By Krista Tedrow, guest contributor
Six months ago, I ended an article with one last question: What if one word could help you stay connected to yourself, no matter what the year brings? At the time, I did not realize I was writing that question for myself. I chose “Radiant,” imagining confidence, joy, visibility and a lighter season after years of grief, rebuilding and becoming.
Instead, radiant changed the way I saw my life before it changed anything around me. One word did not give me a different life. It taught me how to inhabit the one I already had.
A companion, not a command
In January, I wrote that you do not “achieve” a word. You notice how it appears, how you drift from it and how you return. Radiant did not demand positivity, productivity or constant light. It became a question I carried:
How do I want to meet today?
Some days, the answer was courage and other days it was rest. Radiant could look like saying yes to an adventure, having a difficult conversation, crying without apologizing or looking up long enough to notice my life was happening without me trying to manage everything. The word became less about who I hoped to become and more about how I wanted to be present. It did not push me forward as much as it called me back to myself.
Radiant met me in the middle
I might have pictured a radiant woman as someone glowing with confidence, already on the other side of heartbreak. Instead, radiant met me in the middle of uncertainty, loss and real heartbreak, the kind that rearranges you.
Radiant taught me that light does not require the absence of darkness. I could grieve and still laugh until my stomach hurt. I could have my heart broken and remain open to love. I could feel uncertain about what came next and still trust the woman taking the next step.
Maybe your year has held contradictions, too: something beautiful beginning while something else ends, or pride in who you are becoming alongside grief for who you had to be to survive. Transformation is not always a clean before-and-after. Sometimes it is learning to hold more of life at the same time.
The moments that met me
Choosing radiant did not suddenly fill my life with extraordinary moments. It helped me recognize them. This year has included red rocks in Arizona, concerts in Chicago, the Pacific Ocean, Colorado mountains and countless miles across Iowa. Yet I remember the people more than the places.
I remember watching my daughter, Amelia, see the Pacific Ocean for the first time. My heart melted while she was collecting shells, laughing at the waves and entering wonder without hesitation.
I remember coffee on Lauren’s porch and the gift of being known for 17 years. I remember breakfasts, long conversations, flowers carried into a friend’s office, young people discovering their voices and friends becoming family. I remember a rare poetry book whose cover fell off and found its way to a woman in Cedar Rapids who had just begun learning bookbinding.
These moments mattered because I was present for them. Radiant looked like putting my phone away, lingering longer, listening intently without preparing a response and letting an ordinary afternoon be enough.
The world had not suddenly become more beautiful. I had become more available to its beauty. The more present I became to my own life, the more generously I could show up in the lives around me.
Writing my way through it
Radiance also found its way onto the page. Poetry became part of how I lived this word — not something I wrote after I had made sense of an experience, but something that helped me make sense of it as I was living it. I wrote through wonder, travel, motherhood, heartbreak and return. The poems helped me name what I was feeling, hold contradictions and integrate experiences before I could fully explain what they meant.
My birthday is July 27, and I have come to think of it as another kind of new year: an opportunity for honoring what has shaped me and choosing what I want to carry forward. This year, I am giving myself the gift of publishing my fourth book, “tragic magic,” a collection of poetry created as I moved through this season.
Publishing it feels like an expression of radiant. Not because every poem is bright, but because writing allowed me to bring light and language to what I was living. It turned inward reflection into something I could offer as an invitation for another person to recognize themselves, feel less alone or discover that beauty and grief can occupy the same page. Sometimes radiance is not only what we notice. It is what we make from what we have lived, and what we choose to share.
The person I found along the way
The greatest surprise was not where I traveled or what I accomplished. It was how at home I began to feel in my own life.
“I really like myself,” I said over lunch with my mentor, Rachelle Keck. That still feels tender to write and I almost didn’t include it.
The words surprised me. I have spent years healing and rebuilding after loss. I have done the counseling, read the books, sat with difficult questions and processed the grief I once tried to outrun.
Healing and learning to genuinely accept and like yourself are not always the same. For years, I asked: What still hurts? What needs attention? What part of me needs to heal next?
This year, I began to intentionally notice and savor what was already good. I asked something gentler: What is already beautiful here that I have been overlooking?
I like that I am endlessly curious, that I can facilitate strategic planning in the morning and write poetry at night. I wander through used bookstores, collect first editions and crystals with equal enthusiasm and research a symbol simply because it caught my attention.
I cry easily, laugh loudly, carry around rocks to share, bring flowers to friends for no reason and find meaning in conversations others might call rabbit trails. I can build systems, tell stories and ask difficult questions without abandoning wonder.
For a long time, I worried those parts made me too much, too layered or too unconventional. I feared poetry, spirituality and wonder might make the woman in the boardroom seem less credible. So I decided which parts belonged in which rooms and left the rest outside the door.
I do not live that way anymore. The woman writing in her journal is the same woman designing systems, building partnerships and leading difficult conversations. My curiosity shapes my leadership. My sensitivity notices what is beneath the surface. My creativity imagines solutions that do not yet exist. My spiritual life keeps me connected to meaning.
The nonprofit leader, strategist, mother, poet, spiritual seeker, friend and dreamer are not competing for space. They belong to one another.
Wholeness is not something we earn by healing enough or becoming acceptable enough. It is a way of inhabiting our lives. You feel it in the shoulders that stop bracing, the deeper breath and the voice that sounds the same in every room. I once thought confidence came from certainty. Now I think it comes from coherence, when your inner and outer lives recognize one another.
I am fortunate to have people who make room for the whole of me. They follow the rabbit trails, listen to the poems and welcome the questions, intensity and wonder. They do not ask me to choose, and I stopped asking myself to in their company. Being welcomed whole has changed how I welcome others.
I still have hard days, unanswered questions and grief that arrives without warning. I simply no longer meet any of it as a stranger to myself. I know the woman living this life. And it took me 36 years to genuinely like her.
