Your hardest year might be the one people later call your turning point. Nobody calls it that while it’s happening.

Turning points only get named afterwards. While you are inside a hard year it does not feel like a beginning, it feels like damage, and the useful parts are invisible because they are still being built. The story someone tells later is assembled out of a stretch that felt, at the time, like nothing but loss.

You do not have to decide what this year means while it is happening. Keep doing the few things that hold your life together and let the meaning arrive late. If it would help, write down what you are learning now and read it back in a year.