Closing a Year That Changed Me: How Grief, Imposter Syndrome, and Radical Honesty Shaped My 2024—and What I’m Carrying Into 2025

In this solo episode of The Visibility Standard (formerly All Our Parts), I’m pulling back the curtain on the realest parts of my 2024—the parts I didn’t always know how to name while I was living them.

From battling imposter syndrome and insomnia to grieving the loss of relationships that shaped the year, this episode is an honest reflection on what it looks like to keep showing up when certainty is gone and clarity comes in fragments. It’s part journal entry, part grounding reminder, and part love letter to anyone ending the year a little raw but more real than they’ve ever been.

In this episode, I share:

• What it’s been like to let people see the real me—even when it’s messy
• How therapy and community helped me stay grounded in truth
• The difference between being visible and being vulnerable
• What it takes to keep going when nothing feels certain
• How I’m dreaming into what’s next for All Our Parts in 2025

If you’re closing out the year carrying grief, self-doubt, or the weight of big transitions, this episode is a reminder that you don’t need a perfectly wrapped ending to move forward.

Some years don’t resolve cleanly. Some years crack you open. And sometimes the most honest thing you can do is honor who you became—even if you’re still becoming.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello, we have hit the end of 2024. Can you believe it? I am bittersweet. It is bittersweet that this year is coming to an end. Hello, I am Jasmine. Welcome back to All Our Parts. Welcome to All Our Parts if you're new here. This is my first solo episode in a while, and I promise, like, my 2025 resolution that I will be doing many more solo So, yeah, I wanted to do my 2024 reflections because why not, eh? And I think there's always something to be learned when we allow ourselves the space to reflect on the year, especially if you are like me, where the first half of your year was hell on earth. And that's putting it lightly, I think, in some cases. And then the last year was almost like the last half was like the transitionary period. It was like, okay, you just let go of all that did not serve you. And so now you either get to step into your potential, allow your life to evolve, or you can be stagnant. And so for the first part of this episode, I thought I would talk about the lessons that I learned in the first half. of the year. So let's get into it. I guess I'll start here. So the first half of the year, I was finishing up my last semester of grad school and I was Very uncertain of what would be next. Honestly, like if I would be good at being a therapist, a lot of that imposter syndrome started to kick in and I was like, is my business going to grow? Am I going to be able to do the thing? Am I going to do it well? It was like an identity crisis almost when I think back to it. I came back from our winter break until my last semester of internship and I was having, I was in a rough space. My supervisor at the clinic that I was at at the time was always like, how are you doing? And I'm always like, great. She's like, okay, what else? I'm like, no, I'm great. Like, I'm good. And in hindsight, I'm like, if I admitted that I was anything but great, I don't know what that would entail. But I definitely wasn't doing well. But that was one thing. of the major lessons that I had to learn is that so much so often I expect myself to show up and everything's great everything is fine everything is wonderful there is nothing going wrong in my life and that is an exhausting act to hold up because truthfully my insomnia was in a really bad spot for the better part of a month and so I remember one and my My insomnia hadn't been when I found myself at a spot where I was not sleeping. I was watching TV from like midnight to like 4 a.m. and then waking up at 9 a.m. And I had like really dark circles under my eyes and it was really just a hard time. I was so afraid to tell people like I'm not doing that well. And it is still terrifying to admit hey I'm not in the best spot all the time it is a contrast to how I usually want to show up and how I usually want to present myself but I had to learn I realized that if I was going to sustain myself and work that I am showing up for people I have to allow myself to be seen I have to allow Jasmine without the Without the mask, without an outfit, without all the things, who is Jasmine and I needed to show up as that and then people would either accept me or they wouldn't. Allowing myself the space to be seen allowed a lot of my, just about all of my relationships and my friendships to grow, to be in a more genuine, authentic space that I didn't, I don't know if I knew was possible. possible. I also experienced a lot of loss. I think another really big lesson that I learned in the first half of 2024 is that the easy thing is not always the right thing. And we have to look at their actions and say, you know what, actually what you're doing is way out of line. And I've always been a person of advocacy, but I've never known how to channel it. But I found myself in a situation where I knew that speaking up was the only right thing to do in this scenario. And it was something that I had to manage very privately for the last semester of my graduate school program because I really was thinking about... the people that I love the most in this circumstance, and I really didn't want to involve anybody else. I knew that I could either throw my neck out there and get eaten alive, or I would have the support that I would need to stand up. I was held up all throughout the situation. I think I grew closer to a lot of people, and I think it allowed a level of transparency that I did not always offer to people. And that can be really powerful, but it was also really hard because I ended up losing a lot of people within that situation. And as someone who has been newly estranged from their family in the last two years, It's hard to lose people. It is hard to choose to lose people because it can be easy when we have lost so much to get into a scarcity mindset of, oh, no, I want to protect this person. I want to keep this person close because I don't have anybody. And while I didn't know what my life would look like now at the time, I definitely would I was just really trusting myself, trusting that regardless of how hard this feels, regardless of how other people may respond, I know I'm doing the right thing. And as long as I stood firm in that, there was nobody that could convince me of anything else. I've had to look at losing people with such a different reframe. I think first, I have to allow myself the space to grieve because I am somebody that, especially when I have somebody that's very close to me, I imagine what life looks like months from now or a year from now. And if I choose to have somebody close to me, like I'm choosing to have them in my life for a significant amount of time. And so losing people for me is hard, especially as I'm creating Chosen Family, especially as I'm continuing to create depth and connection within my life. I have to allow myself the space to grieve that loss, to say, gosh, it really sucks that this person isn't in my life anymore. It really sucks that this didn't work out. And my mind off the bat goes, oh, I'll figure it out. Or I'll just avoid the situation altogether. I won't even deal with it. And then I'll bring it up like four months later in therapy and be like, actually, this kind of sucked. working on the delayed processing. I'm a really great therapist, very grateful for her. The creme de la creme of therapists, and I'm so fortunate to have her on my journey. This is a complete aside, but it is so special when you find a therapist, a coach, a mentor, somebody that you respect, somebody that you know so well, sees you and understands you, and you're just like, you're stuck with me. It truly is truly so impactful to the healing recovery journey when we have people who are guiding us through some of our darkest moments and we truly trust them and we allow them to see us. Game-changing. And I would say in the last two years, but especially in the last year or so, I've truly let my therapist in. And it has just felt so wonderful to be supported in the capacity that I have And so a big lesson that I think I'm reiterating and what I've learned is it's valuable to allow yourself to be seen. It is valuable to allow you to to show up. Not the person that you think people want to see, not the person that you think will gauge a certain response. Just showing up as you connects you to people and opportunities that are most in alignment of you. If you show up as someone else, you're going to attract opportunities that may be fitting for that person but they're not going to be true for you and therefore they won't be sustainable. But showing up as yourself, allowing yourself to be seen, allowing the messy parts of you to come to the surface and allowing yourself to build trust with other people can be, it gets to be a very healing experience. And with all of that happening in the first half of the year, it also really flipped a switch for me that shit will always happen, but I cannot stop going after my dreams. I can't stop creating the life that I want just because shit hit the fan. Hopefully one day shit won't hit the fan or shit will always hit the fan. Either way, that's not going to stop me. And I think when I realized I was letting so much of life impact the moves that I made, I was like, this cannot have that much power over me. You cannot have that much power over me. And so I, as I've been building out this podcast for the last year, I decided, you know what? Full send, post weekly. That's when I also started making content on social media. And before, a lot of people say, you know, you tell stories so well. Before I even started posting content of me speaking, I would like go to the park. I would go sit on a bench and I would just record myself like sitting in my trunk talking. I didn't post them. I didn't share them. I would show them to my... supervisor at the clinic. She called them trunk talks. And like I would play them. And I think that was just helping me get comfortable with like talking to somebody, like talking to the camera on the phone. And so I did that for a good few months before I really started posting myself on social media. And yeah, the rest is history. I have been, and I'm so happy to be in this space in the sense that I'm just so proud of my own journey. I have gotten more consistent. And I think if you were to ask me two years ago if I considered myself a consistent person, I would say yes. Yes. But I am a consistent person. I am someone that follows through. And I realize I owe it to myself. I realize there's so many moments that I abandoned myself, that I really let myself down. And learning how to channel that self-compassion accepting that I did the best that I could with what I knew at the time when I allowed all those things to be true. When I stopped letting perfection paralyze me, this was actually a quote that Lauren was like, put this on your vision board. She made a TikTok about it. She was like, do not let perfection stop you to the point of paralyzing you. That's like a paraphrase But I did write it on my vision board. So shout out to you. When I just allowed myself to show up messy, show up fun, show up weird, show up as myself. I realized, okay, I cannot let myself down. I don't have to hide anymore. I did a lot of hiding as far as even coming out. I was very much in the closet for a long time. Portraying my identity on social media publicly was very hard for me as someone that worked at a Christian camp for so long. I was so used to curating my social media like If campers find me, if leadership finds me, and getting out of that headspace is harder than I expected it to. While I didn't realize how much it was influencing how I post or what I post or how I present myself. As I've continued to grow, not only in the content space, but also as a therapist, I realize if I am asking my clients to show up authentically in session, I've got to be fucking doing the work to show up authentically as well. So I think that's the first half of the year. It was a painful beginning, but I'm so happy to say that the end of the year has just spring-rolled in ways that have just been so fulfilling. Thank you so much for tuning in. I thank you all so much for the support. I would not be continuing to do this without you all's feedback, without your support. And it really has just motivated me to continue growing the show, growing how I show up and make content. And I am so, so excited for 2025. So... Talk to you soon. Bye.