I had no idea what this last year would hold.

I might have bailed if I’d known – or maybe done things differently in the run up to the bombshell. But perhaps it was already too late, and really, there’s no way I could have jumped ship early…for me, that’s just not an option.

There were some good intentions last year of documenting my journey – the goal was to become someone happy in my own skin. I filled my life with a lot of activity – much of it good – but took little time to contemplate and invest in relationships…and certainly left little time for writing.

It was a tough year at work and possibly the toughest year on my marriage, which is set to become an ex in the first part of this year. In hoping that I’d find what I needed to dig into inner happiness I was faced with the statement that my husband felt he could no longer be happy with me and wanted out – the bombshell. I couldn’t breathe when he first said that, and even now that phrase “I don’t think I can be happy with you” is like a knife in my heart.

So this next year is going to be the end of what I thought would be the rest of my life. That’s a hard thing to accept – there’s a lot of grief there and plenty of opportunities to look back and wonder “what if”. I know I need to grieve and that it will take time to walk through this. I’m hopeful that there’s a more beautiful story waiting to be written – more adventures that have not yet been imagined – and that I can keep the “if only I’d”s to a minimum.

I start this new year with a great deal of fear and trepidation as to these next months – I want to be able to jump ahead, skip the work of transformation and the pain that invariably goes with change. But there’s also a grain of faith – and if all it takes is a mustard seed of faith to move a mountain, then maybe I’ve got a chance to become beautifully transformed.