Two weeks into the new year, I am reflecting on how hard it has been to juggle change. I think about how sometimes, we hold stories of those around us as our own and how it affects how we navigate our decisions.
I had a patient who came in to see me last week who had a pretty significant hearing loss and told me stories about how her mother struggled with a hearing loss at her very age and couldn’t successfully manage it (with hearing aids). She told me she feared experiencing the same thing. Her fear is what kept her from helping herself, what kept her living her mother’s story.
And that’s just the thing. We get stuck living other people’s fears and failures, assuming them as our own. We assume our story will be the same because it is a familiar one, but it isn’t truth, is it?
Stepping into our own path is hard. We often feel heavy with familial baggage that makes it difficult to brave a path that is different from what we know. Doing something unfamiliar may feel uncomfortable, but what feels risky may just bring about the very thing we seek.
To you, to myself- I say “let’s brave it.” Let’s brave the weird feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Let’s take a chance and be hopeful that trying something new, something unfamiliar, will yield success. Two weeks into 2026, I’m rooting for us all.
