How have you overcome challenges in 2024? What did you learn?

Day 10 of the 2024 yearly review.

Suzy Walker

Dec 10, 2024

a person in a yellow jacket is standing in a cave — Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

At Christmas, we often think about the people we love and Christmases past.

It’s my mum’s birthday today.

She would have been nearly 90. She’s been dead for almost 40 years.

She died so young.

My dad died even younger. He was 47.

Cancer got them both.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness, wrote one famous writer once.

Maybe I took those words to heart.

Because I have never wanted to live my life carelessly.

I did for a while. I was a teenager, just started university.

I got drunk and staggered around a lot but it was also at that time, I started reading self-help books.

I was lost at sea, and I would cling to their wisdom like driftwood, trying to figure out how to navigate my way home by the light of the stars.

For me, it was the self-development stars.

I gobbled up huge tomes written by big men with iron jaws and tried to ‘Awaken the Giant Within’. I would copy out scraps of wisdom from poetry books. While my friends at college had posters of Simple Minds and that cool rebel guy from the Breakfast Club on their wall, I sellotaped a newly published poem by Mary Oliver above my desk: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’

I didn’t think she meant go wild, drink and fall down a lot.

I spent most of my twenties a little lost and very drunk, if I’m honest. But no one really noticed because we were all at it. Alcohol was having a Renaissance. It was the era of ‘ladettes’ when Zoe Ball married Fat Boy Slim in a cowboy hat, carrying a bottle of Jack Daniels, and Bridget Jones and her friends swam around in buckets of Chardonnay, and the Sex and the City foursome ordered another Cosmopolitan cocktail.

I went from writing for the tabloids to becoming the chain smoking, hard drinking health editor of New Woman magazine, the female equivalent of lad mag Loaded. It was a hazy few years seeking spirituality in the wrong kind of spirits. But through the hangovers, I managed to hone in on the stories of transformation. I loved the idea of alchemy—that we could use the lead of our emotional horror stories and transform it into the gold of life.

How can we heal? How can we thrive despite the darkness? How do we grow? These were the questions I was asking when I was the same age as my son Charlie is now.

As well as drinking far too much.

Seeking and drinking.

Not the best combination.

I eventually stopped drinking but continued to seek and landed the perfect job for me. I became the editor of Psychologies magazine, which was all about creating flourishing mental health and once again, I got to speak to lots of the wise people—Oprah, Brené Brown, Michael Singer, Julia Cameron,

Elizabeth Gilbert

Gilbert and

Cheryl Strayed

Their wisdom not only saved my life but helped me to live a life that was better than I could ever have hoped for when I felt so lost as a teenager.

Those self-development giants showed me a way, an alternative way of thinking, a way to reach up from the gloom of grief and find a pool of light to sit beside and helped me to build a simple, creative life that makes me happy.

In honour of the years my parents didn’t get to live, I didn’t want to be careless with the days of my life.

Ultimately, this is what this yearly review is about – a chance to take a breath and consider…. how are we spending our minutes, hours, and days of our life, how do we waste them and how can we stop and how can we create a life that makes our heart leap?

This journey has brought me here.

Writing my Heart Leap substack.

I want to share brilliant resources from wise people, coaching questions, course-correcting actions, and inspiring quotes and invite you all to be part of my community of funny, delightful people who are also on this journey.

Because it’s not easy.

Much is out of our control. Shit happens on a regular basis. But I do believe that if we point ourselves in the direction we want to go, head out on a path that makes our heart leap, then we are not wasting our lives, we are truly living it.