True Grit

With 2025 coming to an end, I thought long and hard about what I wanted to say to end the year. I could have lamented that it was the most challenging year of my life, but it seems 2025 wasn’t the best year for a lot of people… why would my story be any different? What good would it do for me to commiserate about how awful it is? Why even bother giving power to that year by labeling it as a bad one, rather… shouldn’t I put a spin on it that comes from a place of power?

Still, I have a weariness inside me that I can’t seem to shake. This ever -looming fog that becomes denser with time as I watch it rolling in behind me. Like my soul is just sore from the constant gymnastics I use to conquer the tests being thrown at it. My nerves are so frayed that the slightest sounds (like the fucking Microsoft Teams chat chime) or annoyances trigger this rage inside me that brings about a sense of shame every time it cracks the surface of the facade I’ve curated the past year… of this funny, hardworking, driven, care-free woman. Granted, I am that woman deep down, but it’s just that this exhaustion seems to have corrupted the very foundation of who I am. Or maybe it’s just the things I’m doing prevent me from being who I am, and it’s my authentic self fighting furiously to stay the course.

And I’ve numbed those feelings not with booze or drugs or sex or retail… but with production. Lift more, run more, work more, ascend the ladder more. Dopamine rushes from conquering life’s challenges: manage this program, square yourself away financially, get fit, therapy the fuck out of yourself, ACHIEVE ACHIEVE ACHIEVE… like in the relentless pursuit of self-improvement I actually deny myself the self-acceptance of who I truly am.

And in doing so, I’ve just boiled with resentment. Living for my resume again and not my obituary.

My heart is bruised. I want someone to lay my burdens down by their feet… someone to just tell me it’s ok to drop the load. I want, even for the briefest of moments, to just be weak. I’m exhausted from pretending.

2025 was the most challenging year of my life, but it was also the one that made me grow the most… more so than the spring/summer of 2021. It was a season of profound grief, and I experienced depths of anguish that I thought I already knew, but I was caught off guard by being thrown back into the darkness again. I started the year off losing Blitzkrieg, then found my partner of 3.5 years abruptly leaving me (never to speak to or see her again, which still to this day is as horrific as it is MIND BOGGLING), to being thrown into the arena of one of the biggest disasters of recent history in Texas. All of these things have a ripple effect… where the ramifications just echo on and on and on… endlessly. Relentlessly. When does it stop?

Lost my dog… lost my girlfriend… all I needed to make a shitty country song was to lose my truck.

So I spent the whole year in a season of messy healing, mostly in silence. Quiet defiance. That this year wouldn’t catch me weak. That the heartbreak wouldn’t catch me stumbling. Not because I didn’t want the help, or was worried that people would judge me, or to protect my ex’s reputation, but out of just… frustration. “Here we fucking go again…” as I yank myself up by my boot straps AGAIN.

Such an interesting phrase… do you know that it’s impossible to lift yourself up by your bootstraps? I learned that from my good friend, Liam, whom I talked to about his beautiful journey of sobriety and resilience. It literally means physically standing yourself up by grabbing the straps on your boots which is physically impossible like trying to lick your own elbow.

You just tried licking your elbow, didn’t you…

Speaking of shitty country songs… this leads me to the title of this post: “True Grit.” Many years ago, I worked for Virgin Galactic and their sister company TSC (literally called “The Spaceship Company”… so clever *heavy sarcasm), and one of our core values was “True Grit.” Now, at the time I thought it was a little corny… kind of reminded me of the final frontier, which actually is brilliant, thinking back on it, seeing as VG/TSC was trying to pave the way for commercial space travel. After a while, I thought the core value kinda went hard, and I still have many of Virgin Group’s current core values as my own.

So when my life was at rock bottom again, and I found myself gazing up out of this hole of despair I found myself in aaaaaagain, I already knew I had it in me to climb the hell out of it. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m at the end of this climb and I’m just tired of doing it. I’m out of steam, right at the very end.

True Grit, though, to me, isn’t about powering through the hard shit like it doesn’t all affect you. I won’t sugarcoat it: it’s traumatizing to watch your dog die in your hands. It’s traumatizing to have someone you are SO SURE of, who has been your best friend for 3.5 years, whom you’ve formed a future with, suddenly ghost you to never hear from them again. It’s traumatizing sifting through debris and finding baby shoes from a child who got lost in the floodwaters. It’s traumatizing seeing dead people one day then returning back to your normal life like nothing just happened.

True Grit isn’t me pretending that it didn’t happen, or that it didn’t matter, or that it didn’t DEEPLY hurt me. True Grit is sewing the bullet holes up while you still march forward with your tear -stained face and blisters on your feet. It’s knowing when to push and when to step back. It’s running a marathon, not a sprint. It’s moving forward, even at a snails pace, so long as it’s FORWARD.

Resiliency isn’t being as strong as steel, it’s being bendable like rubber. Steel will fracture eventually once it’s reached its limits, and repair will be harder achieve. Try welding the bits of a human soul back together. Rubber, on the other hand, just eventually retracts itself into its original form. It’ll take time, but it will eventually get back to baseline.

But the very end of this journey has stretched my resiliency to its very limits. Which, you know what? That just means it remembers how far it can go. That I CAN see things through… harder things that I never knew I had the ability to get through.

As for my battered soul and boiling rage… I take it as a sign that it’s time for me to step back and assess my needs and what I want out of my life this year. I want calmness. I want peace. I think I deserve that. I think after everything that happened last year (the grief, the loss, the witnessing of human despair), I’ve earned the warmth of walking off into the sunset. I’ve earned the time to enjoy the warmth of people who love me. I’ve earned my freedom.

I crave a life of peace. I crave the presence of people who bring me that peace and safety in my life. And if you aren’t going to add peace to my life, then I don’t want you in it. That’s my promise to myself in 2026: to remove the things that don’t bring me peace and to stop living for my resume again.

True Grit is the ability to do the hardest thing possible… and sometimes that hardest thing is walking away.