If you do anything in 2020, I hope you grieve all you’ve lost – all the time, all the experiences, and all of the people. Everything you consider a waste, grieve it. Resolve your unresolved grief and lost time.

It took four long years to properly grieve the biggest heartbreak of my life. Let me tell you what happens when you properly go through the stages of grief… you find acceptance. Honey, when you find acceptance, you understand that no experience is wasted. No time is wasted, either.

I know, I know. No one likes to admit they wasted time, and people certainly don’t like to lament on failure, but we have to. Even worse, some of you haven’t walked away from something due to fear that you may have to admit defeat or come to terms with the fact that you didn’t make the right decisions.  

But I’m here to confirm that in order to walk into the next stages of your life, you must accept all of the experiences you were quick to classify as a waste. All of those things that didn’t “end well,” embrace them and interrogate them. Say what you have to say, cry when you need to cry, and dammit, yell when you need to YELL.

Before you get to the stage of acceptance, you must go through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. You see, people fear those emotions, but without each of those stages, you cannot find acceptance. To be totally transparent, you simply cannot come into a new, transformed season while angry, bitter, or full of unresolved grief. You have to let it go to see yourself through to the stage of acceptance. From there, you can shift your perspective and reproduce what you deem a waste into something useful.

All this talk of sustainable living yet we’re not looking at how to sustain ourselves. How do we take our own waste and make it anew? Ultimately, we want to get to the point where nothing is classified as waste, but instead, a product that has reached the end of its life and is waiting to be transformed into something else. 

No time, no love, no person, and no job is considered a loss. They are simply waiting to take a new shape in your life.

Listen, Young Queen – the next phase of your life will require you to bring your so-called wasted experiences and skills to be used by God for something new. So, be ready. Be ready with your “wasted” experiences in tow. 

For the first time in my life, I can reflect on the past year and feel like nothing was a waste. 2019 was good to me but more than that, I was good to me. I was gentle with myself. I allowed myself to fail. In the freedom of failure, I found success.