My Word for 2025 and How It Is Completely Uprooting My Life

If you would have asked me what my word for this year was back in January, I would have told you "ME" or "Me and God" and while that may have been true as most of my 2024 was spent learning how to set boundaries, stopping my deadly people pleasing habits, and following my intuition, God had something much BIGGER and BETTER in mind.

I don't owe anyone any explanation about my word for this year or any insight into my personal decisions, however; as a healer and leader hoping to guide people into a life of more love, I thought I would explain some of my thoughts on why I am choosing to move back to Nebraska this May and how my word for 2025 quickly became HOME.

For as long as I can remember, I always felt called to California and after finishing my undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, I had the opportunity to escape everything I had ever known and live out my California Dream. In 2021, I packed up my life and moved to San Diego to pursue a graduate degree at San Diego State University. It didn't take long for me to realize that I no longer wanted to be a professor like I once thought, so I dropped out leading me into a route I never thought I would take.

Suddenly, I found myself nannying for around 20 families in the city along with dog sitting while building my business. These were both very healing experiences for me because as a little girl I had always wanted to be a mom and being able to care for little babies, reassured me that I would be an amazing one someday. Dog sitting was healing for me as I was able to realize my original dislike for dogs was present in an attempt to lessen any more unwanted emotional pain after my beloved best friend of a dog, Bailey, got ran over in the second grade. There is particularly something about being invited into people's, really stranger's homes, their seemingly most sacred spaces, and being trusted to take care of their babies that filled a place in my heart I'm convinced nothing else ever could.

While being a California resident, I was also able to build my own family/community, through bumble best friends, open mics, beach clean ups, and the ever so real divine intervention. During my hardships and loneliness in San Diego, these people reminded me that love is everywhere. There are kind people at every corner waiting for us. People willing to help us without asking for anything in return. People I was forced to lean on in my most vulnerable moments when my own stubbornness and independence couldn't sustain me anymore. It is because of these people that leaving San Diego is both extremely difficult but also easy. They have taught me that it is hard to leave people you love and who love you back, but they serve to remind me that there are even more people waiting to love us in even more of the most unexpected places.

After three years of being a part of other families, I realized while I was spending time with them, I was simultaneously losing quality time with my own. Soon the love from these 20 families and my San Diego family couldn't fill this void anymore as I began to think of my own imaginary family I want to create in the future and my own current family I have more memories to make with.

On the other side of things, like any other experience in life, there is a painful story to accompany any joyful one, I have learned that we cannot outrun duality. I am returning to Nebraska without a partner, and it is something I still feel as though I would like to experience. If you have read my new book, "love, the one that got away" you know by now, I have had my fair share of heartbreaking encounters in the streets of San Diego. While these parts of my history have helped me write a moving book to empower others to live after heartbreak and served as a tool to help me know myself more, they most definitely broke me into pieces before breaking me open. These heartbreaks, along with the other challenges I have faced in California such as a car accident, fight after fight to learn and abide by the corrupt Californian systems, a surgery to remove precancerous cells in my body, having four friends abruptly move away, and other experiences have contributed to my readiness to leave.

August 2021

When I first entered San Diego, gripping the wheel tightly while driving in six lane traffic for the first time, I told myself I would never leave. Over the years, I fell into an intoxicating love with the city, the beauty, the ocean, the people, the fast life, the dream, and ultimately the Shana I had become. This attachment has been the driving force in me staying in California for the past two years as God was beginning to tell me to move. It started out as a gentle whisper and turned into the loudest screaming knowing of my entire life. Before I knew it, my love for San Diego grew into an attachment that I eventually felt imprisoned in. All my studying on what love is has informed me that love and attachment are two different things. Because my decision to stay has been solely reliant on my commitment to San Diego, it is time for me to leave. San Diego has given me absolutely everything it ever could, and I am forever grateful for every person I have ever met here, every experience I have ever lived even if it pushed me to question everything I know, and most of all a deepening love for myself. However, I have realized that my love for this city eventually took me away from myself, my heart space, my light, and how I want to live my life.

Truthfully, it was my love for San Diego and California that brought me out here, and the love I experienced nannying, dog sitting, and networking that asked me to stay, and it is my love for myself, my family, and my legacy that has brought me back to Nebraska. As for right now, it is time for me to go HOME.

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