A year ago, I was in a kitchen cooking the same food I cook every year this time of year. Christmas movies playing in the background. Snow on the ground. Cookies piled high on the counter. Dogs running around my feet. And still, the subtle hum of a lie living just under the surface of every ding of the timer.
This year, I’m alone. And I won’t sit here and pretend I’m not feeling anything about it.
Lately, I’ve been broadening my definition of sadness. Sad, to me, feels sharp and fresh, like a papercut but bigger. Maybe like a cardboard cut if you’ve ever had one of those. Immediate. Demanding attention.
That’s not what this is.
What I feel is older. It aches like longing, but colder. Like the headache the wind chill gives you when your ears stay uncovered for too long. It’s grief. For things that aren’t happening yet. For the things that can’t happen right now. Sad feels like pain before understanding. This has awareness all around it. A hug it doesn’t want.
So much has changed in a year, which somehow feels like both the longest year of my life and the blink of an eye. We’re taught that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But I am now living proof that that isn’t the whole truth.
Especially this time of year, those few strange days between Christmas and New Year’s, when the collective “Get It Together” energy descends. The before-and-after mentality ramps up. The resolutions get drafted. The reinventions are outlined. As if we’re all standing in the before, frantically planning for an after we hope will finally make us feel different.
I remember talking with a bartender last January who was half-joking, half-complaining about how everyone’s Dry Januarys and health kicks were going to make it a slow month. I laughed and told him most of those resolutions don’t make it past a few weeks anyway. He looked relieved. I got a free drink out of it. Silly, maybe. But telling.
Here’s the part that matters.
I showed up to this year with no plan.
I talk about this at length in Braver, Not Fearless, but the short version is this: standing on the shoreline in Santa Cruz, California, I made two agreements with myself. I wouldn’t drink myself to death. And I wouldn’t throw myself into the ocean.
That’s bleak. And it’s honest.
Which brings me to the title of this piece. Not before and after. Before and honest.
Not the performance of progress. Not the strategy deck. Just the willingness to stop lying to ourselves long enough to hear what’s actually true. To ourselves first. Then, slowly, to the people who love us. And maybe even to the people who haven’t had the chance to love us yet because they haven’t seen the wizard behind the curtain.
I hesitated to share this next part. Which says a lot, considering how much I’ve already put into the world.
For most of my life, talking about my weight felt like a line I wasn’t allowed to cross. Like acknowledging it would somehow cheapen the persona I had built. The version of me who “didn’t care.” The version who performed confidence so convincingly that even I believed her sometimes.
But performing confidence is not the same as feeling it.
I knew what pride was supposed to look like. I just didn’t recognize it in myself. Like asking someone who’s colorblind to identify blue. They might be able to name it, describe it, even teach it. That doesn’t mean they can see it.
What I saw instead was a girl who was her own harshest critic every time she looked in the mirror. I remember writing in my journal once, If I can’t even get myself to lose this weight, why should anyone listen to anything I have to offer about getting what they want?
So why break my own “we don’t talk about that here” rule now?
First, because honesty is no longer optional for me. It’s not a resolution or an intention. It’s a vow. Honest is the best thing I’ve ever been.
Second, because between this exact moment last year and right now, I’ve lost over forty pounds.
There was no plan. No reinvention arc. No dramatic overhaul.
After I learned I could trust myself to keep my word, I made one simple promise: I would go on daily walks. And while I walked, I would try to get to know the girl underneath the performance without judgment.
I owed her that.
The weight wasn’t the first thing I lost.
It was the stories I kept telling myself about who I was allowed to be.
Xx, to the brave thing,
P.S. If this piece resonates, my book Braver, Not Fearless goes deeper into the year that changed everything. It’s there if and when you’re ready. 🫶🏼💗