(No. 51) Growing Through.

With every year there are silent battles and battle fields I have journeyed through that no one knew, sometimes not even myself until one day I woke up and the damage or wreckage met me in such a way that it could not be dismissed or ignored. 2025 was no different.

Call it growth. Call it pattern breaking. Call it depression (or the “debo” as one of my friends says). Call it sadness. Call it shedding. Call it lost. Call it dark night of the soul. Whatever you or anyone else may call the battles and battle fields, I know that the deep, sometimes delicate, and always sacred journey in and through is intense and layered and often invisible because it’s not something you can touch, or even see but it is there.

While these sometimes anguished states of growth are universal, there is a loneliness, an aloneness that always seems present. Even though we are not the only ones to have ever gone through it, the truth is that no one can journey through for us. We can’t select a stand in, have them learn the lessons, take the notes and then implant the knowledge of experience.

If you battled, fought and grew this last year in ways you are still processing, still reconciling, still unraveling, still cannot put into words, and if the growth is still in progress (and lets be real, growth is always in progress) I hope these words meet you. I hope these words hold you. I hope these words remind you. Though my eyes may not be directly on you, and though I may not personally know you, I see you. I am you. Still here. Growing through.

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there are victories that are unseen, “wins” and triumphs that cannot be recapped in pictures, tweets, light hearted posts and reels but this does not mean they should be forgotten, or dismissed. this does not mean they should not and cannot be honored, and celebrated and rejoiced in.

i want to remind us to rejoice in the ways we have moved and steadied ourselves through shaky grounds and turbulent tides of grief; have opened and healed through heartbreak, stayed soft and forgiving through mishandlings, especially when it is our own hands that have mishandled ourselves.

i want to remind us to honor the ways in which we have returned and remade home, rewritten love stories where the love of our lives are all versions, pieces and parts of ourselves.

i want to remind us to recall all the victories that required the dismantling of our own walls so that new kinds of sanctuary could be built within.

i want us honor the ways in which we have milked wisdom from pain, sought nectar from the bitter, basked in the shadows, seen ourselves as the light, made peace with the aches, squeezed sweetness from the deepest of wounds.

it is these victories that have required us to learn, to know, how to be both the healer and the medicine, the garden and the gardener, not for others, but for ourselves and i want us remind to honor, to celebrate and rejoice in this too.

- Ẹniafẹ Isis, Words As Fruit