Anchored, Not Lost

The year I was out to sea and back on a therapy couch. A year-end reflection..

Olympic National Park

At one point this year, I told my therapist I felt like a ship floating out at sea. Anchored. No clear direction. No visible harbor. Not sinking. Just tethered by a short chain. Held in place while everything around me continued to move. So this is 54, huh?

The past couple of years have been jarring in ways I didn’t anticipate. They brought me back into therapy. Back into deeper listening. There has been grief upon grief. Some obvious. Some requiring digging to reveal. The kind of grief you don’t always recognize right away, but feel accumulating in the psyche and body over time.

Life is actually full of grief if we’re paying attention. Not just the big losses, but the smaller ones too. Versions of ourselves we outgrow. Expectations that fall away. Relationships that shift and those that are lost. Certainties we didn’t realize we were holding until they were gone.

This year asked for a lot of feeling. A lot of processing. A lot of releasing. It has been challenging. And also, in unexpected ways, deeply beautiful and rewarding. Not because the hard parts disappeared, but because I stayed present for them and committed to the real work.

There’s an idea that keeps showing up on my radar, often repeated in wellness and self-help spaces, that gratitude can’t coexist with other emotions like sadness or anxiety. That once you access gratitude, harder emotions should dissolve. From a clinical and psychological perspective, that simply isn’t true. Being told to “just be grateful” when you’re in the middle of a difficult emotional experience can feel dismissive rather than supportive, but I’ll save that deeper unpacking for another time.

Emotional life isn’t binary. It’s complex and nuanced. Emotions aren’t confined to a single place in the brain, nor do they cancel one another out. We are capable of holding multiple, even seemingly contradictory feelings at the same time. In fact, that capacity is a sign of emotional integration and maturity, not confusion.

This year made that truth impossible to ignore. Grief didn’t cancel out gratitude and gratitude didn’t require me to bypass what hurt or needed to be felt. They existed side by side, sometimes tangled, sometimes simply alongside each other. Mostly messy.

I feel immense gratitude for this year. For the people who showed up, again and again, listening with love and without judgment. That part always feels like a divine gift. Gratitude for the deeper work I returned to. For the ways I learned to sit with myself and uncomfortable emotions instead of rushing toward clarity or resolution. For the slow expansion that doesn’t show up in neat metrics or public milestones, but changes how you move through your life and relationships and how you show up for others.

There has been movement. Not dramatic. Not linear. But real. A subtle loosening. A growing trust in my own inner knowing. A shift away from chasing and forcing direction and toward listening for it.

I don’t end this year with a map or a clearly marked harbor. But I do end it with more respect for times of uncertainty, and more trust in the wisdom of staying anchored when rushing to move would only lead me somewhere misaligned.

The work is ongoing. I’m still learning. And I’m deeply grateful for that and this life. c’est la vie, 2025! You’ve been necessary.

xx,

Michel