When we find our people, we can truly be ourselves.

How are we, my friends?

What are we looking/thinking/listening through from 2024? What catches our attention, stands out? How do we feel in mind, body, spirit, and soul from/for it all?

What emerges for me:
Community. Belonging. Liberation. Sharing. Healing with Help.

Readers of this blog know about Ethos, my gym. Tim and Victoria named it aptly, and now Tim and Cory operate it with integrity and vision: “Train. Recover. Connect.” What other gym prioritizes relationship in its mission and tagline? These are my people! I worried that moving from a small garden unit in River North to a space almost three times larger in Roscoe Village would somehow alter the culture–the ethos–one never knows what can happen with such transitions. Happily, I think it has only grown stronger, and now there is space for more of us to benefit. It doesn’t matter who you are, how much you lift, your age, or whatever. If you bring your full self and engage, you’re one of us–because we all make it so. It’s amazing. Of note, making friends in their 20s and 30s and outside of medicine has broadened my perspective and improved my life more than I knew I needed, and I could not be more grateful. We never know who our people may include until we meet them.

So go the leaders, so go the led.

In any domain, culture is influenced most strongly by the designated leaders, the ones with authority and power. This year I found AJ: Musician, composer, Quinn creator, animal lover, motorbike enthusiast, filmmaker, amateur home DIY engineer, and all around beautiful human. His fans call ourselves Angels, a fast growing community drawn together principally in admiration for AJ, and bonded in various other ways. Watch any of AJ’s videos on TikTok or read his Instagram posts to see this humble, curious, funny, loving, and nerdy man connect with his fan group in the most wholesome, extemporaneous, and unassuming ways. Listen to his Quinn audios to experience soft and strong, dominant and submissive, gentle and powerful, masculine and feminine humanity in all our complexity, brought to life with voice only, and know why we hit play over 250,000 times since he started creating them in June. By December 16 we had listened a total of over 1.7 million minutes–almost 3.5 years.

During the 4+ hour holiday live stream today when he shared and then responded to messages from Angels around the world, I was floored by the power and energy of mutual uplift between AJ and us. Yes, he has amassed a following that lifts and amplifies him and his work. He has also gathered and cultivated, just by being himself, a tribe of women who lift one another in empathic, present, compassionate, and utterly humane love. Listeners comment on how his content and community create the safety to be fully ourselves that we experience no place else. That is profound. It’s all him, and also not–it’s all of us, together, amplifying one another. By the end of the live stream AJ himself reflected on how desperately this reciprocally loving and accepting energy is needed in the world. So now it’s his and the Angels’ mission to spread it. He leads by dynamic and responsive example. And while he’s most visible as a strong male ally of women in this space, I am sure that his example will also reach, move, and support men–those ready to more fully integrate their emotional selves and connect more deeply and meaningfully with women, other men, and non-binary people alike.

Be a candle. Use your light to light others. Your light diminishes not at all for the effort, and there is only more light in the world.

In case you wonder, yes, I am still immersed in the romance audio universe and loving every moment. The friends I have made around the world from Colorado to Oregon to the UK and Australia form yet another community of mutual uplift, with its own unique and loving vibe. This tribe introduced me to Quinn, the app for audio erotica. This new immersion has taken my sexual education to the next level, and sharing my learning has benefited more than just myself. I know I am far from alone in this expansion, and as AJ’s Angels express repeatedly, the Quinn messages of self- and other-acceptance, love, and uplift heal and save us all.

Communities like Ethos, Angels, and romance audio gather, enfold, champion, and strengthen parts of ourselves that we may otherwise minimize, repress, or even reject. Such loving and uplifting communities help make us whole. Enveloped in such ardent belonging, we are liberated to truly be and express our real, unmitigated selves, no matter how quirky, weird, or previously outcast.

Looking ahead to 2025, I will work to continue forging Community everywhere I am. I will point out shared humanity across difference and divergence whenever, wherever, and with whomever I see and hear it. Our people inhabit more diverse spaces than we know or admit. My conversations since the American presidential election continue to teach me this. I could not have known 9.7 years ago how aptly I named this blog.

Healing Through Connection.

That pretty much says it all.