2024 Year In Review - Top Articles

Love, like Rain

What’s up, fam? I've been working on new content for 2025, and I’m excited to continue building community with all of you! I can’t believe that it’s been almost two years since I started this Newsletter and four years since I launched my podcast, My Black Book Journal.

I’ve also been creating content to share with other platforms and publications. This is beautiful because it means that our community is growing through serving others.

To wrap up the year, I am posting a few of the top-read posts from the year; it just so happens that some of these articles are also some of my favorites. I may also add a few behind-the-scenes notes to give you all a glimpse into my life and process.

The first article is "Love, Like Rain." It is one of my favorite articles. When I published it, I was going through an extremely difficult season of life. Not too long after writing it, I resigned from my job—not for one thing, but for many reasons, some large and small. That decision led to a season of rest and being confronted by the fact that I was experiencing severe burnout.

So, when I went back and read this article the other day, it caused me to reflect on the pressure I was under. Much of what I shared still rings true, but as I went back and reread my work, I found myself wanting to add and change things. I desired to clean up my writing to make it a little bit more tidy. I wanted to insert more about what I was going through and encourage men and women to seek out help if they feel like the weight of life is too much. But all that would just be additives. It wouldn’t be genuine to the hopelessness I was battling in those moments.

So here is the first article in our reflection piece. If you read it when I first published it, I’d love for you to share how the piece impacted you then and how it is impacting you now. If this is your first time reading it, please feel free to dive into the conversation.