What has this year built in you?

THIS year has asked something of all of us. More than a sequence of months, it may have felt like a building site, a place of dust, scaffolding, breakthroughs, and quiet moments where truth arrived like a whisper.

For many of us, it has been a year of unlearning and rebuilding, shedding, a tender (at times) process of learning to trust the ground beneath our feet again.

We often imagine courage as loud or certain, something that announces itself with confidence. But what this year taught me is that courage is usually far quieter.

It sounds like the breath you finally release after holding it for far too long. It looks like choosing yourself even when you’re shaking. It feels less like walking away and more like walking towards something you know matters. In trying to make sense of this year, in this episode of The House of Motherly (T.H.O.M), I found myself returning to a metaphor that helped me understand my own inner landscape: the idea of a house filled with different rooms.

Not a physical home, but a symbolic one in a way of recognising the many emotional and psychological spaces we carry within us, and the more I sat with this image, the more I realised that we each have a house inside of us.

Perhaps you’ll notice the same as you wander through your own internal house.

There’s the living room: The space of connection, community and belonging. Some years it feels full and warm; other years it grows quieter, asking us to reassess who sits close to our centre.

Nearby on a ledge in the living room is the shrine, a candle lit space where grief and loss linger. Loss of a person, a relationship, an income, a dream, or even an old version of ourselves. This time of year can soften the edges of grief or sharpen them sometimes both at once.

The kitchen: It is where nourishment lives. For many years I used food as a form of reward or punishment, now it's used as fuel and nourishment and a source of celebration. For many of us, this room has been complicated, but it remains a place where we can learn to delight again.

In the gym: The strength takes shape not as punishment or pressure but as movement that honours the body. A reminder that our physical selves carry stories too. The gift of being able to move with meaning.

The study: It is where purpose waits patiently. This is the room of clarity, drive, legacy, and the quiet knowing that whispers, This matters.

The bedroom: A place where intimacy lives, it invites rest and reclamation. It is where we meet ourselves without the masks, a place to recharge and rediscover.

The garden: The dappled sunlight between leafy trees of seasons and breath. Growth is rarely linear, yet colour always returns if we pause long enough to notice. Also reminding us that we don't need to bloom all year round.

The bathroom: The place of releasing and looking at ourselves eye to eye in the mirror in our perfect makeup, and no not eyeshadow and bright lipstick, bare faced just as you are in your imperfect perfection.

The playroom: It is where joy is unstructured and unapologetic. A room many adults forget to visit, though it might be the one we need most.

Finally, the nurture room: Here we learn how to raise ourselves while raising others. Where softness and strength sit side by side.

As the year draws to a close, I invite you to walk through your own inner house.  Which rooms need tending? Which ones surprised you? Which ones grew? Which ones asked more of you than you expected?

Whatever it built, honour it, because the house you carry within has always been yours and it’s waiting for you to turn the key.

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SUNDAY TRIBUNE