The Year I Finally Lived: 5 Lessons That Changed Me

What if the hardest year of your life is also the most expansive?
I’m closing the year by sharing five lessons that reshaped everything. How I held grief without labeling it failure, learned the difference between solitude and loneliness, redefined love far beyond romance, healed my nervous system to build real safety, and used travel as integration instead of escape.

In this episode, I talk about:

• Why grief showed up in joyful moments and how that became proof that I loved deeply
 • The shift from “I’m alone” to “I’m with myself,” and what solitude taught me about self-trust
• Redefining love through friendship, community, and a wildly affirming Galentine’s
• How the love I thought I lost didn’t disappear, it expanded
• Nervous system healing in real life: therapy, breathwork, movement, sleep, and honest self-audits
• Weaning off anxiety medication with medical support, feeling more, and coping better
• Building internal safety and how that unlocked solo travel and expansion
• Doing the things I always said I wanted to do… and finally doing them

Across the high highs and low lows, the throughline is acceptance: all feelings are temporary, and growth happens when we stop outrunning them. This episode is an invitation to reflect on what this year revealed about you—what you’re carrying forward, and what you’re ready to leave behind.

If you’ve been craving reflection, expansion, or permission to meet new parts of yourself, this one’s for you.

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Transcript

Setting Intentions For Reflection

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the I Will Know You podcast, where we are diving into the heart of self-discovery. My name is Arlene Solis, and I'm your host. And I'm so excited for this episode to recap the year that was. The year that felt like the longest year for all of us. A lot of life was lived this year, a lot of lessons, a lot of growth. And it's funny, when I look back at this year, I had set some intentions for myself about things I wanted to get clear about. I don't know if I got clear on a lot of things, but I definitely got a lot of depth from this year. This episode is going to be less about giving you advice and more about just sharing the lessons that I learned. And if it helps inspire you to think about what you've learned this year or you can take from anything that I've learned, then it's helpful to me. It's a win because this whole self-discovery thing is that it is meeting new versions of yourself. Sometimes they're great, sometimes they're scary, sometimes they're exciting. And I did that. I used to use the phrase all the time I've accomplished a lot, but I haven't lived much. And boy, did I live this year. And with that living came a lot of lessons that I learned. I've broken it down as best I can into five main themes. I'm excited to share what I've learned this year and to reflect back. When I originally started this podcast in the spring, I knew that I wanted to share some of these lessons that I was learning. And I felt like I was changing and growing so much all the time. And I still am. And I knew I wasn't the only person that was going through that or the only person that was having these experiences. So I thought, why not start a podcast and be able to share that? I also had a number of people in my corner who really believe in me and helped encourage me to do that as well. So I put out a few episodes and then I took a little break because life got really gnarly. I came back to it. As the year ended, I got my Spotify wrapped. As a creator, I really wasn't expecting much because I felt like, hey, I don't have a ton of content. Like I have five episodes and I feel like they're great, but I don't really know what else I'll see here. Another surprise to me this year are some of the stats. For my podcast, my podcast was named a 2025 most shared show, meaning it received more shares than 95% of other podcasts. It was a 2025 most talked-about show, receiving more comments than 89% of other podcasts. And this is the one that I am so proud of and just the most excited for. And it's that my show was named a 2025 instant hit show with a debut season more popular than 84% of new shows that launched on Spotify this year. Like, what? My show really talking about what has felt like a lot of messy life and wild things that I've gone through. And I have had hundreds of people around the world listen to this podcast. Obviously, my goal is to continue to grow it, but to know that people all over the US, as well as the UK, Singapore, India, Poland, those are just some of the countries listed for listeners that I have in this podcast. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you to friends, to family, to people that I don't know that have been listening to this podcast for taking a moment to listen to my journey and reflect on your own. And that's the hope and the goal of all of this is that it helps you think about the layers of yourself that you don't know. And how do you get to know those layers? So thank you so much. Thank you so much for supporting me. I think about all of these people in a room together, a few hundred people together listening to this podcast. And hopefully we'll get there one day. We'll have a live episode. But I just wanted to say thank you and thank you for listening to my journey. As we move into this next phase of the podcast, I definitely am going to start integrating guests. I wanted to start out with my own journey because I felt like, in order for you to get a sense of who I am and what this journey has meant to me, I had to take you through some of that. So I just really want to thank you all so much for listening and for your support. Showing up in this way is something I'm still learning. There's a lot to learn with podcasting. And as I learn and grow, that's one of the lessons I've learned this year. I have five main themes of some areas where I feel like I really grew and I really learned this year. The first one is that grief is a part of me, but it's not necessarily a failure and it's not something that is going to keep me stuck. This year, I met more parts of myself that grieved than I ever had. With the ending of my marriage, I had assumed because I was separated for a while before I actually got divorced. I thought that I was grieving during that time because things weren't working out and things seemed to be getting harder and there was a lot changing. But it actually wasn't until things really finalized in the spring that I got this new wave of grief. And that continued to radiate through different parts of life and different parts of the year and different moments when I thought, why am I so sad right now? I should be happy. Acknowledging when grief is really big, as I've talked about in one of my previous podcast episodes, means that you also get to acknowledge that you loved in a big way. It doesn't necessarily even have to be a romantic partner, but to lose someone or to lose a job or to lose some part of your identity that has really stuck with you and been deeply entrenched in who you know yourself to be. When that's gone, it's very disorienting and it's scary. And you kind of look around and you're like, what the fuck? Like, what do I do now? I've spent all my life as this one persona or this one identity that I felt like was such a big part of me. And now who am I? And that's what part threw me on part of this journey to self-discovery. I just didn't expect the amount of grief. I spent a lot of time this year saying to my therapist about different situations. I should be over this by now. I feel like I'm ruining this experience because I'm allowing grief to creep in. She reminded me that's not the case at all of our emotions and everything that we feel is actually it's all part of itself. And so you have to let those things flow. They're all temporary. What we consider bad emotions and what we consider good emotions, it is all temporary. Joy will leave, sadness will leave. Like all of it is something that happens in a moment. And there were so many moments this year that I was really, really proud of myself. And then I would remember something that would make me sad. And that grief snowballed into other grief, like unprocessed stuff from my childhood. Grief sat with me a lot this year. And I don't want it to sound like, oh, I just, you know, was sad all year. That's not the case. Grief can be very subtle and it can show up in these moments that you really don't expect it to. And it showed up for me in some of the moments I least expected it to. It showed up when I was on my vacation in Italy. I remember having moments where I wanted so badly to tell my grandma about the journey I was on. Moments when there were things my ex and I had talked about seeing in Italy. And I was seeing those things on my own. That was a bummer. It's like, wow, I pictured this going differently, or I pictured this being differently. And I had said to my therapist, you know, I feel like I'm ruining these moments. And when she had said, it's natural to have a big moment of joy and then think about how things were or who might be missing or what that used to be like. She was like, that is normal. And radical acceptance, I think, is part of grief, is accepting where you are in your process, in what you're experiencing. And I had to do that a lot this year. And I just felt like there were echoes of it that radiated. I put out an entire episode where I'm talking about grief and love and the fact that if you feel that deep, sad, painful grief in your gut, in your heart, in your chest, in your body, I hope that means you also got to feel really great, beautiful, strong love in whatever form it was, whether that's a romantic form, familial love, friendship love, love of a pet, or loving your career. Grief can come up in lots of different areas. But when it comes up to me, that counterpart, it's great to remind yourself that that means that I loved really big or that I felt love in a really big way. As you think about your grief and you think about letting it in and being curious about your grief and where it comes from and why it's there, I actually think that you get to hear yourself clearer when you are not outrunning it and you're actually sitting with it because it is a part of you. It's part of your emotions, it's part of the experience you go through, that entire human experience, as I've said a million times before, you have to feel it to heal it. And I was trying to outrun my grief because I knew it from when I was younger. I was very familiar with loss and very familiar with being, I tend to be kind of change averse. And I thought to myself, when I started to feel it, I wanted to resist it. I didn't want to feel bad. And having the reminder that you are going to feel all of your emotions, good and bad, they're going to pop up at different times. And that grief is not necessarily something that's going to make me feel stuck. Actually, the more that I let myself process my grief and be curious about it, the more that I can move forward. And it doesn't necessarily follow me into more experiences because I've taken the time to feel it. I'd invite you to be curious about your grief, about the things that you go through. And when you feel that tightness in your chest and you feel that creeping in of an old memory that you're like, oh, this might hurt to relive this or to rethink about this. Let it flow. The more that you resist it, the more that you push it away, the harder it's going to be for you to work through it. So just let it flow. You're not failing, you're not going to get stuck there, you're not going to cry forever about this. You will move forward, but you have to let it in. This year, I really let my grief in. I let it come with me through some stuff. And the more I've let it do that, the more I do feel like it is dissipating more and more as time goes on. Another really big lesson for me this year was the difference between solitude and loneliness. And there were some stretches of this year, big stretches of this year, where I was completely alone, completely with myself. I wasn't dating. I wasn't even spending time with friends. I feel like I had these moments where I needed to just be with myself. And I would have this inner struggle about it, where I sometimes would say to myself, I'm really lonely. And like, what am I lonely for? Am I lonely because I want romantic partnership? Am I lonely for friends? Am I lonely for family? I sat with my loneliness and was curious about it. I live on my own. I work from home. And so I'm with myself a lot. And or I would use the term I'm alone a lot. When I changed my language a bit to say, hey, I'm with myself, that shifted my perspective. I think that I am great company. I know that my friends and family enjoy spending time with me. And why was I not feeling like I was great company to myself? Why was I feeling like that was something that I just struggled more with throughout the year? And also to the dynamics of the life I lived in the way I was raised. I always lived with family, and most of my life I shared a bedroom. And then past that point, I lived with my ex for almost all of my adult life. So this is really the first time these past few years, about three years, that I've been completely on my own, not with a roommate. Me, me waking up with myself every day, being curious about myself, learning about myself, loving myself, being upset with myself, really getting into that time. And it's been kind of fucking scary. I'm not gonna lie. But there have been moments where I'm like, damn, I have had both sides of it. I've had days where I've woken up and been so excited to be with myself. And hey, today we're gonna do this. Today I'm gonna go for a walk and I'm gonna make myself a great lunch and watch a movie, take a nap, and go work out and podcast or write or journal. Like there have been a lot of those days. And then there have truthfully been days where I've woken up and been like, okay, it's me again. Like it's me with me again all day today. And there have been moments where I've reached out to friends and family and had phone calls and talked about this or said, hey, can you come over and hang out with me? I don't really want to be alone today. And then there have been moments where I've had that loneliness and thought to myself, I don't want to outsource something external to make me feel better. How can I sit with myself and feel good about sitting with myself versus feeling like, oh, I'm gonna open an app and go on a date, or oh, I'm gonna go out drinking with friends, or whatever it is. I just think that I learned a lot this year the difference between wanting solitude so that I could process stuff and then feeling lonely and what those two things. And I feel like I'm still doing that. That's a lesson that I'm still learning and I'm still growing a lot in. But learning to sit with yourself and learning to spend time with yourself in the moments you don't want to be alone, I believe is one of the biggest gifts and lessons that you can give yourself. One of the things that makes inner work and self-discovery so tough is that we don't want to face the scary parts. It is a lot easier on the days when I wake up and I'm like, yeah, I have all these things to do, or I'm gonna go to this event. It's so much easier to say, yeah, I'm excited to do that on my own, versus the days where I have an empty calendar, no plans, nothing going on. And those are the days that I've really challenged myself and said, you know, how can I create joy for myself in this moment? How can I push myself to sit with myself and not outsource some external validation to make me feel better? I know I use specifically talking about apps and dating, that seems to be something that's on a lot of people's minds right now. And I've gotten a lot of questions about. But I think one of the biggest things I learned about apps and dating this year is that you can't outsource that if you're not right with yourself. If you're not right with yourself and you have trouble sitting with yourself and learning about yourself in those lonely moments, and you're outsourcing that to other people for validation, it makes it a lot harder to connect. And it can be really dysregulating. For me, part of my work for myself is that I have to learn how to sit with that. No one are the moments that, like, yes, Arlene, this is the time to challenge yourself. So solitude versus loneliness and choosing solitude and trying to retrain my relationship with even the word lonely or being alone has been something that I've worked really, really hard on this year. And the back half of this year has been the harder part, too, because I think the holidays are a time, especially once you start getting into Halloween, Thanksgiving, like that whole part moving forward. That's the part where people want to reach out the most and are typically social the most or with family, et cetera. And I think that's been the time when I've been the most challenged. And I'm really proud of myself for the way that I've done that. I continue to stay curious and ask myself if I have a moment where I'm thinking, okay, am I lonely? Do I need to think more about how I'm spending time with myself? What am I trying to outsource or make external that's going to fill me in some way that I can do for me? That has been such a big, a big way that I've changed and I've learned this year. That's a really challenging one. But I do believe that to me, this is one of the heart, the hardest parts and the heart of self-discovery work, sitting with yourself in the moments that you don't want to and understanding for yourself what is the difference between solitude and loneliness. The next one is, and I alluded to this a little bit, but is about love and attachment in all different kinds of forms. This year was a year that I learned so much about what feeling loved and giving love looks like. And it was one of the years that again, I didn't have a stable, and I guess in my separation, it necessarily wasn't that stable, but I wasn't in stable partnership. And I did date, I dated a lot throughout the year, and I learned about myself in so many ways when it came to attachment styles and how I felt affection from people or how I felt loved by someone. But I learned even bigger than that, the different forms that love takes. I think earlier in the year when I started dating, I had said to myself, but I didn't really know exactly what I was looking for, which when you're dating, that's a little bit hard to say, oh, I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. I'm just kind of going with the flow here. And I think that was because the love that I was so used to, especially in my adult life, was romantic partnership love. And there were so many parts of that relationship and things that went on that did not feel like love that I thought were. So when I first started kind of redefining or rethinking my relationship with love, the first thing I did was date. But I became very frustrated with dating very early on, especially on apps and all that bullshit. I just but I noticed that I was just continuously getting frustrated. And so I put it down for a while. And instead, I looked at other ways to cultivate joy and fill my cup. And I cultivated some incredible friendships this year and met so many women that really inspired me. In February of this year, I threw my first ever Galantines because it was my first, my first Valentine's Day single. And I was sad about it. Like I was absolutely sad about it. And I thought to myself, what can I do to empower myself? What can I do to do something that still celebrates love? In a different way. That's maybe not necessarily the hallmark, you know, chocolate and flowers kind of love. I had been, and I still do, buying myself flowers. I love flowers, I love florals, and would make myself these really beautiful arrangements and kind of had this epiphany that I wanted to have a bunch of women over and I wanted to feed them and I wanted them to make their own bouquets. And that Galantine's party was so pivotal for me because I felt so loved. There were so many women that showed up. I want to say there was close to 30 women that showed up. And everybody was just so excited about having a space to connect, to meet other women, to create their own bouquets so they had their own flowers. And I just felt like it was so empowering. And I had so many people thank me. I thought to myself, wow, this is love in a completely different way. And after that, Galantine's, I had my divorce finalized not too long after that. And I was really sad, even though it was absolutely the right thing. I don't regret it. But it still is sad to mourn 15 years of life. And I reached out to some friends and let them know what I was going through and how I was feeling. And people showed up for me so beautifully this year. And I'm not somebody who likes to ask for help or likes to admit when I'm in a rough moment or a rough place. But because I let myself do that, I let myself be loved so beautifully and so loudly this year by so many people around me that wanted to show up. It's just been so interesting to me to think that I said this before during my Galantines. I felt more love this year than I had felt in my partnership in a long time. And I know that sounds really fucking sad to say, but it's true. I felt love so deeply and loudly by so many friends and family this year, and even some partnerships. I felt like my capacity for love grew because my understanding of it grew and my understanding of how love can look and feel and be, and the fact that it doesn't just have to be within romantic partnership. And I had convinced myself that if I didn't feel that type of love, did I really feel loved? I think you can love and be loved by so many different types of people in so many different walks of your life. And learning that lesson this year was one of the most expansive and probably beautiful things that I learned throughout the year. I also learned about my own capacity to love back and to give love to other people, whether that was romantic or within friends and family. The love that I thought I had lost didn't like it multiplied and it got so much bigger. And I learned about my own capacity to feel love and to give love. And that is something so beautiful because now stopped waiting for it to arrive to me. I know that it's something that I can cultivate, not just within myself, because of course self-love matters, but because the people around me also want to show that love. I invite you to ask yourself, what are the ways that you let yourself be loved outside of partnership and even in your partnerships? I think that I've said this in some of my other content before. I think that there are a lot of people who will love you just as you are, whether that is romantic, familial, or friendship. But can you accept that love? Can you show up in a way where you can let people know, like, yes, thank you so much for loving me in the way that you do? It really means a lot. Or thinking that you're not deserving of people to show up for you or for partners to show up for you in the way that you would want them to. I still struggle with this in some ways. But I I just want to invite you to reflect on that, to reflect on how you let people love you, if you are letting people love you, and the way that you define love for yourself from the people around you, from the experiences around you, from what you're going through. So it was a big one. It was a big one for me this year, but it was one of the most expansive lessons that I learned. I also did a lot of nervous system healing. My nervous system has been pretty shot for a long time. When you grow up and you have a lot of chaos around you, and then you get into your adult life, and that's kind of more chaos. So, you know, from putting myself through school, there was that was really, really hard. And then there was a lot that went on in my relationship that made me feel really dysregulated. I have been on my corporate grind for a really long time. That shit's hard. There's just a lot of things I felt like that kind of kept me dysregulated throughout the years. And for the past almost 15 years, I've been on some version of an anxiety medication because my anxiety has been so bad. And this was the year that I weaned off of that. And I give that disclaimer with again, and I think I've said this before, I don't want anybody to feel like if you are on some sort of a medication for your mental health, you do you. You do what you got to do. I support that. The same way I say, hey, if you had a heart condition, wouldn't you take a pill for your heart? If you got to take one, your brain is an organ. And sometimes you just need that help. And I did for a very long time, but I didn't realize how dysregulated I was. I needed to dive into that because I keep saying I want to live this big life and do all of these things. But if I have this crippling anxiety that's stopping me from doing anything, how do I accomplish that? How do I podcast record? How do I get in front of a crowd? How do I do these photo shoots? How do I travel around the world? I spent so much of my adult life feeling dysregulated and anxious and having panic attacks. And it was interesting. Once things settled from my divorce, I just started feeling a lot better. I started feeling a lot less anxious. I believe having more of that self-assurance and confidence in myself helped that I spoke with my doctor and I started to wean off of that medication. There were so many things that felt like they kind of got pulled out from under me this year. There were some really big kind of shifts in my career. There have been a big shift. I had to sell my house. I got divorced this year. I've had to make a lot of decisions for myself, with myself. My dog has had a lot of health issues. I've had some relationship issues. Like I've had a lot of shit go on this year that really had struck me with so much uncertainty. And I got to this place in the fall where I felt my dysregulation more than I had before because I had been on meds for so long. It softened everything. I just didn't feel things as big and as deeply as I was feeling them before. And then all of a sudden, I was feeling everything, the good and the bad, like times 10. And I had some moments where I was like, shit, should I get back on something? Like, this is a lot for me to deal with. But instead, I used all the tools that I had learned about myself talk and breathing and exercising. And am I treating my gut the right way? And why do I feel dysregulated? Being able to get to the root of those things and be like, hey, Arlene, you've gone out for a few nights, or you haven't been sleeping well, or I didn't work out. I was able to look back and then be honest with myself about the fact that it's okay that I feel dysregulated in whatever moment I was in because of what I was going through. That radical acceptance of those things and using all of those tools that I had learned in therapy and really diving deep into my self-care and pulling on each of those, again, those tools, whether that was going to Reiki or again, that was going to therapy or going for a walk. There are so many things that when I felt that anxiousness or I felt that dysregulation, I worked hard to challenge myself and say, like, why, why do you think maybe you feel this way? What's the root? Where I felt like before in my life, I was just anxious all the fucking time for no reason. Like, and it didn't, it wasn't no reason. I was living in a state of anxiety for a long time. But this year was the year that I really faced that shit. And I really said, like, I don't want to be stopped. Like, I don't want to stop living my life or doing these things because of my anxiety. And this was the year that I really took that back. And I'm not saying that I don't still feel anxious and I don't still have moments of panic. I have been in some really crowded airports. I have been at some concerts, some places where I'm like, I feel really anxious right now. But I've learned to cope with it differently than I did before. And so I also want to be honest about that and say, like, I still have anxiety and I just don't feel it the same way. It's not this like constant thing that lives with me all the time. It's kind of like this passenger that shows up here and there. And I'm like, hey, you can come with me. You can't come with me. Sometimes I'm like, I guess I have to let you. I've really changed my relationship where I had convinced myself for so long I'm just an anxious person and this is just how I am, and this is just how I'm living. But the more I studied the nervous system, talked to my own therapist and my doctor, and figured out more of why my nervous system is the way that it is, and how can I regulate it? And what are the tools that I can use, the more and more that I felt that healing happen, that kind of leads us into the fact that I was able to create a sense of safety for myself that I wasn't able to create before. That sense of safety helped me live. And I know some of the people that are listening to my podcast now that are friends and family have seen me online traveling a bunch and going out and doing things. And those weren't things I did before because I was so anxious. Like the thought of being in a super, super crowded plane or a restaurant or things like that would literally terrify me to the point where I'm like, I'm just gonna sit in my hotel room and not go. And this year, that was not the case. I was able to build safety within myself. And it became part of the relationship I had with myself was like, hey, I can't get myself back to neutral on my own. And that was such a beautiful lesson to learn. And I'm sure I'll have challenges in the future. I still have anxiety. It just no longer is the thing that it gets carried with me all the time. It's something that shows up in really specific, more acute ways than it has in the past. And being able to create that sense of safety, that relationship with myself is something that I'm just so grateful for. And I'm so happy that I was able to do. This next one is, and part of kind of what made that possible, essentially, and the fact that I was able to travel the way that I was able to travel this year, is this travel for me as integration and expansion. Travel was something that I used to be really scared of. And I again, and it was more from a place of dysregulation. And it was more from a place of, I don't know if I can do this because I'm not comfortable or I'm not familiar with these settings. So I'm just not sure if I can show up the way that I need to show up. I noticed for myself this year that changed for me once I started working on my nervous system more. Once I was able to do that more, I really felt that change. This year, I've traveled more than I've traveled in my whole life. And so that's why I have to name this off. This year, I went to Sunnyvale, San Francisco, Carmel, Omaha, Chicago, New York, London, Rome, Capri, Terramina, then back to London. I really did it. I got on a lot of planes, I got on trains this year, I got on ferries this year, and I did all of it, like I said, pretty much unmedicated, which was a shocker to me because that's not something that I feel like I've done before or was able to do. And all of those trips and all of that travel just made me feel like I expanded more as a person, as a human, as a woman. I learned so much this year traveling. And it really changed also my relationship with money and my relationship with stuff. Because don't get me wrong, your girl loves some fancy things. I will always love a good handbag. I will always love some luxe goods. But travel wasn't something I spent a ton of money on. It was more something that I would look at as I'm gonna save up for that and I'll go on vacation like once a year. Not that it was something that I could integrate throughout my life all the time. And the more and more I traveled solo, that actually became such a healing experience because I wasn't worried about anybody else. I wasn't worried about, you know, hey, what do you want for breakfast? Or I gotta make sure that you have all of your documents and you have all of your travel. I was responsible for myself and I was with myself and I got to experience so many things that I never thought I would get to experience in my life in this year. And it feels like it's just the beginning. But being able to fly across the world on my own, on my own dime with myself and enjoy beautiful meals and meet incredible people and shop and swim and whatever I did when I was gone, I came back from every trip feeling stronger and feeling more beautiful and feeling more expansive and feeling like, okay, I want to save my money for my next trip, not I want to save my money for my next handbag. And I have learned, I've talked about this in one of my earlier episodes, but there's this book called What Happened to You by Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry. And one of the things it talks about is how what a privilege it is to grow up with a regulated nervous system and to grow up in a stable environment because it makes you more adventurous. It makes you want to travel, it makes you want to go out and do things. And I hadn't realized that the healing from that, that the fact that I was so dysregulated and had grown up in that way and stayed that way throughout my adult life, just really stressed. It didn't make me excited to travel. It didn't make me excited to go anywhere, to see anything. And now that I've done some of that healing, I just see it completely differently. And now there's so many places in the world and even in the US that I haven't seen and I want to see and I'm planning my next trip for. And all of this, it just, I feel like I got to learn about myself and meet new versions of myself on every single trip I took in every single city I went to. And some of these were places I had already been, but it was like visiting them on my own with myself in this new season of life, feeling more regulated, feeling more confident. I just was able to expand and to grow and to learn and to experience joy in new ways. And I just couldn't be more grateful for that. I really can't be more grateful for all of those experiences and opportunities this year because it really has shaped so much of who I am and who I've become and who I'm continuing to become as time passes and continues to grow. This last trip that I went on to New York here at the end of the year, I went to see Christmas stuff during the holidays in New York City. And everyone was like, You just want to do that? I'm like, Yeah, I just I've always wanted to go to Rockefeller Center during Christmas time. I've always wanted to see the lights. I've always wanted to go to the markets, see the roquettes during their 100-year anniversary. Like I did all of those things. And I did meet up with friends and I, you know, went to work and I did things like that. But I really was like, this has been the year that I've said I've always wanted to do that, and then I did it. And travel was a big, big, big piece of that for me this year. As I rap and think about again, this experience, these opportunities, the things that I've learned. You can hear it and you can see there were a lot of high highs this year and there were a lot of low lows. There were a lot of moments of I'm lonely, this is sad, I'm fucking going through a lot. Then there were other moments of like, holy shit, this is my life. Like, I can't believe that this is where I am. And I've learned to hold all of those things together this year, even though the back half of the year has been a lot tougher than I felt like kind of the front half of the year was. I'm grateful for all of it. I'm grateful for everything that I've learned, whether that was something that was painful to learn or whether it was something that brought me a lot of joy. I'm grateful. And in the moment, it's really hard to say that shit to yourself. It's really hard to be like, wow, I'm going through a lot and eventually I'm gonna be grateful for this. People will tell you that you're going through something really hard right now, but in the end, you're gonna feel so much better about it. In that moment, you're like, I really could care less. Like, I am in pain right now. And so that's not helping. But as somebody who's on the other side of a lot of shit, still going through it, but on the other side of a lot of shit, I can attest to that being true. In that there is expansion, there is growth, there is so much that happens, even in those moments where you feel the most restricted, even in those moments where you feel like things are the hardest, or you're the loneliest, or you're the saddest, or you're the most angry. Remember that there's a counterpart to that experience that will happen and will come. And it's going to continue to change in cycles, right? Like the Arlene that I met in the spring when I started this podcast, when my divorce finalized, the Arlene that I met in the summer when I traveled through Europe, the Arlene that I met at the end of the year, when I went through some gnarly emotional experiences, like all of those are me. I did that. I lived all of that life. And I bet you, if you take a moment to reflect for yourself on what this year has done for you, whether it's brought you a lot of shit, and you're like, girl, I've just been eating shit all year. I don't have any lessons yet. Reflect on that. Kind of ask yourself like, did you meet another version of yourself that you hadn't met? Whether that was good or bad. I met parts of myself this year I didn't like. And I met parts of myself this year that I loved. But again, it was all me. And I had to meet all of those parts of myself to be able to expand into the next version of me and the next part of growth that I'm gonna have. And so I ask you those questions. If you let yourself be all of those things, if you let yourself meet yourself, the good, the bad, and integrate those parts of you, what did you learn this year? Where did maybe you grow? Where did you have moments that you thought, wow, I actually thought that this was constricting me, but it actually was expanding me. I bet you that there are moments in there that you can call on and that you can think about in that time. And so even for myself, as I was putting this episode together, I had kind of convinced myself like this has been a really fucking hard year. Like it just has been. But as I was going through it, I was like, this has also been a really beautiful year. And that continued, that continued um comparison of these two things, right? Just seem so opposite of each other. The juxtaposition of the year that I lived that was a perfect word. The juxtaposition of the year that I lived. It just is. And I accept it. And I accept that this is who I am. This is who I'm becoming. I am in my becoming. And I think I always will be. But I have to leave space to meet all of those versions of me in a year, in a month, in a week, in a day, whoever they are. If I don't meet them, if I don't meet myself at the moments that I need to, how can I grow? And how can I expand? There's going to be more versions that come through that. And so again, ask yourself, you who have you become this year? It doesn't necessarily mean you became a brand new person. But what is a layer of yourself that you learned about this year that you're going to take with you into the next year? And what's the shit that you're going to leave behind and say, no, that's not part of me. That I'm not doing that. This, I'm not doing that next year. Think about it. Have a moment, reflect on it. I truly think that it will help you. And it will change everything. It truly will. Even if you don't think that it will, even if you're living in the moment and feeling like, what is feeling my feelings going to do? What is meeting a new version of myself going to do? I promise it will pay off. I promise that you will feel that level of expansion. You will. You just have to let yourself do it. If you loved this episode, I ask that you please like, subscribe, leave a comment, tell all of your friends, tell all of your family, let them know that this podcast exists. As I mentioned, we are going to be moving into some guest episodes coming up soon. So I'm really excited for that. Be sure to follow me on Instagram and TikTok at Queen Arlene. That's Queen. And then A-R-L-Y-N-E. And you can also follow the podcast on Instagram at I Will Know You Pod. Thank you again for spending some time with me at the end of the year. I hope that the lessons that I've learned help you dive into your own self discovery, meet some new versions of yourself, and learn about yourself too.