"Will I be forgotten?" "Am I becoming irrelevant?" "Am I being lazy?"
It's funny what slowing down in content creation in the last 6 weeks of the year and taking the last week of 2025 off from sharing anything publicly on social media still brings up in my poor exiled internal family parts.
"Other people are posting such great Christmas and end-of-year reflections! You're doing nothing. Are you sure about this, Ann?" My inner critic disapprovingly tsk-ed me as she rolled her eyes.
And yet, these little uncomfortable thoughts were all the more proof for me that my discernment to keep this period of digital and online silence was exactly what my soul needed. And oh how I fought the temptation at times to write or share something because I felt I had a brilliant insight or had just read something I really wanted to share and talk about!
So instead of posting my reflections where others could read or listen to them, I wrote them in my journal. And it's been a long time since I've written so much in private, or sat quietly and let ideas ferment without the immediate outlet which social media often is. And because my husband had also taken this last week of 2025 off from work entirely and we had both chosen to limit our access to devices and abstained from meeting anyone socially, the quality of presence, attunement and deep conversation between us increased along with longer pockets of mutually appreciated uninterrupted reading time.
Slowly, our 'kinda-at-home-retreat-in-daily-life' for the last week of December turned into the slow exhale I did not know I needed to close a year that had been very challenging on my heart and nervous system.
We cooked almost all our meals at home, slept before 1030pm, exercised at dawn together, and had drives and walks with slow and thoughtful conversations. Slowly, our 'kinda-at-home-retreat-in-daily-life' for the last week of December turned into the slow exhale I did not know I needed to close a year that had been very challenging on my heart and nervous system.
The internal tension and insecurity I still feel at times about choosing to retreat so much more often than I see other people who do podcasts and post content do is an embodied reminder to the promise I had made to myself and to God a long time ago - and that was to go at the pace of my inner child no matter how slow she is. This promise has made me more observant and attuned to what embodied living and working means for me, and I feel like the greatest gain of 2025 has been finally understanding and becoming more accepting of the kind of rhythm I need to live and function beyond being on constant survival mode.
I feel like the greatest gain of 2025 has been finally understanding and becoming more accepting of the kind of rhythm I need to live and function beyond being on constant survival mode.
I learn voraciously through reading, courses and workshops, conversations and experience and my learning is never just intellectual - it is always emotional and embodied which makes it incredibly intense. Learning is exhilirating and also highly activating for my nervous system and my old scripts push me to be on the constant wheel of learning and sharing so as to remain highly productive. But that has also been why I burn out very easily. I now know that even when I am not in a season of deep healing, I need space to digest what I am learning through rest from creating and simply just being more fully present to the day-to-day life I need to live "offline".
Putting my learning and experiences into words and sharing them with the world has always been a huge part of my praxis. As teachers and writers would know, we learn most deeply when we teach/write as articulation forces us to be clear about what we understand. But the deepest consolidation of learning and wisdom-making comes from the periods of withdrawal and silence that I still find difficult to take without guilt because it feels like I am "not doing anything productive". Old insecurities and trauma conditioning are hard to kick! But that's ok too because all of it is part of the integration journey and nothing to fear.
Let us remember that choosing to grow in authenticity and integrity towards being our true selves and loving others well is an incredible act of faith and faithfulness regardless of what we are objectively able to do in any present moment!
So while my inner critic and other manager parts of my internal family system still have a lot to say that can disturb my inner balance, they have also lost much of their sting. Their admonitions come gentler now, sometimes even sounding a little resigned, as if they already know that I'm not going to hop back into the old programming. It's nice to experience how interior integration seems to have helped even my most hypervigilant IFS (internal family system) managers learn that I (we) will be ok and that they can afford to calm down and rest.
So as I sit here typing this reflection on the first day of the new year, I find myself feeling hopeful that my "thicker" felt-sense of integrated grounding makes me more ready to share with you some even deeper and more vulnerable stories and insights about my journey and about deconstruction in particular in 2026.
I pray and hope that you and I will receive the grace we need in the new year for whatever lies ahead of us. And let us remember that choosing to grow in authenticity and integrity towards being our true selves and loving others well is an incredible act of faith and faithfulness regardless of what we are objectively able to do in any present moment!
Journeying with you,
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