The Key To Making A Resolution Stick
True healing requires integration, not rejection
Sweet Community,
Throughout the past years, I have written extensively about the vast changes I experienced in myself immediately after my cancer diagnosis. Even amidst what I formerly imagined might be the most turbulent experience I’d ever face, life began to flow freely. A new sense of peace found me—not in the absence of hardship, but in ceasing to resist it, in learning to meet life as it is.
The change was so profound that, after a lifetime of thinking of myself as the most nostalgic person in the world, I stopped experiencing nostalgia. Where I once pined for the “good old days,” I found myself almost never reaching backward in time. I couldn’t long for something better because I had never experienced anything better than living with a wide open, unguarded heart.
It was such an enormous shift that even during the hardest days of cancer, I would walk around thinking, Thank goodness. Thank goodness for this healing. It sounds strange, I’m sure, but I was wildly more joyful. Opening my eyes every morning felt like opening a gift. In that place, a negative social media comment couldn’t impact me. I wasn’t even bothered when my dentist removed the wrong tooth! I became a more loving partner and a far more compassionate friend to myself. Even on the hardest days after chemo, I turned my kitchen into a dance floor. For the first time, I befriended the birds and squirrels in my yard. I felt at home in the world.
When I spoke to my friend Ethel about how grateful I was for this healing, she was happy of course, but cautioned me not to think of cancer as the well from which my wishes came true—lest I unconsciously send a message to my body that illness was welcome in my life. I was grateful for Ethel’s insight, and her words reminded me of something the poet Franny Choi once wrote: “I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life.”
As the new year approaches, many people are considering how to change their
lives. How to change themselves. While the world lists its many resolutions to
be “better” than the year before, I want to share one of the most important
lessons I’ve learned from changing a lot in a very brief amount of time:
The more we change, the more we must commit to loving the people we
were before we changed. The most transformative moment in my journey these past
years was realizing that New Me wasn’t extending love to Old Me. This
realization hit me in the middle of the night. I woke up and saw that I didn’t
just dislike Old Me—I was terrified of Old Me. I feared returning to being
anxious, blaming, defensive, and closed off. I hated the idea of returning to a
life filled with chronic dissatisfaction, bending to the weight of others’
judgments, and chasing the approval of the world.
That night, I began to understand something profoundly powerful: in rejecting who I had been, in pushing that person away, I was caught in a resistance that would do nothing but recreate Old Me. The harder I tried to sever ties with the person I had been, the more I found myself embodying that self. Only when I began to offer Old Me compassion, kindness, and love did a more permeating sense of freedom begin to emerge. When we hate ourselves, we suck all of the air and light out of the room of our being. And nothing can grow without air and light. My therapist says that shame is the least energized, least alive state we will ever experience. But love and acceptance are accelerants for growth.
As I reflect on this journey, I see that true healing requires integration, not rejection. The path to becoming more open doesn’t lie in casting aside the versions of ourselves we no longer wish to be. It lies in honoring them, thanking them, and embracing them with tenderness. Each version of us is a stepping stone, a necessary chapter in the unfolding story of who we are.
So, as we stand on the brink of a new year, let us resolve to love who we have been. In loving those people, I trust we will all root ourselves more gracefully in who we are becoming.
See ya next year!
Love,
Andrea Gibson
