Sublime 2026

Trusting God through loss, obedience, and the quiet beauty of becoming

Dec 30, 2025

0:00

-7:11

This is for the ones still standing. The ones who have walked through fire but keep showing up. The ones whose lives didn’t go according to plan, but who keep moving forward anyway.

We say goodbye to a year, but not really. Endings wear disguises. They dress themselves up as conclusions, but more often, they’re doorways. Thresholds into something we don’t yet understand. I’ve had many endings. Too many. But I know I’m not alone in that.

For me, 2024 was the one that shook me. The kind of ending you can sense before it arrives—the weight of it pressing in even when you can’t name it yet. You ever have that? When your spirit knows something’s shifting, long before your mind catches up? That quiet, stubborn intuition that something is coming, and you don’t know if it will save you or break you?

I’ve always had that knowing. It’s never loud, but it never leaves. I feel things before they happen. I’ve tried to ignore it, rationalize it away. But it always finds me.

In 2024, I flew to New York. It wasn’t supposed to be more than a visit. But the trip unfolded like a quiet reckoning. Without meaning to, I found myself retracing steps, through neighborhoods, through memories, through pieces of the person I used to be. I didn’t plan the path. It simply revealed itself, one familiar street at a time.

I saw my family; my mom, my stepdad, and my cousin. And Dorothy, my mom in every way that matters, up in Connecticut. I stayed for a week. Then I came back to Georgia.

Three months later, my stepdad was in the hospital. One month after that, we were at his funeral.

And then my mother, my birth mother… vanished, again. She sold her place. Changed her number. Cut off contact with me and all my siblings, except one. There are seven of us… seven.

I wish I could say it was unexpected, but it wasn’t. She’s disappeared before. She’s missed birthdays and graduations and the sacred everyday moments where a grandmother is supposed to show up. That’s always been her pattern. But this time felt final. Not like a pause. Like a door closing, and locking from the other side.

After the funeral, I sat on my couch, staring into a silence so thick it felt alive. And one thought kept circling: What’s the point?

That’s the thought no one talks about. The one that comes when the weight feels too big and the future too blank. When there’s no one coming to rescue you. When you’re not even sure if you’d ask them to.

I was there. Quietly drowning. But I prayed anyway. I read my Bible in fragments. I pressed play on podcasts just to feel a voice in the room. I did what people do when they’re trying not to disappear. I kept going. One day at a time.

2025 didn’t arrive with fireworks. There was no great reveal. No money falling from the sky. No cinematic plot twist. Just a whisper. Clarity.

God showed me that all the striving, the chasing, the endless push to prove myself—it was wearing me down. That happiness wasn’t out there somewhere. That I already had everything I needed to begin again. Inside me.

And so, I did.

I went to writing retreats: Story Summit, Her Spirit, Songwriters Okoboji (Okoboji Writer’s Retreat), Pat Conroy’s Literary Festival. I met writers who breathed words like air. I found my tribe. People who understood the ache of a blank page and the thrill of a good sentence.

At one retreat, I met a woman who travels the world volunteering at film festivals. She looked me in the eye and said, “This is my dream life.” And something cracked open in me. Because it wasn’t about success. It was about purpose, connection, and belonging. Suddenly, I knew… that’s what I want too.

So in 2025, I lived it, I wrote, and I traveled. I showed up for the life I still had.

I began my novel. I wrote a feature screenplay, Cash Out Kids. I finished my first thriller, Fingers Crossed, set to film in 2026. I rewrote A Rose to Georgia. I started my first vertical series. These aren’t just projects. They are proof: I didn’t stop.

I stayed connected this year, really connected. That’s not always easy for me. I’m someone who can disappear into solitude for weeks, and no one would know. I meet people, but I don’t always follow up. This year, I did. I kept in touch. I built friendships. I made room for new people, and they made room for me.

My sons are thriving. They’re farther ahead than I was at their age. Watching them grow is the clearest evidence I have that I must have done something right.

And here, on Substack, I found my voice again. I shared stories I’ve kept locked up for years. I told the truth. Even when it hurt.

The grief still comes. It rises in quiet moments—when I think about my mother and the finality of her absence. When I remember the last day I saw her and my stepdad in the Bronx. Our last Breakfast together… laughter. Ordinary moments that I didn’t know would be the last.

Some losses don’t heal. We just learn to live beside them.

2025 was the year I finally accepted that she’s gone. That the mother I keep hoping for doesn’t exist, and never did. That’s a brutal kind of peace. How do you stop loving someone who broke your heart? You don’t. You just stop begging them to be someone they never wanted to be.

I still love her. I always will. But I’m done chasing what she will not give.

And even in the ache of that truth, there is joy. So much joy.

There’s joy in my sons’ voices. In the friends who show up. In the community I’ve found. In the lake where I walk. In the words I write. In the quiet knowing that I am not alone. Not ever.

So here I am, standing at the edge of 2026.

I don’t need the whole picture. Just the faith to take the next step.

Because even after all that was lost… I am still becoming.

Sublime.