This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 600 tenthth episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors

Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Looking Back on 2022, five

reflections on a year of healing.

For the past five years or so, I have opened every new year with an episode looking back

on the lessons I have learned in the previous year.

What began as just another idea for a podcast episode

has become one of my most treasured rituals.

Every year, when I sit down to write this episode, I enjoy looking back

over the previous 12 months and taking the opportunity to share the highlights and sometimes

the low lights with all of you. And every year I wonder what

will I write in next year's post? For all of us, these last few years have been intense. For me the intensity really began several years before the pandemic in 2016. When I turned 30 a few months earlier, someone told me to enjoy it. That one's 30s are potentially

the best decade. So far, my 30s have not exactly disproven that idea, but they certainly didn't turn out how I thought.

The past seven years have been unrelentingly amazing, unexpected, enlightening, liberating, and transformative, but also beyond difficult, sad,

lonely, terrifying, and often bewildering.

Someday I may talk more about what happened, but for now it is an explanation that

involves the privacy of too many people whose relationships and feelings I value.

I will say that whatever you're thinking it might be,

you're probably wrong.

Suffice it that certain life circumstances finally became

untenable and when they did the bottom fell out of my world I felt unmoored as if I had lost all context and for a long while it felt as if I had

nothing to hang on to. I moved to another state to be closer to my sister and for the first time in my life I lived alone. As it turns

out loneliness and existential crises don't make for happy bedfellows and then

...