The Purge

A New Year's Resolution

This time last year at Forest Path (photo not mine). If this path interests you, I’d be thrilled to support you on your way.

It’s that time of year again, the lull between Christmas and New Year’s, between the end of the old and the beginning of the new. As we look towards 2026, I struggle to fathom how a year has passed. For me, it was a year of upheaval, of loss I could not have imagined, and, alongside it, an abundance I still cannot explain.

A couple of days ago, I went for a long swim in the ocean for the first time since February. As my head hit the water, I immediately felt how long it had been. I thought about how much of life is not about becoming, but about undoing, the repeated necessity of emptying and purging what no longer fits to make space for something new.

Our world is organized around growth, accumulation, and optimization. But we are rarely taught how to let it all go. Nothing is created without something else ending. For something to live, something must die.

The thing that scares me most is not necessarily death itself, but the realization that I am not in control of the timing. That change could come before I am ready. That it may not arrive grandly, but instead as a long decline masked by administrative tasks. That my ability to leave a biological legacy of children has disappeared with my fertility. That any legacy at all could be quietly forgotten.

This time last year, I was in Guatemala for what had become my most sacred ritual, an annual solo excursion to cleanse my body and mind. I believe deeply that we have much to learn from the earth, from the oceans, from the plants that grow. In this, one of my greatest teachers has been ayahuasca. It is an experience unlike any other. It demands respect.

It has shaped my life more than almost anything else. I emerge from the ceremony more honest, more awake, more aware of the gift I’ve been given. But this year, when I’ve needed it most, I couldn’t go back. My body would not allow it, but I’ve realized it was never about the medicine, but the integration.

The medicine does not heal you; the healing happens afterward, when you live differently because you can no longer lie to yourself. It offers confrontation, seeing what you have avoided, the stories you have told yourself to survive. Last year, it forced me to rewrite my past by seeing it clearly and releasing it. It prepared me for what was to come, even if I didn’t know it yet. It asked me to let it go. To purge. To dissolve into nothingness. To cry until there was nothing left to protect.

In that darkness, surrender is all you can do. You move through what terrifies you most toward something you can’t yet see.

And life holds you to that.

This year, I lost almost everything. I lost the life as I knew. I lost my body for many months, along with my ability to work and live as I previously had. I lost the future I thought I was building. I lost a version of my physical beauty, but with it, the fear I had long carried about my safety.

And in this space, I’ve been asking myself the same question I ask myself in ceremony: What am I afraid to see? What am I still holding onto?

Someone told my mom that if I’m not cured from my cancer, it’s because I don’t believe enough, and it’s thrown me into a dark existential spiral over the last few days. I don’t know how I could believe more. I don’t know how I could do more.

As I sat in that darkness, a familiar ayahuasca song came to mind:

You tell yourself you come here to heal
You tell yourself there’s so much to heal
But this is just another kinda story you tell yourself
To delay the day when you get out of the way
And allow your true self to be revealed.

You say you lose your way in the dark
You say that you’re afraid of the dark
But this is just another kinda story you tell yourself
‘Cause you’re afraid of the light
You don’t give yourself the right
To reveal your true self in all its glory.

I write to make meaning, to calm my nerves about facing the unknown, but that itself is its own form of distance and distraction.

I write about healing, but what does my body and my life look like when I recognize I have nothing left to heal from?

The hardest thing for me to believe is that I may be broken on one plane of existence, but I am whole on another. And as I look towards 2026, swimming, dancing with the saltwater current with the sun on my back, my world has never felt truer.

Christmas is the time after the solstice when the light begins to return. God enters matter at the nadir, and Christ emerges as lux in tenebris. I’ve been cramped inside a house of my own making, only to step out in the night and see how vast I am. The purging and emptying only sharpens the light. How little life needs to contain to still feel full.

Happy holidays, and I hope you are all having a beautiful time with family, friends, or solo time away from the world. Thank you, as always, for reading, and thank you to everyone who has shared my words. It means the world to me.

I’m too tired to make a whole section. The existential angst of trying to plan the logistics for a life which is currently unplannable is wearing on me, but I wanted to leave you with this beautiful short video:

And suggest an alternative approach to New Year’s Eve Resolutions:

• Write everything you want to let go of in 2026 on a piece of paper. Burn it.

• For the next few days, write three pages when you first wake up (can be longer but not shorter) of everything you want to let go of in detail.

• Let yourself be bored. See what emerges.

• Take one belief you’ve lived by for years. Underneath, write What if this is no longer true?

• Think about what you want to do less of in 2026, not more.

Opening the chat if anyone wants to discuss!

Love,
Lou