2022: What a Year

trigger warning, the Resilience Project provides an open space for people to share their personal experiences. Some content in this podcast may include topics that you may find difficult, the listeners discretion is advised.

Hello friends, welcome to radical resilience, a weekly show where I Blair Kaplan Venables have inspirational conversations with people who have survived life's most challenging times. We all have the ability to be resilient and bounce forward from a difficult experience. And these conversations prove just that, get ready to dive into these life changing moments while strengthening your resilience muscle and getting raw and real.

Welcome back to another episode of radical resilience. It's me, Blair Kaplan Venables, and I'm here for a brief holiday intermission. It's the last episode of the year, the last episode of 2022. And what a year it has been, whew, we began working on the global Resilience Project, at the beginning of 2019, which it started off as the I am resilient project. It started off as a goal to write a book to share my father's story and my story of forgiveness, my father's addiction, resilience, and our journey. Our story was helping people. And so we thought of this project as a way to continuously tell his story when he was no longer here. And if you've been following along from launching the project, until now, there's been a lot of trauma and drama and hard things going on in our life. And we finally put the book out. So 2022, let's talk about that. So 2022, January 17. That would have been our mother's birthday. Our mother passed away almost a few years ago now. And we launched this podcast almost a year ago today, or not today. Well, yeah, almost a year ago, today, January 17. So that happened in January, I actually was climbing out of deep grief in January, I started to feel like myself again. And in February, we got the call that my father's health was declining, and the family was called in. So February, I spent time with my dad time with my sister and my family. And my dad passed away. So February was sad. And then I felt like I got sucked back into a vortex of grief. It also brought up a lot of feelings. And all that jazz, you know, from losing my mom and my father in law and my baby and just lots of other things. March Well, actually, in February, Atlanta, and I were supposed to go to Palm Springs to be together over the anniversary of our mom's passing. And it just so happened that my father passed away within the same year as my mother. And so we postponed our trip and went in March, because it's way better to be sad and warm than sad and cold. And we both live in Canada. Alana lives in Winnipeg, where it's minus 40 Celsius often. And so, you know, we spent time together being Griffey and floating in the pool. And it was really good for us to spend that time together. And then in April, I started to get the energy to put into the book to begin to finish the book, the global Resilience Project book. So we worked on it, and we worked on it, some cool stuff happened. My story was featured in a different collaboration book, actually, in a couple, but one of them took me on a media tour around the USA, I ended up on a billboard in Times Square, which is amazing for the project, great visibility, but it was also very taxing on my mental health to be traveling that much and being you know, in such big busy cities. And I think it was definitely like, interesting because I remember standing looking at the billboard and thinking, like, I know, this is exciting, and I feel happy, but I mostly feel sad. Like I mostly felt sad and depressed. And I knew something was not right. June also, we had our mother's unveiling, which is a tradition in the Jewish religion. You don't get your headstone right away. You get your headstone, like within like six to 12 months or so of passing. But our mother passed in February and the ground is frozen, so and it's cold, so we decided to do it in June. And so it's supposed to symbolize like this closure, and it was really great to be together with family because when mom passed, it was COVID height of COVID. And so we couldn't really celebrate our mother's life and memory. He's the way we wanted to. And yeah, the unveiling was quite interesting and like our mother and father are buried somewhat close together. So it's just like, it's weird. It's a weird feeling. I've been in a lot of a lot of events at the cemetery. And yeah, June, after I got home from my three and a half week adventure of media tour and unveiling family time, I realized that I was extremely depressed and that I had to go back on SSRI. So I did and I started to feel better. And I spent the summer healing and paddleboarding and camping and being in nature and doing what heals me. And yeah, and then fall came and here we are, it's now winter. Something I actually just remembered that I left out was we actually published the global Resilience Project book. We published the book in June and we became a best seller on Amazon, in the US and in Canada. Number one best seller, super exciting, really proud of it. 70 stories from around the world. And if you hear if you hear a bell in the background is because I have a kitten that I decided to buy on my father's birthday November 13. And he is playing with the noisiest toy. And he only does this when I'm on a Zoom meeting or recording. So if you hear it in the background, it's not Santa jingling. It's my cat Frey. And so, yes, we published his book and became a best selling author. And it was really great. But I felt like I was really burnt out from the grief and everything that's been going on that I couldn't celebrate it the way I wanted it to. And I couldn't celebrate the accomplishment the way I wanted it to. And so back to where I just was in the fall like fall was really great. I started to feel like I was healing. Shannon, I went on a vacation and I had a dream where my mother came to visit me. And in that dream, we were getting ready to publish our second book, the second global Resilience Project book. And so on vacation in Hawaii, I had a dream where my mother came to me and she was just telling me how proud she was of me. And we were getting ready to publish the second global Resilience Project book. And so I saw that as a sign that as time I sat with it, I felt it and yeah, it's time. So we're just preparing for the new year to launch the second global Resilience Project book to open applications for people to be in the book. We're actually you know, Alanna has been spending more time on podcasts with me it's, it's great. I love podcasting. With her. We have a little segment called reefy gals. And yeah, that's that's awesome. And then yeah, winter just happened. A lot. Alanna came here. She celebrated her first Christmas with myself and my in laws and my husband. And it was really beautiful. Because Clinica overlapped Christmas. So we had a big Hanukkah party. And I don't think we've been together for the holidays in like 15 plus years. And maybe we have but I don't remember. And I don't think she remembers. And so it was really special, a really beautiful way to wrap up the year. And the global Resilience Project for the next year. 2023 you know, has some solid plans, but also is open to seeing what unfolds. So we're gonna continue podcasting, we're going to keep dropping into your ears, we're going to announce and open up applications for the next global Resilience Project book, we anticipate the book being bigger, having more reach, getting more publicity, I've signed on a couple of really cool opportunities that I will share more details with as they unfold, but one of them includes sharing our story, my story, the global Resilience Project story on a new series that's going to air on Amazon Prime. And that's amazing. I'm filming in March, I'm also getting brought into different organizations around the world to share how to strengthen your resilience muscle and share our mission and the story of the project and my story and, you know, speaking to teenagers and to adults and big groups, 1000s of people at a time to a few 100 to, you know, 15 to one, I am so excited because I'm here to turn my pain into purpose. This project, for me is a way to heal and it's a way for you to heal. And I am so grateful that I got to this point in my healing where I can proudly say that I've taken all the hardships that I've had, and I've been able to transform them into a tool that is going to help you and it's helping me while I help you. So Happy Holidays. Merry Christmas. This was just a quickie. Go back to loafing go back to enjoying your time off. And cheers to the new year.