our silences.
Grief is strange like that.
It doesn’t arrive loudly with instructions to follow. It settles in quietly and changes the air you actually breathe. It winds up turning ordinary moments into heavy ones and joyful occasions into reminders of who is missing. We missed our moms deeply this year and we still do. We always will.
And yet, here we are, standing at the beginning of a new year, doing something that once felt impossible: turning the page.
Turning the page doesn’t mean closing the book.
It doesn’t mean forgetting or that grief or love disappears or fades. It just simply means acknowledging that life continues to move forward, even when your heart lies behind. And while grief will still come and go in waves, as it always does, we are choosing to welcome happiness and joy back into our lives as a testament of love, not a betrayal of loss.
Grief has also clarified where my energy belongs and where it doesn’t. I no longer feel obligated to pour myself into friendships or relationships that don’t meet me halfway. Not every connection is meant to last forever, and not every absence needs an explanation. If something requires constant effort without care, presence, or reciprocity, I’m learning to let it go without resentment.
Time is too precious to spend convincing people of my worth or chasing connections that no longer nourish me.
My husband always laughs at me because when the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, I usually cry. Not even a pretty cry — an ugly, deep cry. Same thing every year since I was a kid.
I’m not even entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m relieved the year is over. Maybe I’m sad that it’s gone. Maybe I’m scared of what the new year will bring. Maybe it’s the quiet fear that the people I love the most could get sick, or that time is moving faster than I can keep up with.
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s all of those things wrapped together.
New Year’s Eve makes me acutely aware of time and how much has passed, how much we’ve lived, how much we’ve lost, and how much is out of our control. I think about everyone getting older. How moments slip away unnoticed until suddenly they’re memories or how the years don’t ask permission before they pass.
What this past year has taught me more clearly than anything is that the most valuable and irreplaceable commodity in life is time. Not money or things — just time and, more specifically, the present.
The NOW.
The moments we are actually living instead of rushing through or worrying past.
I no longer have time for petty arguments. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for unnecessary judgment of myself or of others. I don’t want to spend my days reliving grievances or replaying conversations in my head that don’t matter in the long run. Grief has a way of stripping life down to what’s essential.
It makes the silly outside noise unbearable and the trivial intolerable.
I am painfully aware of how much the world is changing. How much darkness now feels louder than light. How fear, division, and uncertainty seem to seep into every corner of our lives — if we let them. So my resolution for 2026 is simple but very much deliberate.
I am choosing to create the world I want within my four walls, and under my roof.
I can’t control the outside world and I certainly can’t stop time as much as I wish I could. I can’t prevent loss but I can decide what kind of energy lives in my home. I can choose kindness over criticism. Presence over distraction. Love over resentment. Peace over chaos, whenever possible.
This year is not about grand reinvention and unrealistic goals that I have set for myself. It’s about intention and honoring grief without letting it define every chapter that follows. It’s about making space for joy again because love deserves room to breathe, too.
So here’s to 2026. A year of turning pages gently. A year of holding space for what was — while making room for what can still be. A year of protecting time, nurturing balance, and remembering that even after loss, life still asks us to live.
And when the ball drops next year, I’ll probably cry.
But not out of fear or sadness. I’ll cry because I stayed present.
Because I chose love over bitterness.
Because I honored grief without letting it steal what’s still mine.
Because despite everything, I found my way back to being happy.
And that feels worth the tears.
That’s My Reveal for the week.
Love,
Karin
