02 Named Acknowledged

What needs to be named or acknowledged this year?

Intro

During fall 2024 I attended a workshop with journaling mentor and coach Joelle. You can follow her substack at Reconnect and Befriend; her Instagram is Reconnect and Befriend Coach.

To help conclude this year (that wraps up a quarter of the twenty-first century), Joelle's recent substack offered three questions – with three lively illustrations – to answer as we anticipate a bright 2026. My second reflection is about named or acknowledged.


What needs to be named or acknowledged this year?

This is another old one for me because "you can't change what you don't acknowledge." Particularly since Covid was pandemic, I've looked around and seen how many are struggling with finances, housing, career, mental and emotional health, social well-being. What's on your list?

You know the adage about women settling for too little. However you identify, you've probably been so overwhelmed, disappointed, and snowed under that you've truthfully admitted almost everything is pretty bad, not what you expected, far from what you ultimately need, but when you scarcely can breathe or take another step, you still admit "at least" I have a roof. "At least" I have some income. At least I don't quite hate my job(s). I'm "even" doing better in some ways than I was in and when…[name the place and/or name the time].

But it's not only naming the situation that's never objective because it involves living breathing people. It's acknowledging the sorrow, grief, and devastation. Most of us are doing whatever possible to alter our current circumstances, because so few are in anything better than passable. Amidst all that, naming where I am today professionally and residentially is easy and I've been doing it out loud, on paper, and online.

Like almost everyone I know, I'm working on updating my living and career situations. I've been taking action, however sporadically, imperfectly, and otherly. What I want is simple. How to achieve it isn't simple; that I know because I can't count the dead ends and roadblocks.

I need to name and acknowledge the grief, the loss, the shattered minimal expectations. The emotions!

Someone in a past life told me their physiological reactions usually were vascular. Mine are visceral, so my gut takes a whole lot of the impact. For physical health at least as much as for my mental and emotional well-being, I need to name and acknowledge the grief, the loss, the shattered minimal expectations. The emotions! Out loud (on paper, and online) now.

It's hard because we do need to tough things out some extent. Everything cannot become a major crisis, or even a crisis saved for later when I have time for it.

That's my word of acknowledgment today. Because I can't change my reactive gut until I admit to it.

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