Reflecting on 6 Life-Changing Lessons in 2024

No lie—it feels strange to be sitting here writing you this post. Every year, I open the new year with a reflection on everything I learned in the previous year and a look forward into my intentions for the year to come. When I first started this tradition, I focused mostly on the specific lessons I was learning in my own writing, but as time has gone on, the writing lessons have had such an impact on my life and the life lessons have had such an impact on my writing, that these retrospective posts have expanded into something much broader and more personal.

One year ago, I sat here and wrote to you about how I felt the previous year had been the culmination of an important Flat Arc period for me. I talked about what this period had taught me about the importance and complexity of Flat Arcs—character arcs in which the protagonist does not change but builds upon previously integrated Truths, as the foundation for eventually evolving the status quo yet again in future Change Arcs. I hinted I was coming to the end of this particular Flat Arc in my own life and standing on the brink of something new and momentous.

On this blog, I don’t share too much about the personal details of my life, since the main focus is, of course, helping writers become authors and authors become artists. But art draws from life, just as life builds upon art. If you’ve been following along in these New Year posts over the last half dozen years or so, you know I’ve been on quite a transformative journey, one that has challenged and evolved me in just about every area—not least in my relationship and perspective on art and story. In many ways, the First Plot Point of that journey was when I took the leap on a huge and, in many ways, traumatic move in 2018. I moved to a little farmhouse in Missouri, where I stayed and learned and grew and experienced pain and joy on levels I had never even known were possible. That was my last Change Arc.

Then circumstances dictated I move back. My intentions were to pitstop with my parents for a few months, then move to the West Coast. I ended up staying two plus years, caught partly between the throes of my own indecision and the housing market and, partly, in my deepest wisdom, the knowledge that I needed to take a minute to let myself fully live into my Flat Arc, as I processed and integrated the changes that had so radically altered my life not so very much earlier.

During that time, I made significant progress in healing my burnout and my relationship to writing fiction after four years of terrifying writer’s block. The last two years were a period of tremendous peace and blessing, but also years wracked with frustration, doubt, and uncertainty. At the end of last year, I decided to spend my birthday month in the mountains on the border of New York and Massachusetts. I have always believed that when we feel stuck, sometimes it is better to do anything—even if it is a mistake—rather than to do nothing at all. Just the act of moving the energy can change things up enough to evolve perspectives and reveal new possibilities (incidentally, this is also good advice when plotting a story).

That trip (I called it my Scorpio portal) changed everything for me. I came home and did what I do best: made a plan. I finally got super clear on the sweet spot where exactly what I wanted met up with exactly what options were open to me. I made the commitment that either I was buying a house in state by August, or I was giving up on the local market ever giving me what I wanted and moving out of state to rent once again. For the first time, instead of waiting around for something to happen (aka, the perfect situation to be offered to me), I started moving forward with intention, doing everything I would need to do if I was going to move.

I knew my ideal moving month was April, so I worked up a tight but (mostly) manageable schedule to do all the work I possibly could in the first four months of the year. By Christmastime, something happened that hadn’t happened in the previous two years: a house I really liked came up on the market. I looked at it, loved it, put a contract on it—and then the whole thing fell through after house inspections revealed major problems. A month later, the realtor let me know the owners might be willing to get everything fixed, so I went back to look again—only to have someone else put a contract on it first.

So I went back to work. I wrote 90% of the year’s blog posts, recorded and edited podcasts, filmed videos, created the Shadow Archetypes email course, edited the second edition of Structuring Your Novel, and prepared for publication its “sequel” Next Level Plot Structure.

Then, in March, my brother-in-law texted me a link to a house that had just come onto the market. As soon as I opened the link, I knew exactly what I was looking at. It was my “dream house.” It was a house that had first come onto the market three years earlier, when I was still in Missouri and just starting to look. It was everything I wanted, but at the time I wasn’t in a position to pursue it (not least because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to move). Throughout the long process of struggling to find anything in the area that I liked, this was the house I kept coming back to. Every time I got discouraged because another house I didn’t like came onto the market, I would go back to the old listing for this one and remind myself that if it was there, then something else I liked would be as well.

And then that house itself came onto the market! I was the first one to see it and the first one to offer on it. A friend who already lived in the neighborhood told me later that when they had first moved in many years ago, they had driven by this house and randomly commented, “And that is Katie Weiland’s house.”

I felt so held and led by the synchronicities, so blessed to be given not just a house, but the house.

My Flat Arc was officially over. The status quo was forever changed. Cue the next Change Arc. Once more unto the brink, my friends!

The 6 (Biggest) Lessons That Changed My Life in 2024

Obviously, this was a huge year for me. As a first-time house owner, I was learning or experiencing something new around every corner. As someone who relies on schedules and routines, and who struggles to acclimate to new spaces, it was a year that stretched me nearly every single day. Truly, it has been a portal. I am still not quite sure who I am on the other side, but I know I am not the same. Who I am will unfold, helped no doubt by everything I will write to you in the coming year.

So much of the year passed in a blur. I look forward to re-reading my journals from this year, because honestly I have no idea what I wrote in them! Every day, I was feeling and thinking something new. For me, this move was not simply a new place to live; it was adamantly the closing of one chapter and the opening of the next. It was an epoch (because, let’s be honest, I don’t know how to do it any other way). Necessarily, it is difficult to take such a life-changing experience and distill it into a short list of pertinent lessons. But as I scan back over the twelve months since I last sat down to write to you like this, these are the six lessons that particularly jump out at me.

1. Take the Leap

For many years, I have kept on my nightstand a small framed quote. It says:

Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

For many reasons, making this huge life change scared me. In the intervening years as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do, I knew part of what was holding me back was fear—fear of the unknown, fear of the responsibility and risk, fear of revisiting old trauma. I read somewhere that the three most stressful life events are major illness, death of a loved one, and moving. As excited and aligned as I felt about the decision, I was terrified. About a week after closing, I spent a solid twenty-four hours shaking and crying. Once I actually moved in, it felt like I’d jumped into an abyss.

For years, I have worked with the discipline of feeling into pain and fear as a way of moving through them. But now, I was truly in them—truly feeling them in my body… and moving them through. The limited perspective of my logical self believed the shaking and crying meant something was wrong. But my body knew better. My body was doing what it did best—like a dog shaking itself off—moving all this stuff through my system.

For years, I have been faithfully showing up to the personal practices that have asked me to confront my own limitations, constrictions, and shadow. Now, that work was paying off. The resources were there for me draw on, and I was able to keep moving forward—to “do what is front of me”—because underneath all the chaos, there was, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, the certainty that everything was okay, that this was all just part of the process, and that I only needed to be faithful to it and to remain present to myself.

And then something happened. There were moments where I felt… amazing. I felt better than I have felt ever. I felt such gratitude. Such joy. Such pleasure. It just bubbled up out of me. And then the hard parts would come again. But I began to gain the perspective that this feeling of joy was always there. Finally, I had cleared enough of my own junk to be able to see it, and in seeing it, I knew that this was a truer and deeper part of myself than anxiety or grief could ever be.

A few months in, it dawned on me: So this was what was on the other side of fear all along?! If I had known that, I would have blasted through it a long time ago! I realized I had been believing a Lie—the belief that on the other side of fear was just more fear, endless terror, and pain. But the Truth? The Truth was that the fear just needed to be moved out—in a painful process that certainly required bravery and resourced discipline—but after it was out, it was out.

I never would have learned that if I hadn’t been willing to take the leap in the first place.

2. Plan Ahead

Another quote I have kept somewhere handy for a long time is:

Do something your future self will thank you for.

Most of the time, I think of this quote in respect to the big things (like buying a house), but this year, it became clearer than ever to me that sometimes the future self I’m serving isn’t too far removed from my present self.

Without question, the greatest thing I did to help myself through this transition was putting in the work before I ever put a contract on the house. I worked like a crazy person during the first quarter of the year, doing a year’s worth of work—including the blog/podcast and three major projects—in four months’ time. The first couple of months went really well and felt manageable. The second two—after I put the contract on the house—admittedly pushed the redline pretty hard. This was something I had done my utmost to avoid in previous years, since I had pushed myself to burnout previously and definitely didn’t want a repeat performance.

But it was a sacrifice I made that my future self was endlessly grateful for throughout the year, since it allowed me to focus all my energy on not just the practical stresses of physically moving and making a home, but on my emotional needs in processing the tremendous changes I was creating in my life. Today’s post is the first post I’ve written since February 2024. The break—although hardly a sabbatical—was welcome in its own right and has brought so much space into my ability to think about what I want to share and how I want to serve this community going forward.

As for fiction, after closing, I decided to set it aside until I was settled in. My writer’s block was triggered the last time I moved, something I definitely didn’t want to repeat. This time, I also tried to honor my future creative self by giving her permission to focus her creative energies on building the foundation of a creative life to come.

3. Accepting Help

This summer, I ran across a beautiful quote from the book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charles Makesy:

Asking for help isn’t giving up. It’s the opposite.

I was blessed to be deeply supported by others throughout this transition, particularly by my parents and by my brother who was able to come down and spend six months with me, helping me move. The last time I moved, I felt very alone, for many reasons (some of which weren’t, in fact, true). This time, I was humbled and healed by not just the help that was always on offer, but by my own ability to reach out and ask, in ways I had never let myself do before.

The last several years have been the saga of my heart’s opening—something that in many ways was initiated by the birth of one of my nephews and has been, ultimately, the journey of learning to love and accept myself ever more deeply. It has been a quest to understand what it means to love and be loved, to explore the endless complexity of the query, “What is Love?”

Something I learned this year that seems utterly simple to recount, but which was profoundly life-changing is the realization that a true experience of Love is as much, if not more, about receiving as it is about giving. When it was growing near time for my brother to return home, I was remembering and recounting all the ways he had blessed me this summer, feeling into the true depth of his love for and service to me—and as I spoke my gratitude to him, I could see in his eyes how loved he felt by my recognition of his love for me. I realized that the love I was often trying to “push” out of myself toward others was a pale reflection of the love that emanated when I simply sat and received and recognized the essential lovingness of those in my life.

Counter-intuitive as it may seem, perhaps it is not untrue to say that when we cannot receive, we cannot truly love.

4. Surrendering

“Be Ground
Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender.”
–Rumi

Here’s maybe the biggest and most ironic thing I learned this year. For a long, long time now, I thought buying a house would give me a sense of security and stability in this life. Almost right away, however, it became clear to me that the exact opposite felt much truer. This year has challenged me with one of the most profound practices of surrender in my entire life.

I thought having a piece of ground to call my own would make feel rooted and proof against the changing times, but so far, nothing could be farther from the truth. Anxieties I either thought I had long laid to rest or didn’t even know I had came roaring out of the shadows. Everything felt so much more uncertain. The future suddenly seemed full of tripwires and a host of potential tragedies and misfortunes.

Instead of feeling like I now had something substantial to call my own, it felt like now I had something to lose. And my instinct was clamp down as hard as I could in a futile attempt to comfort myself with the conviction that I could control what happened to my future.

When I was young, I often felt my life was a straight road to the horizon. The older I get, the more I discover it isn’t a road at all, but a wide-open wilderness. Ultimately, I count that a good thing. But it’s scary as hell. And so, this year has been—and continues to be—a practice in surrender, a practice in opening my hand and letting life flow through my fingers. If there is one thing I keep coming back to in my deepest heart, it is the commitment to living to my highest path and purpose in this life—whatever it takes. In the abstract, I already know that “what it takes” is listening for the truth that “whatever each moment brings is my highest path and purpose.” That is the lodestone I always return to. House, no house, failure, success —whatever—it’s not the point. The point is listening for and living into my deepest understanding of Truth in each moment.

5. Gratitude

When the bursts of anxiety grabbed me especially hard this year, I would look around at this amazing opportunity I had been given, and I would tell myself, “Girl, what are you doing? You couldn’t possibly be more blessed.” I would tap into my longtime practice of feeling wherever gratitude was in my body—and wherever it was there, too, was space and peace.

In re-reading an old journal entry, I ran on to a quote I had saved:

Thank you for everything; I have no complaints whatsoever.

That simple little meditation has become the mantra of my year. “Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.” I look around me right now, and it is true. I have no complaints. And as I sit in that feeling and think of all the things my anxiety wants me to be afraid of, I realize this will be just as true even if every single one of those things (improbably) did happen.

Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.

My gratitude for this journey overflows. I am filled with so, so much gratitude for the fulfillment of a dream I have dreamed for so many years. I overflow with gratitude for the journey that has brought me here, for the person I have fought to become, the person who was brave enough and committed enough to keep going, to keep believing, to not give up. I am grateful for the experience I get to have right now—for this new home and all the experiences and lessons it has already brought to me.

That gratitude will remain no matter what comes next. Whether I am here for a year or ten years, I will always have gotten to live this and to have been the person who made it happen. If my life so far has taught me nothing else, it has taught me that however hard things may sometimes be, everything always happens the way it is supposed to. All I have to do is listen and trust and do and open my heart into the gratitude for the all that is life itself.

6. Reflection and New Directions

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.–Victor Frankl

These retrospective New Year posts are always quite long, and I know they’re not to everyone’s tastes (don’t worry, we’ll get back to the writing next week!). But I want to close with this powerful quote from a powerful man.

Good storytellers are always aware of the power of the pause. That moment of pregnant possibilities between action and reaction is where all of story—and life—is born. I would argue that this quote ultimately points, once again, to the power and importance of Flat Arcs. After the great flurry of a Change Arc comes the moment where you get to stop and look back at the road behind you and see how far you have come. In a truly transformative arc, you will no longer be able to even see where it was you started from.

And then you look forward once more—to the road ahead. Perhaps it seems to be straight for a while—Flat—as you catch your breath. You are in Frankl’s “space.” This is the foundation for all that is yet to come. How will we integrate all we have learned? What will we build next?

For me, honestly, I have no idea. I’m still catching my breath. In fact, perhaps I have not yet reached the Flat part of the road. My Change Arc may not be over. Certainly, I feel the dust is still settling, and I’m still looking alongside the road for a nice clear pond in which I can view my reflection and see just who it is I have now become. I do know that the year ahead will be one of yet more integration and many more lessons. It will be full of more stories and more musings on story, and I look forward to sharing it all with you!

Whether you currently find yourself on a Change Arc or the Flat part of the road, I am wishing you a momentous 2025 and thanking you, always, for being my fellow travelers.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What were your biggest growth moments in 2024? What are your intentions for the New Year? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, or Spotify).

___

Love Helping Writers Become Authors? You can now become a patron. (Huge thanks to those of you who are already part of my Patreon family!)