I never wrote a “Welcome to 2026!” post. Honestly, January just came and went, and I spent most of it playing with my birds and taking long walks, recalibrating.
2025 was a year of massive, earth-shifting changes, and my body essentially demanded a pause. An AI tool recently tried to generate a draft for me about “the magic of self-celebration,” telling me I should pop confetti for folding my laundry and start a vision board. (I nearly rolled my eyes out of my head.)
For me, celebration isn’t about bubble baths or forced positivity. It’s about recalibration. It’s about taking a hard look at the baggage you carry, realizing you don’t need it to survive anymore, and letting it go.
Case in point: I spent December and January selling off my entire collection of 32 vintage fur coats.
The Mental Health Impact of Letting Go
I collected those coats during a very specific, very dark era of my life. I bought them while I was recovering from the trauma of almost being homeless, technically couch-surfing back in 2009 with my Goffin’s cockatoo, Boo (who I’ve had since 2000 and who has been with me through everything).
When you don’t have a safe home, you hoard warmth. You hoard things of value. You insulate yourself.
But for the last ten years, those beautiful coats have just been sitting packed away in boxes. As the cold weather hit this December, I started listing them. I absolutely could have held out, played the algorithm, and squeezed more money out of the market. But honestly? The real ROI was the profound relief of letting them go.
Knowing they were going to good homes—that they were being worn and treasured as Christmas presents instead of decaying in the dark—felt incredible. I didn’t need to maximize every last dollar; I just needed the energetic release. That, to me, is true self-celebration: acknowledging that I survived the era that required 36 coats, and recognizing that I am safe enough now to let them leave.
(Don’t worry, I didn’t sell them all. I kept four: a beaver, a mink, a fluffy fox with the lining ripped out for myself, and an absolutely unhinged full-length 80s raccoon fur with shoulder pads big enough to rival a Dynasty villain. It’s completely over-the-top, soft and lush, must have cost a fortune in 1982, and I picked it up for a song at a yard sale in 2010. Some things you just keep).
Celebrating the “Small” Wins (Like Teflon-Free Tenants)
Another reason I vanished in January was to recover from the marathon of fixing up my St. Louis duplex.
When we talk about “celebrating small wins,” people usually mean treating yourself to a fancy coffee. But my wins look different these days. After all the chaos, the universe handed me the best possible tenant for that duplex. She is a bird person. She has parrots.
Do you know the sheer, visceral relief of knowing that when I visit my own property in St. Louis with my cockatoos, I will never once have to worry about lethal Teflon fumes in the kitchen? It sounds like a hyper-specific detail, but for a bird owner, it is everything. It fundamentally lowers my resting heart rate. That is a win worth celebrating.
Overcoming the Discomfort of Acknowledging Your Worth
We are conditioned to just keep pushing forward. You fix the duplex, you get the tenant, you survive the trauma, you leave the unhealthy relationship, and then you just… move on to the next task.
It feels uncomfortable to stop and say, “Look what I did.” It feels vulnerable. The societal expectation is that you just keep grinding. But if you never stop to calibrate your present against your past, what is the point of all this work?
Selling the coats and securing the duplex forced me to pause and look at my life. I am not the scared girl couch-surfing in 2009 anymore. I own property. I run businesses. I have built a life that is safe for me and my flock.
Building a Calibration Habit
If you take anything away from this, let it be a permission slip to redefine what it means to celebrate yourself.
You don’t need a cheer squad. You don’t need a gratitude journal if that feels fake to you. Sometimes the most profound way to honor your own growth is to look at the physical, emotional, or professional baggage you’ve been dragging around for a decade, realize it served its purpose, and pack it in a shipping box.
Take a pause. Recalibrate. Keep the ridiculous 80s raccoon fur, but sell the rest. You’ve earned the space.
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