Not because it was the worst year. But because it was the year I stopped believing that better was possible — and there is a particular silence around that kind of surrender that is difficult to put into words.
I had tried everything.
Not in the way people say it casually, meaning they tried a few things and gave up. I mean I had given years to the search. I had sat across from practitioners, healers, therapists, teachers. I had read the books, followed the protocols, done the inner work with genuine devotion. I had wanted it — the relief, the clarity, the version of myself I could sense existed somewhere beneath the weight of everything I was carrying.
And something would shift. For a while.
And then it would return. Quietly, reliably, like something that had simply been waiting in the next room while I was busy believing I had finally outrun it.
What I didn’t know then — what nobody had been able to show me — was that I wasn’t failing.
I was simply working on the wrong floor.
But I didn’t know that yet. In that year, I only knew the exhaustion of a woman who had tried everything — and was beginning, very quietly, to run out of reasons to keep trying.