Last week at the gym, my friend Jenna asked, “So how are you?”
“I feel like it’s all too much …” is what I think I said, rolling my eyes and moving into a creaky down dog.
“At so many levels …” is what she definitely said, then six of us laughed at once. The next hour, people quoted her when our discussions of everyday life veered off or felt off because … fascism is not fun. I almost wrote, “None of us had lived through this before.” And then my brain added, “not in this life.” And then I remembered my Black friends saying, “We never stopped living this. We are always afraid of being picked up and killed for nothing we did except showing up Black.”
Some of my elders were Holocaust survivors. They remembered times like this, and certainly generations past, again and again … but not me, not in these bones and muscles I make stronger twice a week at Move Well, our wonderful local gym. But I do remember …
For me, 2025 started in the fall of 2024, before the election, when I gave myself a weeklong course at Kripalu with gurus of healing from PTSD. The person I most wanted to meet in person was Gabor Maté, co-author (with his son) of The Myth of Normal. If you don’t know Gabor Maté, you can get a great introduction to how he views the world in this interview with Mel Robbins.
Gabor first made it onto my radar in the early days of the pandemic, in a webinar about healing generational trauma that was sponsored by a variety of progressive Jewish organizations. By the time I met him in person, Hamas had invaded Israel, and Israel had retaliated with relentless displacing, starving, and killing of Gazan citizens.
I can barely keep my stomach settled when I type those words, now more than two years into that war, with no real end in sight, even though the US and Israeli governments are calling what is now in place a “ceasefire” and the UN seems to be submitting to that lie.
I went to Kripalu to connect with Gabor and tell him about my idea for creating the emotional and communal infrastructure for individual and collective repair from so many generations of killing and trauma. When it was time for questions, I got in line at the side of the room. I thanked Gabor for speaking out for the Palestinian people and then said, “You yourself do this, but have you thought about connecting the work you do helping individuals to heal with the work of systemic change?”
Gabor looked right at me and asked, “Do you feel this is your life’s work, what you are here to do?”
“Yes”, I said, feeling so young and vulnerable that I peed my pants a little. That tiny exchange set up everything that shifted inside me in relation to storytelling in 2025 … it changed how I think about many things and how I act … on so many levels.
When I look back at 2025, inside my own body and observing through the lens of healing my own traumas, in the context of responding to big systemic challenges – racism, misogyny, relentless multi-generational war, the planet on fire – a cluster of feelings shows up at once: sadness, and below the sadness, profound grief; feeling alone, unsettled, and powerless. It is as if all my life I have tried to hide that cluster of feelings, and the shame that surrounds them, running fast to keep them at bay. That running and shame took on a life of their own when I was very young … so young I cannot remember a time before that feeling of running and shame.
When I first became aware of this pattern of shame rather than resistance in the face of power – and how deeply it was rooted in my default responses to so many things, at so many levels – in the fall of 2008, I started a daily practice of meditating, storytelling, and writing to begin to face the things that frightened me in myself and the world around me. I call that daily practice Story Asana™.
Out of that daily practice I created the Moments Method® of storytelling and launched Story2, a Techstars funded EdTech business that taught over a quarter million high school and college students, and hundreds of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and everyday people, how to tell their own stories out loud.
During COVID, I started Storyhood®, a community built on storytelling, and in 2025 I imbibed diverse community experiences to help me put my personal storytelling practice in a larger frame. Those community practices include:
- Rev angel Kyodo williams’ No Big Deal Sit and the Healing Race Portal, led by Rev angel with Resmaa Menakem.
- I took Gabor’s one-day course and found a movie about Gabor directed by Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, and was present for the online launch of The Eternal Song, their celebration of indigenous stories and healing around the world. For anyone – like me – who wants to connect with their deepest, truest ways of knowing, and who wants to learn the stories of the diverse indigenous cultures Europeans tried to erase around the world, The Eternal Song project – 11 films and extended conversations with indigenous wisdom-keepers and community leaders – is the place to begin.
- And feeling that I could finally write the book my father talked about when I was sixteen and he was dying – but I could not market my own writing – I joined Luvvie Ajayi Jones Book Academy and then her Bestselling Book Mastermind.
All of these encounters, and ongoing conversations with other members of those communities, draw me closer to where I want to be: comfortable in my own dry skin, able to sit with the mess of my childhood, and love everyone exactly as they are, as an observer for many generations backwards and forwards.
That journey to the deepest, most multi-faceted version of my own story happened in the context of many big events in my personal life:
- In February my husband Jed was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (LBD) and we began our journey through both the science and spirit of living with an incurable illness, without giving ourselves over to the medical-industrial complex as if something is wrong.
- Over the summer two of my children had new children. For me, #GrandmotherToTheWorld, this is huge. Everything surrounding one of my daughter’s giving birth to a daughter deserves a lot more writing over time.
- In September, my mother – the indomitable Mimi – passed, and we buried her beside my father in the Jewish cemetery they helped to establish years ago between State College and Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.
- In November, we remembered Mimi with a public celebration of her life in State College, and the boy who assaulted me when I was eight said, “I was wrong. I apologize.” I am writing about that in a coming newsletter.
- And over the course of the year, I went deep into my old life as a professor and faculty advisor to the Rutgers Admissions office to help two Gazan refugees navigate the college process.
I originally wrote this letter in December, with the energy of the Solstice and Hanukkah, the season of light out of darkness, everyday miracles wrought from faith. Honoring our intense, outcast ancestors, who somehow kept loving through chaotic times, Jed and I take in refugees, including lost parts of ourselves; we rise in gratitude, find new friends and new learning each day, and meditate on forgiveness last thing every night.
What are the stories that shaped you in 2025? What is the most important thing you are taking into 2026, this Lunar Year of the Fire Horse?