Stop Trying to Fix Yourself: A Year-End Reflection on Forgiveness, Growth, and Choosing Peace

We’re not doing resolutions this year. We’re doing reflection. In this episode, I share some of the most meaningful lessons this past year taught me in my own personal live—about forgiveness, letting go of control of others’ lives, healing abandonment wounds, and choosing softness in a world that encourages armor.

This isn’t about fixing yourself because you’re not broken. It’s about understanding who you’re becoming and moving into the new year with more peace, compassion, and intention.

Transcript

Hey friends, welcome back if you’re a regular. And if you’re not a regular and you just found your way here, well I’m so glad you found us and hopefully you’ll continue to show up here and show up for yourself. And if someone sent this to you, that’s awesome that someone cares and maybe someone knows you’ve made progress and wants you to reflect on this past year or maybe they think what I’m sharing of my own personal journey will somehow help. However you got here today, I’m so grateful that you pressed play and that you’re here, that you’ve taken just a little bit of time for yourself because that’s what we’re here for. To make small shifts, small movements forward and that starts with your own self care and this can be part of it. But this episode today is one I look forward to in order to start our year off right, not because it’s about setting resolutions or reinventing yourself or promising to become an entirely different person on January first. No. This episode is about something a little bit more honest, more grounded, and more sustainable: reflection, taking the time to look back on this past year to help us move forward into the new year and I’m going to share some personal reflections of my own. 

Reflection isn’t about shaming yourself or picking apart your entire year, I’m talking about the kind that invites you to pause, sit with yourself, and gently look at what this past year has taught you, where you have grown. What it stretched in you. What it revealed about you. And we know that growth and reflection can be painful because the most effective growth usually comes from pain. You can’t build muscle without consistency and a little bit of pain. You can’t become more flexible in your body without stretching past where you think you can go and it’s the same with your mental health. So we want to reflect on what has built us up this past year and what it’s quietly asking you to carry forward.

So in not doing resolutions but reflections these resolutions tend to be reactionary, often fueled by guilt, what you should do, what you shouldn’t do. Remember when you hear the word should, that’s someone else’s voice talking in your head. We choose resolutions by comparison, I want to lose weight to look like this person, or I need to make more money to be like that person. And we choose resolutions based on the pressure to “fix” something but guess what, you’re not broken. Now reflection? Reflection helps you understand yourself. Reflection helps you choose, intentionally. It helps ground you in what’s realistic and healthy for you yourself. It’s not about deciding who you should become; it’s about understanding who you are becoming.

So I want to share some reflections from my own life over the past year. These aren’t lessons I learned from a book or a course or a perfectly curated morning routine. These are things I learned the slow way. The uncomfortable way. The way that requires sitting with feelings you’d rather avoid and asking yourself honest questions. And that uncomfortable way is the way we truly learn and grow. We don’t grow when things are easy and predictable, we grow when we feel stretched and sometimes in pain. So just like your body and muscles...they don’t grow and become strong sitting on the couch, they do so by pushing our bodies a bit, by moving weight around.

My hope here is not that you take my experience as a blueprint for your own life, but that you listen and gently ask yourself, What part of this feels familiar? What part of this might be inviting me to soften? We’re going to talk about forgiveness. About letting go of wanting more for others. About abandonment wounds and emotional triggers. And about learning how to love people—including people with different opinions—without trying to reshape them into something that feels safer for us. None of this is about bypassing pain. It’s about meeting it with compassion instead of armor.

One of the biggest reflections I’ve had this year is about forgiveness—what it really is, and what it is not. I’ve had people ask me, sometimes gently and sometimes with disbelief, how I can still care about or even help people who, in their minds, have hurt me. The question underneath the question is usually something like: How can you forgive someone who caused you pain? Doesn’t that minimize what happened? Doesn’t that let them off the hook? And I understand that question because as many have, I have thought in the past that forgiveness was something you extended outward—a kind of moral transaction with the other person. Something that said, What you did was okay and I’m going to forget about it. But that’s not how I experience forgiveness anymore or how it’s intended to be. For me, forgiveness is not a declaration about someone else’s behavior. It’s a decision about my own inner life.

Yes, I can acknowledge that something hurt. Yes, I can honor the pain it caused. And at the same time, I can recognize that the person who hurt me is on their own journey—one shaped by their own experiences, their own wounds, their limitations, and the tools they have available to them. Forgiveness doesn’t erase accountability. It doesn’t require reconciliation. And it certainly doesn’t mean allowing continued harm. What it does mean—for me—is choosing not to let anger or resentment build inside me, and take over my inner peace. I am choosing not to become hardened by pain. Because the truth of it for me and for all of us is that unprocessed resentment doesn’t protect us. It consumes us.

When I hold tightly to anger, it doesn’t punish the other person. It lives in my body. It tightens my chest. It colors my thinking. It narrows my capacity to show up as the caring, open-hearted person I want to be. Forgiveness, in this sense, is self-preservation. It’s choosing peace over prolonged suffering. I can still be a caring person. I can still offer assistance when it feels aligned to what I can offer in a healthy way. I can still act with kindness—not because someone “deserves” it, but because kindness is who I want to be. Forgiveness allows me to stay soft in a world that often rewards hardness. And that, to me, is not weakness. It’s strength coming from my core, from my heart to remain in the way that I’m becoming, the way I choose to move forward.

Another reflection that’s been transformative for me is learning to let go of wanting more for other people. This kinda goes hand in hand with the forgiveness part and this one is tricky, because it hides inside love. We want the best for the people we care about. We want to spare them pain and we don’t want them to go thru anything hard. We want to protect them from mistakes we’ve already made. We want them to choose the path that feels safer, healthier, more aligned—as we see it. And often, this desire comes from genuine care.

But I’ve come to realize that wanting more for someone can quietly turn into trying to live their life for them and it’s not your life to live. The truth we all have to face is that if I don’t allow people to walk their own paths—especially when those paths look different from mine—if I do that I am robbing them of their own learning. We all arrive where we are through different experiences. What worked for me may not work for you. What healed me may not be what heals someone else. And sometimes, people need to touch the stove themselves to understand that it’s hot. That doesn’t mean we stop caring. It means we shift how we care.

Instead of saying, “I know better,” we say, “I trust your journey.” Instead of trying to steer, we stand nearby ready to support if we can and if it is helpful. Instead of rescuing, we witness. There’s humility in recognizing that our role in someone else’s life is not to manage their outcomes, but to offer presence when invited. This has required me to sit with discomfort—especially when I can see potential pain ahead for someone I love. But I’ve learned that growth doesn’t happen when we’re shielded from all hardship. Growth happens when we’re allowed to meet our own lessons, to find the meaning in the pain and the discomfort and what I might find for meaning is different than what you might find for meaning and I need to let others find their meaning and their lesson.

Letting go of wanting more for others has brought me more peace than I expected. It has softened my relationships. It has reduced frustration. And it has allowed me to love people as they are, not as I wish they would be and that is more pure love, not transactional love.

Another area of deep reflection for me this year has been my relationship with abandonment. Abandonment wounds are subtle. They don’t always show up as fear of being left forever. Sometimes they show up as a tight feeling in your chest when someone cancels plans. Or a sudden wave of sadness when someone can’t give you the time or attention you hoped for. I’ve noticed how easily I can be triggered—not because someone is doing something wrong, but because an old story wakes up inside me that they has nothing to do with them and they don’t even realize the story is there or that it’s reading to me inside.

The story says: If they’re not choosing me, I’m not important. The story says: If they say no, it means rejection. And this year, I’ve worked on gently challenging that narrative. I’ve had to remind myself that people have full lives. They have responsibilities, needs, and limits. When someone says no to or choosing something else that they need, they are not necessarily saying no to me. They are often saying yes to themselves. And that matters. Because that’s what I talk about and that’s what I want them to do. That’s what I do.

When I honor my own capacity and needs, I’m not rejecting others. I’m caring for myself. And if I expect compassion for my boundaries, I have to offer the same in return. This shift hasn’t erased the emotional sting completely. But it has changed how I respond to it and it’s made me recognize it quicker. Instead of reacting from the wound, I pause. I breathe. I ask myself: What else might be true here? And ultimately what’s true is that I am still loved, I am always loved even when I am not chosen in that exact moment. And learning that has been incredibly healing.

All of this reflection naturally leads into how we relate to other people’s opinions—especially in a world that feels increasingly polarized. I’ve spent time this year noticing how quickly we can assume opposition where there is simply a difference. Someone may hold different political views than I do.
 They may prioritize different values. They may see the world through a lens shaped by experiences I’ve never had. And I’ve learned that this does not automatically mean they are against me. It often just means that other aspects of life feel more urgent or important to them.

When we truly care about people, we don’t try to flatten them into versions of ourselves. We don’t demand agreement as proof of love. We don’t force them into our mold to feel safe. We allow complexity. Now of course if someone’s views are completely against your core values, so for me that means that all are worthy of love, respect and caring regardless of color, regardless of how you identify, what religion or anything else, then yes, if you are against that, then you can choose to move away from them. But for the rest we remember that humans are layered. That people can be kind and loving and still see the world differently than we do. This doesn’t mean abandoning your values. It means holding them with confidence rather than aggression. It means listening with curiosity instead of defensiveness. It means recognizing that connection does not require sameness. And honestly? This has been one of the most peaceful shifts I’ve made. When I stopped trying to change people, and care about them for where they are at, I find more peace in relationships.

At the heart of all these reflections—forgiveness, letting go, healing abandonment wounds, accepting difference—is one central choice and it is a choice: Do I harden, or do I soften? It’s tempting to build armor after we’ve been hurt. To say, Never again. To close ourselves off in the name of self-protection. But armor doesn’t just block pain. It blocks connection. And I personally don’t want to live that way. I want to remain someone who believes in compassion. Someone who offers grace without self-abandonment. Someone who trusts that staying open—while maintaining boundaries—is not naïve, but courageous. This doesn’t mean I get it right all the time. It means I’m willing to notice, to reflect, and to choose again.

As we close today, I want to offer you a gentle invitation. Ask yourself:

• Where might I be holding onto resentment that no longer serves me?
• Where might I be trying to manage someone else’s journey instead of trusting it?
• Where might an old wound be asking for reassurance rather than reaction?
• And where might I soften—just a little—without losing myself?

You don’t have to answer all of these at once. You don’t have to fix anything today. Just noticing is enough. I hope that my self reflections over this past year helps you to do your own self reflection and that we can all move forward into 2026 stronger and moving towards peace just a little bit more. Thank you for spending this time with me and I thank you for following and helping build our community. Thank you for showing up for yourself. And if someone shared this with you, thank them too—because it means someone thought of your heart. And think of someone else that you think needs to hear this, that you can show you care by sharing this with them. Let’s go into this year with more kindness towards ourselves and this will naturally lead to more kindness to others. Let’s be more gentle with ourselves and with others, let’s believe there is love in the world and let’s start with ourselves. Let’s offer love to yourselves and begin to bring more light into the world, little by little and peace by peace.