Entry #18 • February 3rd, 2026

My January Ritual

From my journal on 1/14/2026:

I started an annual tradition six years ago. In the first week or two of the year, I sneak away to a coffee shop (my go-to for this tradition was Sweet Kiwi Bakery, but sadly they closed permanently at the end of 2024) and spend a few hours journaling.

The journaling is focused first on reflecting on the past year—making sure to recognize all of the wins, but also the hardships. My personality (Enneagram 3, for any of you who are into that) is constantly onto “crushing the next goal,” and I will not naturally stop and appreciate my wins or accomplished goals. This annual reflection has been a fantastic way for me to slow myself down and really see what all happened in the past year.

It’s equally important for me to slow down and reflect on the hard times, because ultimately, wins come from those too.

After I journal through pages of reflecting on the year that just ended, I then start to dream for the new year. I begin to unpack the goals I have, my word of the year, and any other exciting aspirations. It’s an incredibly invigorating time. I really love the feeling a new year brings.

This year, though, the timing of everything made it really hard for me to slow down and have this reflection period when I normally would. I usually get it done before we reopen the store after inventory counting, but I just couldn’t make it happen this year. It was a pretty short closure with the way the dates fell on the calendar. I prefer to reopen the store by the second Friday in January.

So finally—fourteen days into the new year—I was able to sneak off to Kiln for a couple of hours to start my annual reflection. It’s funny, fourteen days isn’t that far into the new year, ha, but in my brain, time was slipping fast.

As much as I like to think this is a slower time of year, where I can really bring everything down a few notches, that’s just not reality. And every year I feel a little whiplashed by that. The store is slow—yes, it’s really slow. My staff is probably already at the point of talking to the walls because there’s no one else to talk to during the day. But while the store may be slow, my personal life is B-U-S-Y.

The Myth of a Slow Season

Basketball season is upon us.

This is our family sport of choice, and I absolutely love it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is a lot. I have eight kids, and currently four of them are playing basketball on three teams. My daughter is on a girls team, my 4th son is on a middle-school boys team, and my two high-school boys are on the varsity high-school boys team.

And my husband? He’s the athletic director of the homeschool sports league our kids play for. So our family is all in.

There’s another complication here—something most people don’t realize unless they’re living it. When you’re a homeschooler in a homeschool league, you don’t have a gym. Because…you don’t have a school. For our league, that means a constant stress of finding gyms for practices and games.

And guess who’s in charge of all that gym scheduling?

My wonderful husband.

He does it with such grace. I’m amazed by him. I would be pulling my hair out.

In fact—shhhh—my solution to this problem is a little secret dream of mine. One of my Big Hairy Audacious Goals is to build businesses that are successful enough to one day fund an incredible “coliseum” for the local homeschool community. I have it all mapped out in my head. Multiple gyms, so all the teams can practice in the same facility. A true home gym. Home-court advantage, which we never truly have.

I have other plans too—rooms for co-ops, a marketplace for budding entrepreneurs (as I was as a child). The sky is the limit.

One day. 🥹

My kids talk about the coliseum frequently. They like to think it’ll happen while they’re still homeschoolers, but realistically, that’s not even remotely possible. At this point, my hope is that it’ll be there for future grandkids or great grandkids. Sigh. One day.

Now you know one of my secret heart’s desires.

Anyway.

All that to say—this is always an insanely busy season. My husband coordinating gyms for three girls teams and four boys teams is a lot. He also builds out the entire game schedule for the league, which includes at least four private schools and two homeschool groups. He creates the schedule and communicates it to all the coaches and beyond.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to coordinate how we get four kids to three different practices twice a week—six practices total. Those practices happen at three to five different gyms, and this feels like the right place to give a little shoutout to my mom, who has helped a ton with getting kids where they need to be this season. I truly could not have managed it without her. Practices start in November, and then when January hits…games start.

And then it really gets interesting.

Not only do the practices continue, but now we layer in an average of one to four games a week. Some of them are in Montrose (an hour away). Just typing this out makes me laugh—no wonder January feels anything but slow in my life. It is so chaotic.

And yet—I love it.

This is our basketball season. It’s a whole-family affair. It’s special. And while it’s absolutely nonstop, I know it’s for a season. Eventually we transition into the next one (which, thankfully, is not basketball for seven months).

So yes—the store is slow. But my life? It’s kicked up several notches. And carving out intentional time becomes even more of a dance. During these months, I hardly have time to talk to friends, let alone spend time with them. I barely see my husband outside of basketball games and church.

About the only normalcy I’m able to keep is my Sunday afternoon Kiln time and even that has been rocky the past month.

Slowing down that afternoon a couple of weeks ago—though I absolutely had work for the store to do—was needed. Like I mentioned above, I normally reflect on the previous year and then look ahead to the new one. But this time, all I could get through was the reflection.

It was a lot to process.

Tears were shed quietly in the corner of Kiln as I sipped my beloved cozy winter drink (though it doesn’t really feel like winter this year 😭)—a London Fog with the seasonal almond syrup. Hands down, my favorite winter drink. It just feels…right.

Despite having processed a lot of 2025 in real time as it was happening, it still stirred so much in me in that moment. As I worked through it, I thought, there is no way I can just move right into 2026 goal setting. I have to really just…sit here for now.

I knew my next step would be to process it again—double dip?—by writing about it here, in this Just Me entry. Perhaps after this, I’ll be able to fully step into 2026.

Because 2025 was absolutely riddled with loss.

I know I’ve already written about that in a not-so-distant entry. But here we are again. It’s worth digging a little deeper.

Twenty-twenty-five held a tremendous amount of loss for me.

When Losses Began to Stack

Let’s back up to the second half of 2024 when I was grappling with how to support my best friend through a debilitating addiction. We’ve been friends since I was fifteen—over twenty years. She has been a solid rock through so many life changes. She even spent a few months living in Mexico with me when I moved down there, got married, and had my first child.

She has celebrated every time another baby joined my family. She’s championed all of my kids. She’s shown up—over and over—for sports, music, church, and so many moments that mattered. She’s supported my parents in their seasons too. She has been the definition of a true best friend, through thick and thin.

I watched her navigate her divorce and come out the other side. I’ve been alongside her as she’s progressed through her career path. She’s a phenomenal person—wildly talented at breaking down complex concepts into common-folk language. I used to marvel at how she could take something so complicated or downright boring and turn it into the most fascinating subject ever.

She is incredibly gifted.

In 2024, I watched her really, truly begin to lose her battle with alcohol. Maybe that battle had been lost long before, and I was too naive to accept it. But in 2024, it came to a head.

And I care way too much about her to turn a blind eye.

So I tried everything I knew how to try. I texted. I called. I wrote her snail mail—her absolute favorite. I met with her in person. I reached out to others for both local and non-local resources. I watched videos and studied closely what alcohol addiction does to someone and to the people who love them, hoping it would help me support her better.

All I wanted was to see her make it out the other side—victorious.

I was talking recently with someone else who has a friend lost in addiction, and she shared something that stopped me in my tracks. She said that for someone in addiction, shame can grow so deep that their protection mechanism oftentimes is to cut off the very people holding out a lifeline.

Despite my best efforts, I believe shame holds my best friend more tightly than I can reach.

In the last few months of 2024, she became more and more distant—though she lives two minutes down the road from me. Six weeks into 2025, I had heard from her maybe once. So when a text finally came, completely disregarding the harsh reality of where our friendship stood, I replied candidly. I told her how much I was struggling—how the changing friendship felt like a death, and how I was grieving the loss of everything it had been.

Her reply? A drunk voicemail.

It sounded nothing like her.

My heart shattered.

That was the moment it truly sank in: what was, was gone. It had died. And I couldn’t save her from herself.

She never initiated conversation again.

A few months later—just weeks before we were set to leave on our long-anticipated family trip to Mexico—I sent her a birthday card. I had so many passive-aggressive sentences I wanted to write inside it. Thankfully, I had enough sense to know that wouldn’t help anything.

So instead, I asked myself—on a Sunday afternoon at Kiln—why am I sending this card? What is my purpose here?

After thinking on that for a bit, I realized I wanted her to remember that she mattered to me. That I loved her, no matter what.

With that clarity, I wrote a simple sentence wishing her a happy birthday and dropped it in the mail.

She texted me late on the night of her birthday to thank me for the card. She wrote, “I WILL be in touch. I don’t know when. Every day I think it will be today. And it just hasn’t been.”

Shame.

That was the shame speaking.

And that was the last I ever heard from her.

It’s been over eight months now. No calls. No texts. Nothing.

Even writing this all out again makes me question myself. Did I do enough? (I did.) Where did I mess up? (I didn’t.) I’ve had countless conversations with three close people in my life—just trying to navigate this without gaslighting myself.

Writing about it here breaks my heart all over again.

Most days, I’m okay with it. Most days, I can pass by her house—something I have to do every time I leave my own—without thinking about her obsessively (it took over a year to get to that point). But as I edit this Just Me entry for the second time, I need to say this out loud. Because it still makes me deeply sad to fully accept that this is the reality.

Just…another wave of grief.

Two and a half weeks after that last interaction with her, my life turned upside down when one of my boys was knocking on death’s door. Ever grateful we didn’t lose him, his life looks very different now. I’ve shared in depth about that through previous entries—specifically Entry #3. It is absolutely wild to think that she knows nothing about what we went through.

And now—let me back up to late 2024 again. Because while that loss was unfolding, there was another weighty situation quietly building in the background.

Toward the end of 2024 and into the first half of 2025, I was following a local court case closely. While my family was not directly involved, people we know were. It was a heavy case involving sexual assault of multiple minors—teenagers my boys knew personally. My kids had played sports with these teens, sometimes as opponents, sometimes as teammates. They had attended youth events together through church functions (outside of my church).

The case mattered deeply to me. Not only because of the emotional weight of it, but because there were real safety implications for my family as well. It’s far too complicated—and too personal—to fully unpack in a public email.

As the case dragged on, more and more came to light. And the moment when the rubber really met the road happened during the exact same stretch of time when the death of my friendship became real and my son narrowly escaped death.

So much heavy.

All at once.

We returned from our trip with a completely new reality for my son—and ultimately for our family. I’ve already used this language once, but it’s the only way I know how to describe it: it felt like we had traveled through some kind of wormhole. What had just happened? How could our world be turned this upside down when all we had planned was a long-anticipated trip to see people we loved?

I kept wondering how anything could possibly be real. I felt like I was floating through life. Everything felt out of body.

Then, less than two weeks after we returned from that wormhole trip, the very real possibility of my parents losing their cabin to a destructive wildfire came into play. They’ve owned that property since I was in sixth grade. My precious babies who didn’t make it earthside are buried up there. That land—and that cabin—are incredibly sacred to me.

Seeing a fire burning just across the way, with nothing more than a green pasture and a two-lane highway separating it from the cabin, was too much. I honestly don’t have words for it. It felt like layer after layer after layer of heavy.

In July, I was still living in the shock of my son’s diagnosis, trying to orient myself to a reality that was still very new.

Then August hit.

That’s when the weight of my reality started to sink in.

I felt like I was in a chokehold. I could not breathe. I even sent a text to our store Insiders saying all I wanted to do was go lie down outside on the hot concrete. Something about lying flat on hot concrete sounded regulating to me, like it might calm my nervous system.

I didn’t do it.

But I desperately wanted to.

In August or September, another loss arrived. A very dear friend of mine—hi Rachel—moved away. Zing. Another layer of grief. I had known it was coming for months. We’d talked about it back in April. But I chose not to process it then, because I simply couldn’t. There was already too much brewing in the grief compartment of my life.

And then? She left.

She was gone.

Rachel deserves a place here. She reads every one of these Just Mes, and that means more to me than she knows. She’s been a close friend for sixteen years. We’ve raised our babies together—ever since she had her first and I had my third. We joke that church was the one thing we had in common, because in nearly every other way, we were wildly different. But church knit us together.

We attended the same church all of those years. We took turns having babies. Lots of boys. She, too, has seven boys and one girl. Our families became deeply intertwined.

When she moved away, I was so raw and beaten down by that point that I remember thinking, what even matters anymore? Nothing felt solid. I felt absolutely filleted wide open. Like I could lie there on that hot concrete, exposed, and the birds could come peck my eyes out.

I had nothing left.

I was empty.

And the crazy thing is—through all that loss, all that heartache, all that grief—life keeps on keeping on.

You don’t get to stop.
You don’t get to tap out, even when you’re completely tapped out.
You just…keep going.

The kids still had to eat.
Bills still had to get paid.
My store still had to run.
I had fledgling staff who still needed training.
My husband’s business—the one I run behind the scenes—was gearing up for the next round of Spanish classes.

Everything keeps moving.

And then there’s the hospital.

They keep hounding you for bills. Relentlessly. They don’t care that you just endured a traumatic experience—within their care. Nah. Pay up. You have insurance? Cool. We’re not going to bill them correctly. So instead, we’ll just keep hounding you. Every. Week. For tens of thousands of dollars.

Layers upon layers upon layers.
Piles upon piles upon piles.
It’s relentless.

And then there’s this truth: life doesn’t just keep happening to you.

Life happens to other people too.

As I was barely hanging on, people in my inner circle were being hit with their own onslaughts. My dear friend Kourtni was navigating an endless, complicated nightmare of selling and buying a home—far from a normal process, for reasons too layered to share here. I remember us helplessly laughing through frustration, saying we hadn’t coordinated our hardships very well. We weren’t supposed to be drowning at the same time.

And then two other women in my life—S and H—were (and still are) navigating unimaginably heavy health situations with their children. Real life-and-death circumstances.

Deep breath.

None of them expected me to carry their weight. Just as I knew others couldn’t carry mine. What existed between us was quieter than that—a silent camaraderie. A mutual understanding. A shared knowing.

Still, even without carrying their burdens, it all felt impossibly heavy on top of my own muck.

But God Was Near

But God.

(Continued from my 1/14/2026 journal reflection entry)

I know it’s one of the most quoted passages in Scripture—but slow down with me for just a moment. Please.

Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.​
​Oh God—you are enough.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.​
​Despite the weariness, He makes me rest in abundance.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.​
He will lead me—even when I feel lost at sea. He will keep me in His ways.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.​
He is near.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.​
Despite my struggles, He still pours His blessing over me.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.​
Oh God—fellowship with You. There is none greater.

Hope, Seen in Hindsight

In early 2025—before the full weight of these losses arrived, but when I could feel them beginning to form—I prayed a very specific prayer. A deeply personal ask of God. At the time, it felt…childish, maybe, to even voice it. That prayer was offered almost exactly a year ago now.

And I had no idea if or how God would answer it.

He had a master plan. And now, with the gift of hindsight, I can see it…and I am absolutely blown away.

I’ll share more about that prayer in a coming entry.

Until then—thank you for walking with me through this heavy reflection. I didn’t even touch on the wins of the year. And there were wins. Big ones. Maybe they will get their own space in a future entry.

Cheers,

– Just Me[gan]