All this week, I've been feeling a heaviness that didn't start to lift until I named it. 

Everyone in our home has had Omicron over the past two weeks. We are all finally negative and all cases were thankfully mild. Like many of us, all this comes after weeks of altered or cancelled holiday festivities and postponed gatherings with family and friends. Another year of not having events that used to be pillars of our family ties and seasonal traditions. 

Despite the negative tests this week, there's an uneasiness that isn't leaving. 

There's a collective heaviness that this environment is bringing us, and I think it's important that we name it and move through it together. 

This is real. It's here.

We're coming up on two years of living in a global pandemic environment, and so many of us are carrying with us and learning to move through so much that never have before:

• a collective grief for the way things were,
• a collective grief for the people...

In the Summer of 2011, I was living in NYC and getting divorced, after 7 years of marriage.

I had baby who had just turned one. I had been with his father for 11 years. I was 30 years old, living in Brooklyn with a new job in Manhattan. I was terrified and lost.

A few months after, I was terrified and lost plus, I was looking forward to start dating. 

When you haven't been single since the 1990's and you've never seen an online dating site - the dating world can seem incredibly intimidating. 

I had no idea what I was doing when it comes to dating. I later learned, no one really does. It's not something you figure out with your head alone. 

It would be nine years later - mid-pandemic on a first date that was mostly masked and socially distant - that I would reconnect with a friend and have that bloom into the committed partnership I have today. The one I had always wanted. 

This story is about the nine years in...

Every December, I share my lessons for the year. 

And then, there's 2020.

On the year that brought us a global pandemic, a massive opportunity to shift in consciousness (and also brought me my 40th birthday), the lessons went deeper than they ever have.

Here we go: 

• I am finally OK with others' discomfort, when it is a result of my authenticity. For my entire life I have molded how I show up - particularly around some people close to me - to keep the peace, to not ruffle feathers. Well, that's done. I'm going to be who I am always. I wish you luck with your discomfort. 
• I am owning my full power, more than ever before. I recognize the irony here. I spend my days supporting women to own their power. This year I recognized all the places I was still holding back from fully owning and expressing it -  using burnout and overwhelm as excuses to not create what I really wanted. I finally got real. I started living as my future...