Where We're Headed in 2025 (Plus, a Look Back On Where We've Been)

In this final episode of 2024, I look back on a challenging year of loss, transition, and new beginnings. I also share what's ahead for the podcast in 2025. 

I reflect on my journey through the caregiving and loss of my mom, sending my son off to college, turning 50, and launching a brand new project (this podcast). 

Plus, I share the questions I'm asking myself in this new season.

I hope you'll join me back here in the new year as we continue to explore what it means to live a life that feels "more like you"! 

To stay in connected through the holidays and beyond, subscribe to Angie's weekly newsletter Hello Friday at angiemizzell.com/subscribe.

Get Angie's memoir Girl in the Spotlight: angiemizzell.com/book

Connect with Angie on Instagram

Transcript

Angie (00:00)
Hey, I'm Angie Mizzell and welcome to More Like You. This is the last podcast episode of 2024, but I'm not going anywhere. If you'd like to stay connected with me throughout the holiday season and beyond, head over to my website, angiemizzell.com sign up for my free weekly newsletter, Hello Friday. It's a weekly dose of inspiration and encouragement delivered right to your inbox. angiemizzell.com forward slash subscribe will get you there.

In today's episode, want to share where we're headed in the new year, where the podcast is headed. But before we do that, I want to pause and reflect on where we've been, specifically where I've been the beginning of 2024 to now.

what I have dealt with, what I have gone through, and where I am now. I always tell my stories hoping that it will help you connect to your stories. This is the power of storytelling that draws me to writing and speaking and sharing pieces of my life. I'm always pulling from the pieces that feel relevant and universal somehow. So that's what I wanted to do today.

I started 2024 in a crisis right before Thanksgiving of last year. My mom got really sick.

She had been dealing with years of chronic pain and health issues that she had just been dealing with, just sort of suffering through. And it all came to a sudden head right before Thanksgiving last year, where suddenly we are rushing her to the emergency room because she can no longer walk.

In that moment, my life and my stepdad's life instantly changed. We were suddenly in a caregiver role that we had no idea we were going to be in. The brunt of this long illness that my mom would endure fell on my stepdad. I assumed more of a part-time caregiver role.

being there for them every day for a few hours to the best that I could while I still continued to work.

it was a month after my book launch. I have three children, house to run. My oldest son was a senior in high school, getting ready to apply for college. And we were at the holiday season. November rolled into December, rolled into the new year. And this went on for month after month.

We were living in a stage of life where we were very in the moment dealing with things that were coming up that day and we felt like we couldn't really plan ahead. And that is what much of the first half. of 2024 was like.

And then my mom passed away in June and even though she had been so sick and in and out of the hospital, we thought we were rounding a corner. In hindsight, I could see now that the signs were there, that we were actually nearing the end. But in the moment, we were still just trying so hard to help her get better, to encourage her.

now I can see that we were nearing the end. But when you are in those moments, you have no way of knowing. And so she passed away in June this was about 10 days, less than two weeks after my son graduated from high school.

So I really spent the summer just spending time grieving, spending time with my family, helping our son get ready for college and.

I was so intentional about that grieving process and that doesn't mean I was just grieving all the time, crying in a ball the whole time. It was just really acknowledging that this is a season for grief and any big ideas or big plans that I had

are going to shift because the grief is larger than everything. So yes, we still went on family trips and we kept a lot of plans because I do think when you're grieving, it's important to still get up and live, but there was this cloud of grief. But what I'm getting at, the reason I was feeling so intentional about being in that spot and not rushing myself through it,

is because of something I realized when I wrote my book Girl in the Spotlight. it was through the writing and revision that I realized that I was holding on to a lot of unresolved grief.

and it was when I finally broke down and first of all, realized the grief I was carrying and then really grieved it, that started to create a breakthrough.

It started a healing process where the grief, sadness never really goes away. But when you grieve and feel that feeling, it starts to work with you to help you move forward. So when I was dealing with this huge, tremendous loss of losing my mom, I knew that I just needed to be in that space.

On top of the fact that I knew I was going to be going through a grief process of our oldest son going away to college. Even though that was a happy time, you can be happy about something and excited and still feel the loss of the way things are about to change. So this summer I was as present as I could be in my life.

So then in the fall, we took Dillon to college and we adjusted to that. And I would say we're doing as a family much better. I appreciate a lot of parents who've gone through this before, who have told us that.

it's going to be really awful when you send your child away or when the first child moves out or the next one. Like I actually started to feel comfort in the parents who said it's hard and it kind of doesn't get easier in some ways. It never gets easier, but in other ways it does. So once again, I just gave myself time to really feel that deep loss of just missing our son being in the house.

and trying to adjust to what that new normal looks like.

While I wasn't the only person going through this change, you know, he has younger siblings. My husband was dealing with the change. Our son, who's navigating a new life in college, he's going through his own transition. So for about a month, we were trying to reground ourselves as a family. And we're still going through that process, but it really is super hard at the beginning and then it starts to get better.

At least that's been our experience so far. But in the fall, it was also time to get back to work. And it was time for me to finally launch this podcast.

This podcast has felt to me in some ways an ending and a beginning. In one way, it was the final thing I wanted to do as it relates to my book, Girl in the Spotlight, coming out last October, October of 2023. As part of my book launch and book promotion, I was going to then launch a podcast.

The point of this podcast was to be a place to deep dive some of the themes in my memoir. And it still is. But I also want this, this podcast also represents a beginning for me and my community of people who have followed me for years. It's time to grow, it's time to expand, it's time to deepen the conversation.

And I don't exactly know where it's leading. But in that way, this podcast felt very important to launch. And it launched much later than I anticipated, given what was going on in my personal life behind the scenes at the beginning of the year. So I finally got the podcast launched at the beginning of October. Around the same week, I turned 50. Now I...

say 50, like it means something. mean, it's interesting when one turns 50. I don't know how to feel about that. Is it young? Is it old? It's definitely a change. I've always felt a really connection to my younger self. In many ways, I still feel very youthful. My personality is youthful.

vital, I exercise, I'm a lot of fun. when you hit a milestone birthday, whether you're turning 30 or 40 or 50, 60, 70, beyond, it makes you pause and think about your life and where you are on the map of your life. So turning 50,

certainly had that effect on me.

Angie Mizzell (09:27)
Something I'm really grappling with now, and I have been the past couple of months, is that my mom was only 68 when she died. She had me when she was 18.

And I really believe, and I'm no doctor, but a lot of my mom's issues, and I bet, I mean, she would agree.

A lot of her issues health-wise were partly caused unresolved unresolved issues of shame around things that happened in her life that weren't her fault. Living in a time where

Women especially didn't feel like they had a voice.

I think and I have seen that there is a huge connection between our mental, emotional, physical health, our gut health, our metabolic

I touch on this in other episodes in the power of letting go and in the power of breaking

Sometimes I feel like every generation stands on the shoulders of the one that came

One of the main things my mom wanted me to realize is that I had more power than I realized. That is a scene in my memoir. It was a conversation we I was barely 30 years old and it was right before I left my career in television when she was talking to me about power,

She was talking to me about the power that liberates, the power that leads you to freedom and joy and abundance for your own life.

So looking ahead to 2025, there are so many things that I want to do and say and share. I want to bring people into this conversation. So I want to interview more people, have more conversations. I want to bring you guys into the conversation and figure out ways that you can ask questions or share your stories and we can bring that in. I really want to.

expand upon the theme of home. I have felt such an intense draw back to home, back to my own home, back to so physical home, but the home in the metaphorical sense of what it feels like to be at home in our own

In last week's episode, I talked about the nine questions that changed my life. And these were questions that came to me from mentors and teachers and trainers and therapists and different people that I encountered when I was growing up and in the first decade of my career. So this was the part of my coming of age story, Girl in the Spotlight.

So my point is I shared these nine questions that changed my life back when I was much younger than I am now. And I've already had many of you tell me that the questions are powerful and you will use these questions whenever you are in some kind of life transition. And it's funny to me that I just realized this week that I am reliving all of those questions again.

Specifically, how do you feel? What should I do with my life? What would you do if you weren't afraid? There were nine, but those three are the ones that jump out to me right I am in a transition and something I've realized, especially once I started having a career, having a family, just basically being an adult, a person in the world, that life is more transition than it's not.

I released Girl in the Spotlight last year. I was 49. Why was I telling a story about something that happened in my 20s and 30s? Because

that life change and the transition and the lessons that I learned are universal and they are serving me

The thing I say at the beginning of almost every podcast episode is welcome to more like you. This is a podcast where we explore what happens when you step out of the life you thought you should live and into a life that feels more like you. It recently occurred to me that I'm still doing I am looking at everything that I'm doing.

I'm looking at my entire life and I'm asking myself, is there anything I'm holding onto that it's time to let go of? Is there anything that has run its Are there things that I'm focusing on that are crowding out things that I'm ready to bring into my own life?

And so here we are. We're doing this together, my I believe in my bones that when we do this work of trying to become more of who we really are, that that is the path to freedom, peace, abundance, joy, all of those good feelings that we really want to feel around the holiday.

We want to feel that way all year long. Now listen, I look back on 2024 and it wasn't fun. It wasn't full of

I spent the first half of the year.

with just like a knot in my stomach, waking up every day, saying to myself, I don't know how much longer we can do this as we were trying to help my mom get better. Sadly, that was something my mom said towards the end. I don't know how much longer I can do this.

Life is like that. Life is hard. Life is real. Life is messy. We have to show up and do things that we don't want to do. So this is not a conversation about how we can life hack, grief, loss, all the things that aren't pleasant. It's not the point. It is about how at every turn, how every day is an invitation to show up.

as who we really are, even if we're walking through a season that is incredibly difficult. And when I look back on 2024, I still see many moments of joy, of of happiness and laughter, relief and freedom, small miracles that happen every

So this is why when I look ahead to 2025, I really feel very compelled to continue this mission of creating a community of people who want to show up for their lives more like

So thank you very much for being here I'll see you back here on the podcast in 2025. But remember, if you want to stay go over to my website, angiemizzell.com forward slash subscribe, sign up for my weekly newsletter Hello Friday, if you're not already there. It's a weekly dose of inspiration and encouragement delivered to your inbox. You can also find me on

So once again, thank you so much for listening and supporting me and my work as a storyteller and for being a part of this community.