Tag: loss
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Confessions of an Extrovert: Why I Now Love My Alone Time
“Allow yourself to grow and change. Your future self is waiting.” -Unknown
Not to be dramatic, but I really mean it when I say that solitude changed my life. I am an extrovert who loves humans, socializing, and learning from people and experiences. I’ve always enjoyed being around others, and don’t get me wrong, I still thrive this way. But when I got Covid in 2021, life completely changed, and it’s not the only way I thrive now.
Before Covid, I’d been living my life in a way that wasn’t serving me. I was partying a lot, not eating well, and living in chaos, with very little rest. I constantly had my schedule booked, leaving no time for self-care. I felt like I was living life for others, ignoring what I needed.
I made mistakes, like blowing off my priorities because I was in a terrible headspace, and I continued living an unhealthy lifestyle until I finally had a talk with myself and realized this wasn’t right for me (then Covid came along, and sh*t got serious).
I didn’t immediately enjoy quarantining and being stuck at home, away from friends and family, but before I got sick, I knew change was coming. And though I felt a lot of resistance, I also felt that a new version of myself was on the way.
While I’m usually not one to fight change, there was so much going on at once, and it was a lot. I also learned that I was one of the people who suffered from panic attacks and anxiety as a side effect of Covid. The aftermath was worse than having the virus itself.
This lasted almost a year. I felt so bad for myself; I couldn’t believe that this is what life had come to for me. I was even losing my hair. Some days I’d wonder if this dark tunnel would ever come to an end and show me light. Things felt very heavy, but I also had some of the most beautiful things going on at the same time, like living in the city with my now fiancé, so it was all very confusing.
I began to lose sleep, which was unusual for me. My inner world felt like chaos. There were lots of tears and weekly therapy sessions (which also changed my life). Therapy and journaling became my safe spaces to release and understand myself.
Throughout the year of that inner chaos, what did I learn? Surrender. I was trying to maintain full control of my life and keeping busy while actively avoiding working through suppressed emotions from times when younger Naila would over-extend for others, and completely forget to take care of herself. I didn’t want to listen because I was afraid. And that’s human nature, to fear the unknown.
So, here’s a reminder that the Universe forces you to slow down and redirect when you’re not listening. This also means it may hurt more since we didn’t consciously welcome the change.
Over time, I have gone through so many phases and such inner growth. I began working with my wonderful therapist and quit a job that was not working out for me as expected (which hurt). I’ve lost people and my relationships changed, thankfully most of them for the better.
As soon as I let go of control and put in the hard work, things got better, and I saw results—even if they were just small victories. I was starting to see that light I’d been waiting for. My body felt lighter as I began to release dead weight from my body and I began to feel like myself again, but this time, better than ever.
I chose watering myself over destructive behaviors. Instead of focusing on the anxiety attacks and trying to force myself back to sleep at night, I meditated. I chose solitude over socializing. This was the peak of my growth.
Sometimes, we get lost in the chaos of this busy world. We get sucked into conversations and company we don’t actually enjoy. Society tells us to be productive 24/7. Our worth is based off money, accomplishments, and what social media sees. Conversations are about what we are instead of who we are.
Long before this journey, I was used to overbooking my schedule, always very busy. I would work two jobs, scheduling anything I could in between and going to school at the same time. I enjoyed it then.
Solitude and self-reflection taught me what I truly care about: genuine connections, giving and receiving love, nurturing myself just as I do others, and living, not just surviving.
My higher self told me that the world’s expectations are not my own, and that it’s okay to choose a different path than I once wanted (or society told me I wanted). As I’ve learned in therapy, I am my own worst critic, so my new path is all about letting life unfold naturally, without constantly criticizing myself for where I thought I’d be in life, especially in my career.
I began to reflect on my life, my inner child, and current self. Most importantly, I began to heal from things I’d stored away from childhood pains and days long ago during an abusive relationship. I let go of self-sabotaging behaviors and decided to finally listen and release, then the inner turmoil started to calm.
Because I was spending much more time alone, I learned a lot about myself. Solitude helps us build trust with ourselves and teaches us about our true desires. We begin to tolerate less and prioritize differently. I value very different things now than I once did. I’m getting to know my true self, and that’s something no one can teach you or prepare you for.
I also want to emphasize that solitude is possible while you’re in a healthy relationship.
Throughout my dark days, I had my now-fiancé supporting me through it all while letting me heal and grow. Him supporting my solitude made me that much more successful on my journey. When someone around you offers love, respect, and support, it makes it easier. Their company becomes a bonus and not a burden. Previous Naila didn’t think this was possible, and I’m grateful things panned out differently.
Overall, I have learned that the “dark” times were actually just lessons and periods that catapulted my growth and healing. The tough times are temporary, and there is strength and clarity in solitude. As of today, I cherish my solitude; it’s a vital part of my being. I also learned that there is light at the end of the dark tunnel. Yes, even when it’s long and scary.
In this new chapter of my life, rest is high on my priority list, not overworking and overbooking. I am much pickier about who/what I surround myself with, much more productive, and still growing and ever-changing.
My life is much more peaceful and calm, and my boundary-setting skills are much stronger. These are lessons I couldn’t learn as an unbalanced extrovert. I’m a better version of myself now.
So, if you’re an extrovert who forgets to prioritize yourself, someone who’s going through a dark tunnel, or someone who avoids change, this post is for you. Instead of being afraid of solitude and change, learn to accept them and watch how they transform your life for the better.
As my dad once told me, change is the only constant in life, so get comfortable with the uncomfortable.
I believe in you. ♥
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Dealing with a Big Disappointment: How to Soften the Blow and Move On
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.” ~Lao Tzu
In the middle of a storm, it is difficult to see any way out. But on the other side, we usually can recognize a silver lining—something we gained from the experience that enhanced our lives in some way.
When my husband unexpectedly died and left me a single mother to three young children, I could not conceptualize anything good coming out of it.
Yet, years later, I am here to tell you that the gutting, heart-wrenching experience taught me invaluable lessons that have helped me to not just survive but actually thrive, finding more happiness when I never thought I would again. Although I wish that experience never happened, I also would never trade the person I am today. Life is funny in that way.
There have been many setbacks and impending feelings of disappointment. Losing loved ones, the end of relationships, professional rejections and mishaps, parenting flops, general life blunders. All of it.
Each time I survive a setback, I learn something new and I get better. I become wiser when I seek to understand the lesson and reflect on the experience. I realize that these moments of disappointment have a lot to offer me in personal growth.
However, in order to get to this place, you must take care of your disappointment. It helps to study human nature and the common responses during these emotions, so you can recognize the pitfalls and be proactive about responding to your disappointment in a nurturing, positive way.
Most recently, when a relationship ended, I knew immediately that I had to make sure my disappointment didn’t turn into something bigger and darker. I learned from previous experiences what not to do.
Disappointment—what happens when your expectations are not aligned with reality—can be emotionally and physically painful. But when it turns into devastation, it becomes destructive and crushing, potentially putting you in danger.
Disappointment is a little hole you can jump over or fill in with some effort. Devastation is a deep trench that is difficult to escape and will require monumental effort. The trick is to take care of it before it becomes insurmountable.
After my husband passed away, it felt like my wings had been clipped. In a second, I lost my best friend, partner, colleague, and source of unfaltering support. I suddenly found myself having to stand on my own two feet with nobody to root me on, and I felt unconfident and unworthy.
It took me a while to consider dating. When I did meet someone, I had high hopes for that first relationship. I wanted so badly to experience the security of a stable relationship with a committed partner, the kind I had with my husband. I overlooked the fact that not everyone shared those expectations.
Unfortunately, this person wasn’t the right one. It was disappointing to feel like I’d wasted my time on someone with whom the stars did not align. I was not prepared to deal with the letdown.
I felt wronged by the universe for being in a predicament that I thought shouldn’t have happened in the first place. If only my husband hadn’t passed away, I wouldn’t be in this ridiculous, embarrassing situation of trying to re-enter the dating field as a single mother in the early years of her middle age.
I spiraled into self-pity, wondering why me and why not other people. It was triggering to see others in relationships and wonder why they didn’t have to suffer the way I felt our family had. It can feel isolating and lonely when nobody in your social circles is in the same boat.
That’s the thing about disappointment. We take it so personally. In reality, everyone has their own share of it; we just aren’t privy to seeing all of the ways it manifests in other people’s lives. We have tunnel vision with the realities we spin in our minds.
That relationship riddled me with self-doubt, which felt embarrassing because I knew I had already experienced more serious loss than that. Still, I wanted to dissect all of the details and ruminate over what happened, what could have happened, and what might have happened.
I let it linger too long instead of severing ties when I should have. I let the experience reinforce negative thoughts, like the ones where I told myself that I would never find anyone, that I wasn’t good enough, or that I didn’t deserve another chapter.
This was a classic case of me not taking care of my disappointment. I let my expectations go wild and I took the disappointment as a crushing blow to my ego. I internalized the pain and let it grow, feeding it irrational thoughts and reactions to perpetuate the negative emotions.
There is a better approach.
Disappointment is inevitable and natural, but there are ways we can soften the blow to help ourselves heal and move through the feelings instead of getting stuck in them. When we learn to not hold on so tight and let go, seek joy, and imagine the road ahead, we help ourselves dilute the disappointment until it no longer hurts us.
Letting Go
First and foremost, learn to accept what you can control and what you can not. This is paramount to taking care of your disappointment. Holding on to a reality that does not exist only makes your wounds fester.
I keep a journal, and it serves as an outlet for me to dump my thoughts into. I can go back to previous entries, and it is usually then that I make connections and realize that the grass was not always greener. I did this recently with a breakup, and I read, in my own words, about the red flags that I didn’t heed, which helped give me perspective as I processed what happened.
When we feel disappointed, our levels of neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine) go down. We experience emotional and sometimes physical pain as a result. The first night after my most recent breakup, my chest felt heavy, making it difficult to breathe as I struggled to fall asleep that night.
Even though I knew on an intellectual level that it was absolutely for the best, I couldn’t get over the feeling that I had done something wrong and, even worse, that I had wasted my time again. I find myself defaulting to toxic habits: lashing out, looking for ways to hold on, giving the situation too much benefit of the doubt, and trying to rescue something that was not there anymore. In a disappointed state, we tend to fall into irrational thinking and unsavory reactions in an effort to make the pain stop.
We have to learn to wrap our minds around the impermanence of disappointment—it won’t hurt this bad forever—and let it go, instead of desperately digging in our heels. At this stage, there’s nothing more important than acknowledging how you feel, but then moving on and adjusting your expectations.
Find Varied Sources of Joy
The old adage “don’t put all of your eggs in one basket” applies here. The person that got away, the job you lost, or whatever happened to cause your disappointment was not the only source of your joy. Or at least it shouldn’t have been. You are a person with many interests, and you are going to find your dopamine and serotonin elsewhere.
If you don’t have any hobbies, now is the time to explore and perhaps learn something new. This will help redirect your attention away from the disappointment and also make you feel good. It’s always a good idea to fill your happiness bucket, and now is the perfect time.
Some questions to consider:
- What did you used to do in the past that made you happy?
- What have you always wanted to do?
- What can you do now that you couldn’t do before?
For me, I decided I wanted to finish some projects I had kept on the backburner when I was busy in a relationship, and I decided to learn pickleball to meet new people and go back to pilates, which I had stopped pre-pandemic and never resumed.
Conceptualize the Road Ahead
Disappointment is not the end of your road. You are not stuck in a dead end. You simply encountered a bump in the road and there is a way out.
First, figure out what you want in your life in terms of priorities and values. I spend a lot of time doing this, but when I encounter disappointment, I still find myself swerving off the path and bombarding myself with negative thoughts. I have to consciously separate the disappointment from my identity, and keep reminding myself that I am not what I lost.
I remind myself of the goals I have, ones that still exist even in the face of loss. Sometimes we need to adjust these goals and find other plans or even go in new directions, but you are still a person with aspirations, hopes, and dreams that belong to you. Disappointment doesn’t get to take that away from you.
It helps me to create lists of the small action steps I need to take to achieve these goals. I call them “bite-size” actions. Teeny, tiny steps.
For example, I made a “glow” list after my most recent breakup, with all of the things I wanted to do to enhance and better my life. It included tasks as small as getting my nails done and as big as setting up an investment account. Check items off your list and build your grit and perseverance as you prove to yourself how strong you are.
Also, embrace an abundance mindset. There are more fish in the ocean. There will be job opportunities you can’t even conceptualize right now. Trust they are out there and be open to these possibilities. Seek them out.
When I get a writing rejection, I try to reframe it as a learning opportunity, trusting that there will be more opportunities to submit my work and I will get better with practice. You don’t get one shot and you’re done. There are an infinite amount of opportunities still waiting for you to explore.
Bottom line: Disappointment is an opportunity to grow your emotional resilience. It’s a chance to get stronger and intentional about your life, evolving into a better version of who you were yesterday.
One way to approach your disappointment is to remember seven-year-old you. How would you talk to that child? What advice would you tell seven-year-old you?
Treating yourself with compassion and patience, while firmly steering yourself back into a positive direction, will help you overcome the many forms of disappointment you will inevitably encounter.
I’m human, so disappointment still stings even with all of the work I have done. But utilizing these tools have helped me navigate through negative feelings, enabling me to heal more quickly and move on toward new sources of joy.
I like this quote by Peter Marshall. He said, “When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.”
Never forget that you are a diamond, nothing less.
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How to Get Comfortable Being Alone and Get the Most Out of Solitude
“The act of sitting down is an act of revolution. By sitting down, you stop that state of being: losing yourself, not being yourself. And when you sit down, you connect to yourself. And you don’t need an iPhone or a computer to do that. You just need to sit down mindfully and breathe in mindfully.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
The day my ex-wife moved out was also the day when our dog moved out and when I was laid off from my bankrupt ex-company. It felt like everything around me had suddenly died. Many of our common friends and loved ones distanced themselves from me, and I felt abandoned.
As I took my first few steps through the rubble, I felt the full force of this new solitude that was now forced upon me. And it wasn’t going anywhere soon.
I immediately lost my appetite and my desire to cook. I started taking irresponsibly long hot showers and baths till my skin burned. I decluttered. I threw away pictures and memorabilia, love notes and cutlery, teabags and cushion covers. I stopped vacuuming.
But I continued running. I started reading. I read anything that looked like it held a secret to end my suffering.
I lost interest in my job. I’d wake up every morning with dread, sometimes not sleeping entire nights.
I kept running. I got faster and stronger. I also got injured and had to stop. The darkness stayed even as the days started to get longer. While I lived abroad, the second wave of covid had just hit back home. One of my best friends from childhood died. Also a cousin. A friend lost his father and never saw the body. My dad got very sick and almost died. I sank further.
But I kept meditating in solitude. Every time the void of existence hit me with boredom, anxiety, and restlessness, something deep within forced me to continue sitting through it. It started feeling familiar. And I slowly started to come back to life. My sense of taste returned. I started cooking again. I started having friends over.
Still, some days I would collapse on the floor and cry till I got thirsty. Then I’d hydrate and go back to my laptop to run the next zoom meeting, smiling through it.
I realized what a shell of a person I was now that my ex-wife had left me. At the same time, I continued to befriend the solitude and get comfortable with my aching heart—to sit with it, have a conversation with it, and see what it had to say and what it had learned.
I was starting to get to know myself from a brand new perspective. It was almost like getting to know this new person who had been living in the basement all these years and I had no idea! And this person sure was interesting!
The solitude soaked in all my tears so I could laugh again with people. It became my duvet in the winters, my picnic blanket in the summer. The solitude and I would often do karaoke at 7:00 on a Sunday morning till the neighbors started complaining. We went on bike trips together, dipped in cold lakes, went to eat at buffets, and sat through boring dates.
It became my best friend when there was no one around. It taught me to write, to read, to think, to philosophize, to know what’s good for me, to love everyone unconditionally, and to be kind.
It showed me things as they truly are and caught me when I was being judgmental. It took away my anger and my desperation. It carried my dreams and filled me with hope.
Solitude has the power to teach us about ourselves. It is the gym where we must go to train.
A century ago, people would look forward to solitary periods of relaxation on their porch after a long day of work. But today, we devote most of our conscious time to the pursuit of feeling connected with other people, either offline or online. A simple notification instantly pulls us away from the present moment. We are constantly everywhere but here and now. But our true self lives in the here and now, though we seem to spend less and less time with it.
In the raw moments of loneliness that succeed a breakup or a bereavement, when we have nowhere to run, we encounter our true self. Like I did. And it was scary. It felt like sitting in the corner of a dungeon with a chain locked around my ankle as a stranger towered over me. I wanted to run away, but there was nowhere good enough to run to. I went scuba diving in the tropics, but my broken, ghost-of-a-self found me under water too.
The key to cultivating fearlessness in these moments is getting to know yourself through solitude. It means deliberately taking time out to sit alone so you feel comfortable with yourself, connected to yourself, and at peace with yourself.
To practice solitude, try this.
1. Think of your favorite meditative activity.
Ideally, it should involve interaction with physical objects, not digital ones. And definitely not a phone or something with a screen. It should be mundane and not involve rational thinking. This provides the ideal setting for your true self to emerge. An example is doing the dishes, focusing on your breath, or just sitting out in the garden, hearing and seeing what’s around you.
2. Set aside a fixed time during the day.
This is especially important if you are just starting out, because a strict regime is helpful to cultivate a habit. A good time is early in the morning. A recent study showed that early morning is the ideal time for alpha wave activity in the brain, which is associated with restful attentiveness. But depending on your schedule or your routine, any other time of the day is good enough to start with. Start with ten minutes and slowly make your way up to an hour. There’s no right or wrong duration, but the more the better.
3. Start with an intention.
Make a decision to consciously choose solitude. Embrace it like it’s your best friend. Know that it is good for you, that it is the right thing for you. That there is nothing better you’d rather do right now, and no one more important to talk to than yourself.
Most importantly, don’t get too serious. Develop a sense of joy, a sense of humor about the whole thing.
Sometimes it all may seem impossible, especially when painful memories and a sense of loss come back with profound pain. It may feel hopeless as the thoughts and feelings overwhelm you. But believe that those thoughts and feelings are like a movie playing in your head. They do not define your reality in the present moment. Do not let them consume you.
Believe you are the mountain in the storm. And when the thoughts and feelings eventually pass, which they will, come back to your practice. Develop almost a blind devotion to it in the beginning, because it may take many sittings to feel the first signs of solidity and bliss coming back.
If you are finding it tough to start by yourself, go to a local yoga or meditation class and work on your basic form. Then come back and try it again.
4. Start enjoying your company whenever the opportunity arises.
As you start building a regiment for solitude, you will start to appreciate moments to yourself. While you wait for your friend at the subway before you head to that party together. While you wait for your favorite burger to arrive after deciding to eat out by yourself.
Think of those fleeting minutes as a gift, as an opportunity to see if you can appreciate the world around you. Wait before you flip out your phone or put on your music. Can you see how solid and calm you feel now, compared to before? How rich the world around you is? Give yourself a high-five for putting in all those hours of solitude practice.
And if by chance that solitude is forced upon you by a tragedy or unforeseen event, even better! Because when your heart is broken it’s the most open, and ripe for new wisdom and the richness of the world to take root. Acclaimed author and Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön says, “To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening,”
Be deliberate. Be disciplined. And you will soon get to know the most interesting person you have ever met! One who will always be with you, no matter what else you lose.
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Dear Everyone Who Tells Me I Should Reconcile with My Parents
“You are allowed to terminate your relationship with toxic family members. You are allowed to walk away from people who hurt you. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for taking care of yourself.” ~Unknown
You might think I’m a monster because I don’t have a relationship with my parents. I don’t spend holidays with them; I don’t call them and reminisce; they don’t know pertinent details about my life, my friends, my family, my work, or even the person I have become. Do these facts shock you?
It is possible that you have only known loving, supportive parents. Parents who were open to discussing and negotiating your relationship, respecting your boundaries, and truly being a part of your life. That’s probably why you can’t understand how I don’t feel the same way about my parents.
When you learn that I don’t have a relationship with my parents your instinct is to deny my reality. You try to tell me that my parents love me unconditionally, that my mother still cares about me, and that my parents acted out of love for me. You assert that I should try and reconcile with my family, and tell me over and over that I will regret it if I don’t.
I don’t agree that they love me unconditionally, that they still care about me, that their actions are based on good intentions, or that they abused me in order to make me a better person. I am sorry if this upsets you or challenges your understanding of what a family looks like.
You become aggressive telling me that I should try harder, that I should adapt and be accommodating and compassionate toward my parents. You tell me that I should forgive them for the things I claim they have done to me and tell me over and over that forgiveness will lead to peace and healing.
But you don’t get it; I have already healed by not having them in my life, by accepting my painful reality.
You think that I should call my parents and have a reasonable conversation that would magically lead to a Hollywood ending filled with apologies, validation, love, and reconciliation. You believe that if I do this, I will have the family I have always wanted, and our relationship will be stronger, healthier, and more supportive.
I need to stop you and be firm. Your lack of understanding about my situation is re-traumatizing me. I cannot contact my parents and reconcile with them. Do you think I didn’t try to have the conversations that you’re suggesting? Don’t you realize that I tried so hard to adapt, to do what they wanted, to apologize and accommodate my parents, yet nothing ever changed? I was never enough!
Each interaction affirmed how much they despised me, how little they thought of me, and how reluctant they were to listen to me, get to know me more, or even to take the time to understand where I am coming from. Over and over, I tried harder and harder, my heart breaking each time. The picture of the perfect family shattering off the wall and the reality of my family becoming clearer and clearer.
These were not parents who loved me unconditionally the way parents should love their child. These were parents that might love me if I was better at school, did more for them around the house, and accomplished something they could brag about to elevate their own social position.
These were not parents who could be bothered to get to know the person I had become, because they believed they knew the flawed, evil monster they had conjured up in their minds. Yet I was not the evil monster; I was an adult child desperate to have a healthy relationship with my parents. I was a teenager who made a few mistakes, and finally I was an adult who saw and understood the family dynamics clearly and accurately.
Cutting contact with my parents was one of the hardest choices I have ever had to make in my life. Contrary to what you may think, I did not wake up one morning and decide that I did not want to have a family anymore. Rather, I woke up one morning and realized that if I didn’t end the relationship, I would continue to get hurt by my parents for the rest of my life.
Cutting contact with my parents, formally known as estrangement, allowed me to accept the reality of my situation and build a life that led to self-validation and healing.
This path has been painful, and there are times when I question whether I did the right thing. However, there are also times when I realize how much better my life is without my parents’ lack of compassion, respect for my boundaries, or willingness to work with me to have a healthy relationship.
Each time you cling to the Hollywood notion of reconciliation, you traumatize me. I know that I can’t have a relationship with my parents because this relationship will never be healthy. Yet each time you suggest I reconcile you cause me to question myself.
Questioning myself is something I have grown good at over the years because society does not affirm my choice as socially acceptable, nor does it condone the reasons I chose to cut contact in the first place.
Questioning myself and my own self-worth is something my parents helped me to become very good at over the years. You see, I couldn’t be doing what was best for me because to them, I was wrong, I was a bad person, and I never remembered situations and events accurately.
Maybe you don’t mean to cause me to question myself, but each time you bring up reconciliation and the notion that the relationship with my family could be fixed it takes me back into that space. I’m forced to remind myself of all the reasons why I had to cut contact. I’m forced to relive the painful conversations and the intense, overwhelming longing for apologies, validation, and love I know I will never get from my parents.
Before you tell me I need to see things differently and that most relationships can be fixed, I’m going to stop you. I’m going to remind you that it is hard for people to change. It is much easier for people to say that they have changed in order to save face or absolve themselves of any feelings of guilt and anguish.
People don’t change for others; they change for themselves because they realize that there are benefits to adjusting their behavior. An uncaring, disconnected parent is not likely to change for a child they never really could love.
I know that my choices make you feel uncomfortable. I took your family picture and I broke it into a million pieces, pieces that can never be put back together. I challenged your notions of the loving, supportive, forgiving family because that is not my reality, although for your sake, I am glad if that is yours.
Don’t tell me that time can heal all wounds or that time fixes relationships. Time has taught me that I made the right choice.
Incredible longing still washes over me when I see some of you interacting with your parents. You have support, love, and mentorship from your family that I will never know. Instead, I will look through the window at the seemingly perfect family, at your family, longing to know what it feels like to be loved and supported the way that you are.
I will always feel the pain of not having that picture as my own. Part of me will always question why I was not worthy enough to have it in the first place. A piece of my heart will ache with pangs of longing, longing I have learned and accepted is a natural part of life when you don’t have parents who are loving and supportive.
Don’t downplay my pain or deny my lived experiences. Don’t tell me that how I feel now will not be the same way I feel six months or six years from now. I don’t mean to be harsh, but you have not lived my life or walked in my shoes, and I am relieved for you.
Don’t remind me that my siblings have a great relationship with my parents, so therefore, I might be able to improve my relationship with them.
Let me remind you that in families like mine, not all children are treated the same way
Some children are the golden children, showered with love and support, while others are the neglected children who are barely noticed yet continue to maintain contact in the hopes that one day the relationship will improve. Other children within the toxic family system are scapegoats. Scapegoats are not really loved, and are blamed for things beyond their control.
In adulthood, some children in these families choose to deny the reality of the dysfunction because society teaches us that everyone needs a family. They choose to hang on and stay in touch with uncaring parents because the alternative choice is so stigmatizing and painful.
Stop! Don’t remind me of the way my mother acted when you were over at my house growing up. Don’t tell me that she treated you well over the years and was very interested/invested in your life. Please don’t tell me she asks about me every time she sees you or that she has no idea why I cut contact with her.
I don’t want to hear about how kind my father was. I don’t want to relive backyard barbecues where my parents acted kind and hospitable. You see, they acted.
Toxic parents can often be kind, compassionate, and caring to everyone else except for their own children. Behind closed doors, when you and the rest of the world were not watching, they were very different people.
You may have seen them treating me with kindness or pretending that they cared. This was all an act. I don’t want to show you who they really were behind closed doors because I doubt that you will believe me. I know this makes it harder to understand my perspective, but I don’t want to live in the pain of the past. I want to dwell in the present and look to the future with an open heart and an optimistic mind.
Let me reiterate this: the choice not to have family is both stigmatizing and painful. The pain and stigma flow from not being understood. From assumptions that there must be something wrong with me for cutting contact, that I must be inherently bad or have done something catastrophic to deserve to be cast out of the family.
Let me shatter that picture again. The only thing I did wrong is challenge your understanding of a loving supportive family.
Let me ask you something: If your friend criticized and judged everything you did and did not accept you as a person, would you stay friends with that person?
What if I told you that after interactions with that friend you were anxious, your entire body hurt, you felt like you did something wrong, you couldn’t sleep, and you questioned your judgment? You replayed the interaction over and over in your head each time, remembering more of the abusive comments, the judgmental actions, and the dismissive words you had endured during your visit.
Could you really stay friends with that person? No, you couldn’t. So why are you encouraging me to reconcile and stay in contact with my parents given that this is how they make me feel? Is it so hard for you to grasp that an unhealthy relationship can occur between family members?
Hold on tight to your family picture, but don’t ask me to repair mine. Instead, understand and accept my shattered picture.
Don’t ask me to cut myself with the shards of glass through forgiveness, reconciliation, and false hopes of unconditional love and acceptance. I’m sorry if what I’ve said makes you feel uncomfortable. Society makes me feel uncomfortable each time I am asked to deny my reality, pick up a piece of glass, and expose my family wound that you could easily help me heal by accepting it.
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My Dad Died From Depression: This Is How I Coped with His Suicide
“Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” ~Jamie Anderson
When I was seventeen, my dad died from depression. This is now almost twenty-two years ago.
The first fifteen years after his death, however, I’d say he died from a disease—which is true, I just didn’t want to say it was a psychological disease. Cancer, people probably assumed.
I didn’t want to know anything about his “disease.” I ran away from anything that even remotely smelled like mental health issues.
Instead, I placed him on a pedestal. He was my fallen angel that would stay with me my whole life. It wasn’t his fault he left me. It was the disease’s fault.
The Great Wall of Jessica
But no, my dad died by suicide. He chose to leave this life behind. He chose to leave me behind. At least, that’s what I felt whenever the anger took over.
And boy, was I angry. Sometimes, I’d take a towel, wrap it up in my hands, and just towel-whip the shit out of everything in my room.
But how can you be angry with a man who is a victim himself? You can’t. So I got angry at the world instead and built a wall ten stories high. I don’t think I let anyone truly inside, even the people closest to me.
How could I? I didn’t even know what “inside” was. For a long time, my inside was just a deep, dark hole.
Sure, I was still Jessica. A girl that loved rainbows and glitter. A girl that just wanted to feel joyful.
And I was. Whenever I was out in nature. I didn’t realize it at the time, but whenever I was on the beach, in a forest, or even in a park, I’d be content and calm.
Whenever I was inside between four walls, however, I felt restless, lonely, and agitated. This lasted for a very long time. I’d say for about twenty years—which, according to some therapists, is a pretty “normal” timespan for some people to really make peace with the traumatic death of a parent.
But during that time, alcohol and partying were my only coping mechanisms. I partied my bum off for a few years. I’d drink all night until I puked, and then continue drinking. Couldn’t remember half of the time how I got home or what happened that night.
Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
Unfortunately, all that alcohol came with a price. I had the world’s worst hangovers—not only physically but also mentally. At twenty-one, hungover and alone at home, I had my first panic attack. Many more followed, and I developed a panic disorder.
I became afraid of being afraid. I didn’t tell anyone, because I was scared they would think I was crazy.
Those periods of anxiety never lasted longer than a few months. But they were usually followed by a sort of winter depression. In my worst moments, I felt like the one and only person that understood me was gone. I felt like nobody loved me, not as much as my dad did. And I did think about death myself. Not that I actually wanted to die, but at times, it seemed like a nice “break” from all the pain.
Acceptance and Spiritual Healing
Finally, in my mid-twenties, I went to see a therapist. She helped me tremendously and made me realize that the panic attacks were nothing more than a physical reaction to stress. Yet, it wasn’t until I did a yoga teacher training a few years later that I finally learned how to stop those panic attacks for good.
Wanting to know more about the mechanisms of the body and mind, I dove into mental and physical well-being, and started researching and writing about mental health.
I understand now that self-love, or at least self-acceptance, and a solid self-esteem are crucial for our mental health. And I know that people with mental health issues find it so, so hard to ask for help. Their lack of self-love makes them think they are a burden.
I understand that, at that moment, my dad didn’t see any other solution for his suffering than stepping out of this life. It did not mean that he didn’t love me or my family.
The pain from losing my dad actually opened the door for me to spiritual healing. It brought me to where I am now. It taught me to live life to the fullest.
It taught me to follow my heart because life is too precious to be stuck anywhere and feel like crap. And it made me want to help others by sharing my story.
I have accepted myself as I am now. I know that I’m enough. I’ve learned what stability feels like, and how to stay relaxed, even though my body is wired to stress out about the smallest things due to childhood trauma.
Let’s Share Our Demons and Kill Them Together
But honestly, the pain from losing him will stay with me for the rest of my life. And sometimes it’s as present as it was twenty years ago. I don’t feel like covering that up with some positive, “unicorny” endnote.
I feel like being raw, honest, and open instead. Depression and suicide f@cking suck. What I do want to do, however, is to help open up the conversation about this topic. I want to make it normal to talk about our mental health, as normal as it is to talk about our physical health.
There are way too many people living in the dark, due to stigmatization and fear. Life is cruel sometimes. And every single human on this planet has to deal with shit. It would be so good if we could be real about it and share our stories so other people can relate and find solace.
I do hope that my story helps in some way.
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How I Healed My Mother Wound and My Daughters Are Healing Theirs
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow…” ~Kahlil Gibran
Now that my daughters are in therapy trying to heal their relationship with me, I have more compassion than ever for my mom. I haven’t felt angry at her in years. But when I was a teen, I earnestly desired to kill her more than once.
I was in my forties when my mom died. Afterward, I had frequent dreams about her chasing me around, telling me I wasn’t good enough. The dreams lasted nightly for about six months and occurred for a few more years when I felt stressed. The last one I remember, she was chasing me under the covers of the bed, screaming my worst fears—that I was unlovable and unworthy—reinforcing my wounded child.
About twelve years after she died, I was able to come to a place of comfort with her. While in deep meditation I saw a vision of her spirit bathed with light and love. Freed from her mental and physical sufferings, I saw her as I had seen her when I was a child—my universe.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t see herself as I did in those days. I knew that she was beautiful. I remember thinking about it as a young child, and when she was dying. How often I’d searched her face, looking for her to see me.
Like my dad, I have prominent facial features. I wished I had her cute small nose and her pretty lips that always looked beautiful in her Berry Berry Avon lipstick. She had blue eyes, which I rarely saw straight on. She was uncomfortable with her looks. I don’t remember any direct eye contact with her unless she was angry, though I realized there must have been.
She was born with a crossed eye. Her story was that her parents were accused of having a sexually transmitted disease that caused it, which brought great shame. My mom was also dyslexic. Sometimes at school, she had to wear a dunce cap and stand in the corner or hall because she couldn’t spell. These challenges shaped her self-worth from a young age.
I loved looking at pictures of her in her twenties with long dark wavy hair, stylish glasses, and a beautiful smile.
When she died, I didn’t cry. I proclaimed that her reign of terror had ended, and I held on to my anger for twelve more years. That day in meditation, when I was able to break through the veil of outrage that kept me in my darkness, I saw her as a bright light in my life.
I had known for years that some of my healing depended on letting go of the story of my time with my mom—one of mental health issues, abuse, and unhappiness. I needed to take time to process our relationship and see her beyond her earthly life. When I was finally able to, I felt better than I expected.
Through my experience and my work with other women, I’ve learned that the mother wound—our unresolved anger at the flawed woman who birthed or raised us—is two or threefold.
Our first challenge is processing the actual events that happened as we were growing up.
The second is letting go of our reluctance to be fully responsible for our mental and physical health as adults.
And, if we have children, the third is not wounding ourselves—realizing that there was never a scenario where we could be the perfect parent we had hoped to be, no matter how self-sacrificing we were.
Processing Our Childhood
Our work as adults is to make a conscious effort to process the hurt, anger, and betrayal that we endured from the female authority figure that raised us (or the figure who was our primary caregiver).
Even if we resolve that our mother did her best, we are still left to sort through our shame over not feeling loveable or good enough, and the feeling that we missed out on the experience we should have had growing up. Processing and healing could mean seeing a therapist, journaling, or even stopping all contact with our mother.
I moved far away from my mom, which minimized my contact and gave me space to process. But I kept the past alive in my thoughts. Now when I look back, I see that holding on to my anger well into adulthood added to the years of feeling like I was missing out on a normal life. In the end, I was responsible for my own healing, and it didn’t happen overnight.
Now, at this place in my life journey, I see the hard parts of my life as the foundation for my life’s purpose, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out.
I’ve met enough people to know that even those who had the perfect parents—like we all wanted—also have challenges as adults. My work to heal has led me to a deep understanding of the human condition and fueled my passion to love and to help uplift the suffering of all.
How Our Commitment to Self-Care Helps Heal Our Mother Wound
We looked to our mother to provide emotional and physical nourishment. Her inability to do this (or do it consistently) created our feeling that we were wronged by our mother. Now, as adults, we need to let go of thinking our mother will take care of us and do our own nurturing work for ourselves. That might seem like a harsh statement, but it enables us to move on.
The second part of healing my mother wound was letting go of the part of me that doesn’t take care of myself. That little voice in my head that apathetically whispers, “I don’t care” about little things that would improve my health, help me sleep better, or feel successful.
That little voice doesn’t have as much power over me anymore. So instead of overeating in the evening, which would affect my ability to sleep well, I can override it—most days. I’m also able to notice that when I don’t take care of myself, I open myself up to being the wounded child again.
We didn’t have a choice when we were young, but now the choice is ours. We need to decide when and how we take up the torch.
When Our Mother Wound Becomes a Mothering Wound
My mother wound turned into a mothering wound when I didn’t live up to my hopes of being a perfect parent. Of course, I had intended to be the loving, nurturing, protecting mother, who produced adults without any challenges, but alas, I was not. How could this happen? I tried so hard.
I was able to find alternatives to the punitive, violent punishments, shaming, and blaming tactics that my mother used, but as a young parent, I was still challenged with low self-worth issues and an eating disorder.
Although some of the things that occurred during the three marriages and two divorces that my daughters and I experienced together were horrific, we were luckily able to process a lot of them in real time with therapy and tears.
Now, with their adult awareness, my daughters are processing their childhood, including my addictions, insecurities, and mistakes. It is almost torture to watch them do that, even though I know they must. And they are so busy with their lives now—as they should be. I miss them.
To weather this time of my life and continue to grow, I need to employ my practices of understanding, compassion, and detachment, and take deep care of myself. Continuing to love my daughters deeply, to be on call whenever they need me, and at the same time be detached from needing them, has called me to deeper depths of my character.
We all deserve to be treated respectfully and kindly. As daughters and mothers, we can role model compassion—empathy in action—and boundaries with our mother and our children. We can strive to create relationships that mutually nourish loving-kindness.
We can focus on healing our past and taking care of our future. We all need to communicate this clearly to our mothers, partners, and children. And, although we can’t walk away from our underage children, we can set boundaries that facilitate healthy relationships now.
We can be clear—our children don’t need their lives or their mother to be perfect. They need to know that they are loved, and they need to see us love ourselves. Holding on to this love for them and for ourselves when our children are troubled, distant, or even estranged is one of our biggest tests as parents. My heart goes out to any mother dealing with these challenges, especially if you are dealing with them alone.
I never stopped wanting my mom to be happy. She is now at peace, maybe even joyful. I strive to let myself be at peace. I let myself live in this place of deep tenderness for her—and now for me. I understand that my experience is universal. I needn’t feel alone.
I realized that this confident and peaceful version of me is the best I can do for my daughters as they heal their mother wounds and take care of themselves, as I am doing for myself.
To heal our mother wound is to remember that it is ultimately a spiritual journey. Not only are we trying to figure out the depths of our own purpose, but we are bound to the journeys of our kin.
As with all spiritual journeys, there will be rough passages that tear our heart open and ask us to become more. The journey of the mother is the journey of love. We need to remember, no matter what rough journey is behind us, we are the designers of the path ahead.
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The Surprising Lesson I Learned About Why People Leave Us
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” ~Lao Tzu
While this Lao Tzu quote may sound familiar, I recently learned there is a second portion of that quote that often gets omitted.
“When the student is truly ready…the teacher will disappear.”
The first part of this quote was a healing anchor for me as I went through what I call a thirteen, or a divine storm.
In one year’s time, I went through a devastating divorce, was robbed, got in two car accidents, and lost a dear friend to a heart attack. I felt like I was watching everything in my life burn to ash, including my deepest desire of having a family, and found myself on my knees doing something I had never done before: asking for help.
I realized the way I had been living my life wasn’t working anymore and I needed to learn, so I became the student and opened my palms to the sky asking for guidance.
So many teachers came. I found a therapist who helped me heal from my divorce, I found spiritual guidance after being lost, I met other divorcees, and found meditation, which was a loving balm to my broken heart. I was ready, so the teachers appeared.
Each teacher that came forward instilled in me the importance and effectiveness of the right support, and as I faced all the challenges of building a new life, I continued to seek help. What I learned allowed me to find my life partner, one who desired creating a family as much as I did.
As my life transformed and I opened my heart to love again, I thought the first part of this quote was the full lesson.
Until recently, when I encountered the second part on a quote website.
Staring at the words on my screen, my whole body stopped. Tears fell down my face as I realized all these years I’ve spoken about the teachers that arrived in the face of my divorce, but hadn’t really spoken about the teachers that left.
Specifically, the biggest teacher, my ex. For the purpose of this post, we will call him Jon.
When Jon dropped the bomb on Thanksgiving Day of 2012, and said he didn’t love me anymore, I honestly thought I could stop it. I thought I could save the marriage. But nothing worked. Not couple’s counseling, not locking myself in the bedroom and refusing to eat, or crawling under the hide-a-bed he was sleeping on in the living room, pleading for him to stay.
Jon’s refusal to work on the marriage left me with something I hadn’t spent real time with in my thirty-seven years. His refusal left me with myself.
And the truth was, I had been lying to everyone around me for years. I had been in an on and off again affair and swayed violently between immense shame for my actions and complete confusion as to why I kept going back to a man I didn’t really love.
I didn’t understand what I was doing or why.
I would cover up the shame and confusion with overdrinking, lots of TV, and listening to constant music. I would cry in the shower, so afraid I would be found out. I was convinced my friends and family would all stop loving me.
But something had been alive for a long time. In fact, it was alive when Jon and I were engaged in college.
I was a musical theater major, and in my last year of school, when I was planning my wedding, I threw myself at two men I was in shows with. Nothing happened with the first guy, but with the second, we kissed, and I immediately felt ashamed and appalled. What was I doing?
So I told Jon, and he asked me a powerful question, “Do you want to postpone the wedding?” I told him no. I told him I loved him. I apologized and promised this would never happen again.
So the wedding went forward, except a week before I walked down the aisle, I felt scared again and asked my mom if this was a good idea. She thought it was just nerves and talked me back into getting married.
Our first year of marriage was both exciting and tumultuous. We were both actors, and very passionate, and many times would have escalating fights filling our small Queens apartment with our voices. My parents came to visit, and my mother pulled me aside, concerned about how we were speaking to each other.
I told her this was what actual communication was like, not just staying silent like she did with my father.
So the yelling continued, as did all the excitement of our careers, and we spent a lot of time apart as we worked at different theaters. Even though I thought we were on the same page about having a family eventually, the years went on and on.
Until my thirty-sixth birthday, when I finally got off the pill. I was terrified. I never thought I would wait this long to have a family, and as the months went on and my period continued to come, I heard again and again how scared Jon was too. Nothing I said would make any difference, and the fights were getting uglier and uglier.
I felt so alone.
And a panic was rising in me. A panic that he didn’t want to have a family. That I was married to a man who didn’t want to be a father.
Then he kneeled in front of me a year later and confirmed my panic. Turns out, everything I felt was actually true.
“When the student is truly ready…the teacher disappears.”
Jon was my teacher for nineteen years. I met him when I was eighteen, wide eyed and madly in love. But now it was time. Time for me to learn what it looked and felt like to be with a partner who shared my deepest desire.
Time to learn what a healthy relationship is, and what healthy and loving communication sounds like.
Time to learn how to honor my instincts and process strong emotions, and especially my anger at being in my late thirties with no children.
He didn’t need to be there anymore, because I was finally waking up and ready to learn the lesson he was in my life to teach me.
He could leave, and actually had to leave in order for me to grow.
Lao Tzu was speaking to one of the most profound teachings we have, that change is constant. People come in and out of our lives for different purposes, and our deepest suffering arises when we try to control every outcome. We try to control our relationships, our friendships, and the people we believe have to always be there.
But what if each teacher is here for the time needed, and when they leave, it’s actually a reflection of what you are ready for?
What if people leaving, relationships ending, is actually a reflection of your readiness for transformation?
What if your heartbreak of any kind, romantic or personal, is a moment of sacred alchemy?
Take a moment today to honor the teachers who have left. Perhaps write in your journal around this question: What did you learn when they were gone?
For me, I sat down on the floor and cried. I felt a great wave of relief recognizing Jon left because I was ready.
And I would not have known otherwise.
You are so much stronger than you know, and your greatest learning comes when you claim the wisdom of those teachers who have left.
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Living a Meaningful Life: What Will Your Loved Ones Find When You Die?
“At the end of life, at the end of YOUR life, what essence emerges? What have you filled the world with? In remembering you, what words will others choose?” ~Amy Rosenthal
Most people believe sorting through a loved one’s belongings after death provides closure. For me, it provided an existential crisis.
After glancing at the angry sky in my father’s driveway for what seemed like hours, I mustered up the courage to crack open the door to the kitchen. The eerie silence stopped me in my tracks. Wasn’t he cooking up a storm in this cluttered kitchen just a few days ago?
I started with the mounds of clothes and cuddled them gently before pitching them. The sweet aroma of his fiery cologne still lingered. The air smelled just like him.
My father’s belongings served as physical reminders of how he spent his time on Earth. Some of my favorites included:
A weathered yellow newspaper clipping of his parents. Cherished family photos, with him grinning ear to ear. A collection of homemade cookbooks. Framed quotes such as Mi casa es su casa. A prestigious Pottery Barn leather chair, distressed by puppy claw marks. Nostalgic t-shirts from the early 90’s.
Chipped and heavily-used Williams-Sonoma platters. An entertainment center that mimicked a NASA operation center, with 70’s CDs left in the queue. Invitations to neighborhood block parties. An embroidered apron which read “World’s Best Grill Master” paired with still fresh barbeque sauce stains.
Homemade recipe cards with quirky quotes like “It’s good because it’s cooked on wood.” An entire closet of camping gear. Leftover birthday celebration goodies. Glazed pottery from local North Carolinian artists. Entertaining sports memorabilia on full display. And a tender card from me:
Dear Dad,
You’re the best dad ever! I hope you have a birthday filled with tasty BBQ, blaring seventies music, and a pepperoncini pepper to start the day off right. Thank you for being there for me. You are my hero. I can’t wait to celebrate with you this weekend!
My father collected items that brought him joy, and, clearly shared them with others.
While you may not know him, or think you have anything to do with him, you do.
You will be him one day. We will all be him one day. At some point, someone will rummage through our drawers. Scary, isn’t it?
Weeks later after organizing his possessions, I returned to my lavish apartment with cloudy judgment. As soon as I arrived, I dropped my luggage near the door and waltzed into my closet. The items that once made me proud, made me nauseous. If someone rummaged through my keepsakes, they would find:
A closet full of color-coordinated designer brand clothes. Scratched CDs listing my favorite nineties bands. An entire drawer filled with vibrant, unused makeup. A high-end collection of David Yurman rings, necklaces, and bracelets. Wrinkled Nordstrom receipts. An assortment of gently used designer handbags. And, pictures of fair-weather friends scattered throughout.
Do you know what they all had in common? Me.
ME! ME! ME!
Comparing my life to my father’s led to a life-changing decision. Should I continue to splurge on meaningless items or start completely over?
After a moment of contemplation, my life mirrored a blank slate. Products related to “keeping up with the Jones’s” were no longer my jam. Instead, my money was reserved for incredible moments that produced long-term joy and warm memories.
My new spending habits derived from the following financial values:
- Seek experiences that make me feel alive.
- Purchase life-changing products.
- Invest in creative hobbies that I’m proud of.
- Provide others with joyous moments.
- Initiate celebratory activities.
- Make financial decisions out of love.
With a little trial and error, I traded in frivolous shoulder bags for top-rated camping gear. Saturday shopping days transformed into baking Sundays. And most importantly, I went from feeling not enough to experiencing fulfillment.
Twelve years later, I’m happy to share that I continue to evaluate my purchases using a “Will this make a good memory?” lens. In retrospect, mending my financial habits was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Why? I’m no longer impressed by status. I prefer art, learning, and the outdoors over any invitation to shopping. In return, my life is filled with purpose, meaning, and long-term satisfaction.
What I know for sure is that most commodities on their own overpromise and underdeliver, unless we intentionally create an evocative memory with them. Materialistic purchases provide us with fleeting moments of happiness. On the contrary, curating beautiful moments with others delivers long-term joy.
While you won’t find many luxurious products in my house now, you will find:
A four-person picnic backpack for sunny days at a park. Bird feeders galore. A fine assortment of tea to share with others. Homemade bath bombs for birthdays. Color-coordinated self-improvement books. Aromatic sea salt exfoliants that replicate a spa experience. Cheery holiday decorations.
An assortment of various vision boards and bucket lists. Seasonal candles galore. A bathroom drawer filled with citrus soaps, shampoo, and lotions for overnight guests. A collection of homemade scrapbooks featuring beloveds.
An emerald green trekking hiking backpack for outdoorsy adventures. Crinkled Aquarium tickets. Handwritten family cookbooks. Seeds for a blooming garden. Hygge and cozy themed library nooks. A bright blue hybrid bike, for nomadic quests. A closet full of board games. And my most prized possession of all, a sentimental card from my darling father, John:
Happy Graduation, Britti!
I am proud of who you are and proud to be your dad. I like how you hold your head high. You are becoming a beautiful young woman and fun to be around. You have taught me things. You are so important to me. I treasure our time together and will always be here for you! It’s not always easy, but, you have a lot of love around you. I hope that life keeps blessing you. Keep spreading your wings and following your dreams!
Love, Dad
The real question is, when someone organizes your belongings, what will they find?
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5 Questions I Ask Myself Nightly Since My Father’s Sudden Death
“Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.” ~Langston Hughes
Nine years ago, I was sitting mindlessly in my office cubicle in Omaha, Nebraska, when the receptionist called to inform me that my dad was in the lobby.
I walked out to greet him: He was happy, smiling, and donning one of his favorite double-breasted suits. He was there because he needed my signature on some tax preparation forms before he handed them over to his accountant. My dad always took care of things like that.
It was a Friday in February, late morning. We briefly discussed getting lunch but ultimately decided not to in the interest of time. We would see each other over the weekend, anyway. After all, we were planning a trip.
A week prior, my dad told me he wanted to take me to Vegas for my thirtieth birthday. I’d never been to Vegas. There were things to discuss, hotel rooms to book, concert tickets to buy.
I signed the tax forms, thanked my dad, and walked back to my cubicle. I don’t remember anything else about this day. It was, in fact, just like any other day. It was ordinary. Humdrum, you might say.
But the next day…
The next day is forever seared into the pathways of my hippocampus, every detail a tattoo on my mind’s eye.
Because the next day…
That’s the day my dad died.
I remember the morning phone call I got from my sister.
9:38 a.m.
I remember running to my car, half a block up Howard Street, and then another block down 12th. I remember the whipping wind and the stinging cold. I remember the saplings lining the streets of downtown, their branches brittle and bare, scratching the ether like an old lady’s fingers.
I remember the seventeen-minute drive to the hospital.
I remember the hospital, the stairs, the front desk, the waiting room, the faces, the hugs, the tears, the complete and utter shock.
I remember that my mom wasn’t there.
Three times we called. Where is she? Why isn’t she answering? Who’s going to tell her?
It seems like our lives are defined by days, even moments, like these—the most joyous or the most unbearably tragic.
I miss my dad.
I miss his ridiculously big heart, which we were told was the thing that killed him.
I miss the lingering scent of his cologne, a sort of woodsy, leathery blend that comes in a classic green bottle. I miss his laugh, which could range from a barely discernible chuckle to a jolly, high-pitched guffaw. I miss seeing him in my clothes—the shirts and shoes and jeans that I wanted to throw away because they were clearly going out of style.
I miss the things I never thought I’d miss, the quirks and ticks and peccadillos that drove me crazy—like the way he’d crunch his ice cubes or noisily suck on a piece of hard candy in an otherwise quiet movie theater.
I wonder if I chose to write this today instead of tomorrow because writing it tomorrow could prove too difficult. Or if I chose to write this after nine years instead of ten years because ten years is one of those nice, round numbers we use for milestone birthdays and anniversaries and other such occasions we’re supposed to celebrate. Or maybe because ten years is a whole decade and a whole goddamn decade without my dad just seems too strange to fathom.
When I think of the last time I spoke with my dad, I can’t help but also think of that Benjamin Franklin quote—the one about how nothing is certain except death and taxes.
But only one of those things comes with any sort of predictability.
Studies have shown that our brains are wired to prevent us from thinking about our own mortality. Our brains shield us from the existential thought of death and view it as something that happens to others but not ourselves.
So, most of us, perhaps because of our biological wiring, rarely even think about the unfortunate truth that we’re going to die, and we have no idea how or when.
On the other hand, some of our greatest ancient philosophers actually practiced reflecting on the impermanence of life—otherwise known as Memento Mori, which literally translates to Remember you must die.
“You could leave life right now,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations. “Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Personally, I don’t think about my own demise a whole hell of a lot.
But there’s a reason I decided to pack up my things and move to a new city six years ago.
There’s a reason I decided to make a career pivot five years ago.
There’s a reason I decided to quit my day job at almost forty years old and start working for myself two years ago.
Because nine years ago, death did a number on me. I had one of those unbearably tragic days that seems to define our lives.
And now, before I go to bed each night, I ask myself:
Was I a decent person today?
Did I challenge myself today?
Did I have any fun today?
What am I grateful for today?
If I were on my deathbed, would I have regrets?
Asking myself these things helps me live a more fulfilling life—the kind of life that I want to live. And I’m proud of what I’m doing here, right now. I think—at least I hope—my dad would be too.
I still haven’t been to Vegas, though.
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The Enduring Pain of Losing Someone You Love to Suicide
“The reality is that you will grieve forever.” ~Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
March is always hard for me. Has been since March 21, 2017. That’s the day my eldest son, then twenty-seven, found his father hanging in our basement. I apologize for being so brutal. But it was.
What no one tells you about grief, what catches you by surprise, is the fact that you can be five years out and still, when March comes around, you can find yourself in a fetal position on the ceramic floor of your kitchen—howling like a wounded dog because a memory slashed unbidden across your brain and cut you so deep that your legs couldn’t hold your heavy, heavy weight. And you wonder—no, you know—that this will go on for the rest. Of. Your. Life.
How to describe what it’s like when your heart breaks… It’s something I’ve been trying to do for five years. Not out loud anymore because others tire of it. More so, I try to describe it to myself. Hoping that by describing it I can move forward, categorize it, and store it; put it away, out of sight, out of mind.
Sure, I’ll go on. Most of us do. Muscle memory accounts for 90% of how you go on, trust me. In those first days I would say the percentage is even higher. Sleep, get up, make food, eat, feed the dog, put clothes in washer, clean the dirty dishes, put out the garbage, sleep, get up, make food…
Suicide loss, I’ve found, is unlike any other loss. Oh, this is not a contest of feelings. No, every loss of a loved one is felt deeply, profoundly. No contest. Suicide loss, however, results in countless unending ripples of devastation for the survivors every single day of the rest of their lives.
I think of my sons. Always. The oldest is forever altered. His father was his best friend. Their relationship had just achieved that rewarding maturity of mutual respect. They enjoyed each other’s company. The youngest, twenty-three, was still working out childhood resentments, but I could see the potential for closeness. He was spared seeing his father’s lifeless body.
We all now live with the special baggage of suicide survivors: guilt (why weren’t we there? I could have prevented it.), shame, anger (how could he?!), rage, trauma, fear (will my sons, will my mother, will my brother…), regret and deep sorrow for yesterday, today, and what will never be. Every anniversary, every milestone, every holiday, every celebration will rip the Band-Aid off again and again.
Sometimes, the full impact of a loss takes time. For me, the first year was a “roller-coaster of emotions”—a common, but completely accurate phrase.
To the outside world, I was pretty darn normal: keeping house, inviting people over, laughing, going about my business. Few, if any, noticed the cracks: gradual isolation, bathing only twice a week, forgetting things more than usual, horrible financial decisions, sudden breakdowns, crying in the grocery store, in traffic, in the shower, on the phone, in the middle of a conversation. Five years out and many of those symptoms remain.
By year two the full weight of not just the loss, but the way of the loss, the reasons for the loss, the eternity of the loss hit me—a full body slam of something too heavy to survive. Or so it seemed.
I found a therapist. She let me talk and weep. I was prescribed antidepressants. Nothing helped. I moved through days, functioned at a primal level showing the outside world only the version of myself that made them comfortable.
No one, I don’t care how well-meaning they are, can understand this loss other than another suicide survivor. It’s true. Just as the surviving parents of a lost child know a uniquely singular, searing pain, so, too, does the suicide survivor.
It’s important to seek out those who understand our pain. I recommend it. And grief counselors. And therapists who are especially trained in PTSD. Seek them out.
I found a group of suicide survivors that met monthly. Hearing about their losses, especially the loss of sons and daughters, allowed me to appreciate the importance of finding a community of people who understand. In the hollowness of these survivors’ eyes, however, even as we embraced, I could see the singularity of their respective journeys. We may share, but we are alone in our pain.
Memories do sustain me, as others so helpfully say. Sunny days at the beach are calming (unless the crashing waves remind me of past vacations with my husband and sons years ago). Drinks and drugs provide a temporary escape (when I can resist the deadly seduction of blissful nothingness). The company of others can keep my mind from the endless cycles of black thoughts. Music can be helpful. Or dangerous.
“Stay active! Meet new people! Get out and do something! Time to move on! Get over it!” I can hear the words of concerned family and friends.
People mostly mean well. Time will pass. Things happen. Kids grow. Other cherished loved ones will die. I have come to understand that death is relentless, and that I must bear other cruel deaths as well as this one.
My sons are my reasons for living. Period. In my most desperate times the thought of their pain has been the only thing between me and oblivion. I will never do that to them. And they, in turn, know that either one of their deaths would mean my end. I have no doubt that I could not survive that. I need for them to be okay.
I will, as they say, put one foot in front of the other every single day, if not for myself, for my sons. Even though they are grown. Even though they have their own lives of which I am but an infinitesimally small part. I have to stay alive because they have already suffered enough. Suicide survivors understand that.
And so, I hate March. I begin to dread it in January. By February I am coming up with excuses to stay home. And, on any given night in March, I am balled-up on the ceramic tile of my kitchen floor howling like the wounded animal that I am. But I get up the next day and I try again.
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How I’m Coping with Grief by Finding Meaning in My Father’s Death
“Life has to end, love doesn’t.” ~Mitch Albom
Before we dive into the dark subject of death, let me assure you, this is a happy read. It is not about how losing a loved one is a blessing but how it can be a catalyst to you unlocking big lessons in your life.
Or maybe it is—you decide.
To me, this is just about a perspective, a coping mechanism, and a process that I am personally employing to get over the loss of a loved one.
My dad and I were best buds till I became a teenager. Then my hormones and “cool life” became a barrier between our relationship. I became busy and distant, and so did he. It continued until recently.
My dad’s health went downhill fast in a couple of months.
I could see him waning away, losing himself, losing this incessant war against so many diseases all alone. We (my family and friends) were there for him, trying to support him with whatever means possible.
But maybe it was his time
The last time I saw my father he was in a hospital bed, plugged into different machines, unable to breathe, very weak. It felt like I was in a movie—one of the ones with tragic endings. And the ending was indeed tragic.
I clearly remember every single detail of the day my dad passed away. I remember how he looked, what the doctor said, who was around me, how my family was, and how fast it all happened.
It shattered me. Losing a parent is something you can never prepare yourself for, ever.
I was broken. I had people around holding me together, but I could only feel either of the two feelings: anger or sadness.
Where did he go? How fragile are we humans? Did he want to say something to me that day? Was he in pain? Was there something I could have done for him? Why is death so bizarre? Why do people we love die and leave this huge vacuum in our lives?
It’s been four months since he passed away. And now, I think I see why.
I have come to the realization—due to the support of my therapist, my family, my partner, and my friends—that death is meaningless until you give it a meaning.
Let me explain that.
Usually, after experiencing the loss of a loved one, we go through a phase of grief. How we deal with death and experience grief is a very personal and subjective experience.
I cannot outline tips for all; maybe your therapist or a mental health professional can guide you better on this.
But, in my experience, grieving and dealing with death come with a bag full of opportunities. I don’t mean to give death a happy twist. To set the record straight, I believe death sucks.
Losing a loved one feels like losing a part of yourself. It is a difficult, painful, deeply shaking experience that no one can prepare you for.
However, in my experience, grieving is a process with many paths. A few common paths are:
- I experienced losing a loved one, so I will now respect life even more.
- I experienced losing a loved one, and it was awful, everything is awful, and I wish I was dead too.
- I experienced losing a loved one, and I don’t know how to feel about this yet.
I was on the third path.
I constantly felt the need to be sad, to grieve, to lie in bed and cry all day
But interestingly, there were also days when I felt that I needed to forget what had happened, live my life, and enjoy it as much as I could, because #YOLO (You Only Live Once).
I felt the pressure to behave and act a certain way. Now that my dad was no more, I needed to act serious, mature, responsible. Now that my dad was no more, I needed to stop focusing on going out, partying, and taking trips with friends and instead save money, settle down, and take better care of my family’s health.
I did not know how I was supposed to feel or to grieve.
Then one night, the realization hit me. (Of course, all deep realizations happen during nighttime, you know it.)
Maybe death is meaningless until I provide it a meaning—a meaning that serves me to cope, to grow, and to let go.
After reading several books, sharing this with loved ones, talking to my therapist, and journaling about this realization for several days, I realized another significant thing.
The process of finding meaning in death is like any other endeavor—you try several things until one works out.
So, I laid out all possible meanings that seemed logically or emotionally sound to me.
And here came the third great realization: Our loved ones want nothing but the best for us. Honoring yourself, investing in yourself, making yourself a better version of yourself is the best way to honor your lost loved ones.
No matter how complicated our relationships with them were, people who genuinely loved and cared about us would want us to love and take care of ourselves.
My dad cannot say it to prove me right on this, but I am pretty sure all he wanted was to see his family happy. See me working on myself, getting better at taking care of myself, and growing into a better human being.
So, after this perspective shift, things became simpler.
Now, death is no longer meaningless to me.
My dad’s death brought me the golden realization that it’s time to upgrade myself, make myself better, and maybe implement some of his best values into my value system.
I have reflected upon this for weeks. I have started working on this too.
On a micro level, I am aware and conscious of how sucky death is. I saw it pretty close, but I now grasp the value of life. I am grateful for this newfound respect for life, however cliched that might sound. And on a macro level, I also know that even my death can also serve a purpose to someone’s life; it could help them ponder, reflect, and probably set things right for themselves.
The moral of the story is that death is dark and sad but can also be beautiful. It is just a matter of perspective.
It can be the storm that rocks your boat and makes you drown, but it can also be the light that guides you back to your purpose.
This last section is for people who are grieving right now. I am aware that I cannot fathom what you are going through; losing a loved one is personal and subjective. But I wish to help you out in whatever little capacity I can.
Here’s a quick list of things that are helping me. If you do decide to give these things a try, please share your experience in the comments.
Write everything down—your memories, your frustrations, your feelings.
Every time you think of that person, pull that thought out of your mind and put it onto the paper, even if it is just in one line. When faced with a loss, we often shut down and avoid our feelings instead of acknowledging how the trauma of losing a loved one is affecting us. Putting your feelings onto paper will help you work through them so you’re better prepared to handle the next set of challenges life has in store for you.
Seek professional help in whatever form you can.
Why? Because a professional is much better equipped than your friends and family. You can see a therapist and reach out to your friends for help too.
Do what you feel more than you feel what you do.
There will be times when you feel like doing something unexpected and fun, but once you start doing it, you will feel guilt, shame, and self-judgment. Doing what you feel like doing and not overthinking about how you are feeling while doing it allows you to let go. Read this again to understand it better.
Keep track to remain patient.
Grieving and getting over a loved one’s death requires a long process for many of us. It can get frustrating to constantly and consciously work on it. But if you can maintain a log of your progress— your tiny steps like making an effort to socialize, sitting with your feelings, or writing about your thoughts and sharing this with someone you trust—this can keep you aware, grounded, and patient for the long ride.
Lastly, live your life.
Circling back to the original theme, your loved ones just want you to be happy. So do things that make you happy. This could be as simple as getting an ice cream from the same place you used to visit together and reminiscing on the good times. Or as radical as getting your ducks in a row, showing up for that job interview, taking care of your body, joining the gym, and working on your mental health as well.
At the end of the day (or life), we are all going to be floating in a pool of our memories, so make memories and enjoy life.
And try finding the meaning of death. Ensure that meaning makes you rise one step above and closer to the person your loved ones imagined you to be. #YOLO
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The Chaos of Life After Loss and the Love That Never Dies
“We need to grieve the ones we’ve lost—not to sustain our connection to suffering, but to sustain our connection to love.” ~Jennifer Williamson
Ken was only forty-seven years old when he met his untimely death.
It was surreal, my brother-in-law was gone from our physical world.
As a family, we felt the motions moving through the initial telephone call summoning us to the hospital to the time we surrounded him as he took his last breath. It was if we were all caught between two worlds, one of cruel reality and one of complete disbelief. You read about it happening to other people, not to us.
My chest felt like a dense, cold stone had been dropped abruptly on it aimed at my heart after hearing those words hit my ears: “He’s not going to make it…”
When it’s your family lying in the wake of such a painful experience, you soon realize the profound effect that death has. It causes an enormous ripple in all our lives that reaches out for miles, days, weeks, and years.
It’s such a deep wound for an entire community that surrounded him—his young family left behind, extended family at work, concert traveling buddies, camping friends, and countless other people who enjoyed his presence.
Ken embraced fun, passion, and laughter, whether he was tearing up the dance floor, creating his culinary signature dishes for our family gatherings, harvesting his perfect tomatoes, or taking pictures of his lovely wife, kids, and all their adventures with his “fancy camera”. Ken was such an amazing soul that brought light wherever he shone.
A fall down a set of stairs changed our world completely. Ken suffered multiple bruises on the front and back of his brain as well as a significant fracture to the base of his skull. Black circles surrounded his eyes that look liked two large shiners. Contusions littered his arms and head.
The next week was steady but slow progress. His alertness grew and conscious awareness slowly trickled back. A conversation with the physician’s assistant was frank. Despite the best-case scenario, it would be a long recovery.
Questions loomed in the back of our minds. If he recovers, will our Ken ever be whole again? What challenges will this new version of himself present for our family?
It was clear that Ken would more than likely suffer from cognitive behavior issues associated with a traumatic brain injury. While in the hospital, some of his behavior was unusual but typical of a patient with his condition and prognosis. Initially, he had to be restrained to ensure he wouldn’t pull out his vital monitors or attempt to leave the hospital.
Eventually, he became calmer and more stable. A couple of days before he died was the last time my husband and I saw him smile and laugh again. A little of Ken was still in there, and it gave us hope.
We soon learned that brain injuries are unpredictable. Twelve days in and without warning, Ken suffered a massive stroke. The night before, he sat and watched the Jets hockey game with his son and wife. The next morning changed everything.
The nurse found him unresponsive. The doctors advised us that they would have to place Ken into a medically induced coma for three days.
The next morning our immediate family was summoned to the ICU. For reasons unknown, the pressure on his brain suddenly escalated. Medical intervention could not save him. Ken would have to be taken off life support. The doctors ensured us that he would pass peacefully.
All our family rushed to be by his side for his last moments. That day was the toughest day of my life. I witnessed the life leave his body as his skin turned from a beigy pink hue to a flush of gray in an instant when death gently urged life to leave him. We said goodbye to Ken as he took his last breath on this earth.
The hospital was a stark reminder of the gravity of our situation. Patients and families in intensive care. The noises of the machines and sight of numerous tubes. The nurses and doctors. Conversations and updates. Decisions. Sandpaper Kleenex from the waiting room. The beeps and syringes. It was so much to soak in with your eyes and ears.
The hospital is not a pleasant and serene place to die. It was out of medical necessity. For his children’s sake, it was a bitter lesson of mortality. There was no real goodbye. Memories of their father motionless, tubes parading from his body surrounded by an army of machines. My heart sank for them. It was their dad’s final moment of life, and unfortunately death doesn’t let us choose our departure.
The next day after he had passed, we gathered at my mother-in-law’s house. A service needed to be planned. Food was ordered, notice in the paper submitted, cremation arrangements and so many other details were handled in a few short hours. A celebration of life at the local community center, where my husband’s family grew up.
Simple and incredibly warm would be his final goodbye to everyone. It told a story of his passionate essence that was his life. There was an incredible outpouring of support by those that attended and were touched by Ken’s being.
A collection of Ken’s favorite things and pictures of precious moments throughout his life was on display. His fishing rod, lures made from his daughter’s nail polish, guitar, sport jerseys, and the leg lamp Christmas Story movie lights I gave him for his birthday, among other things, were included.
Ken’s wife gave the eulogy (the only speech), and it was moving. He was the love of her life since she was eighteen years old, father of her children, and the guy that was supposed to be alongside her till they were both old and grey.
Despite the sorrow, she spoke of the time they had and her gratitude for having found her soul mate. I was held back by the shimmer she refused to let go, despite the world she knew was crumbling all around her. I expected that the service would provide some closure, but despite the reality growing around his death, it made it harder to accept that he was really gone.
The wave of responsibilities in the aftermath of death is overwhelming. It is astonishing the volume of family and friends that contacted my sister-in-law, his mother and father, my husband. It left little time to feel lonely let alone mourn. Constant phone calls, food deliveries, visits.
My sister-in-law knew that it was an unavoidable truth to the whole situation. People mean well; it’s the process that follows that is daunting. Paperwork, death certificate, cremation, insurance, calling the kids’ schools, and all the little things tacked on create an enormous to-do list.
You steadily move without pausing and push through during the most profoundly impacting moment of your life. I’m still amazed at how well she pulled it all together. I knew in my heart she wanted to just collapse once all of this chaos settled. Once the mayhem calmed, the mounting grief would follow in its footsteps.
I watched my family fall apart and try to make sense of it all. The cruelty of holding onto the idea of someone that once was. Hope heartlessly taken abruptly away from us.
It wasn’t just his death alone; it was the rollercoaster of preceding events in the hospital that would damage us. Desperately holding onto the side of a boat without paddles, helplessly letting the river take us down its path etched into the earth. It is futile to stop it, you have to let it to carry you along its rough waters till they are calm once again. Like the river, living is really just control relinquished. It was never our duty to try and harness it.
The heavy gravity of loss and pain we all felt was slightly dissipated as we reminisced about Ken. Our faces would be painted with smiles amid a round of laughter as we fondly remembered his antics and told stories amongst ourselves.
We would be delicately reminded of how much we love him and his incredible passion for living. Death may take our physical being, but his memory and energy will live on within each of us.
Grief and love are so intimately intertwined. Without grieving we would never know love so deeply. It’s the beauty of love and sorrow twirling around us in this constant dance we call life. I realized that our hearts are meant to be broken only to be reborn and rise time and time again.
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How I Healed My Low Self-Worth After Infidelity and Divorce
“It’s okay to let go of those who couldn’t love you. Those who didn’t know how to. Those who failed to even try. It’s okay to outgrow them, because that means you filled the empty space in you with self-love instead. You’re outgrowing them because you’re growing into you. And that’s more than okay, that’s something to celebrate.” ~Angelica Moone
Once upon a time, I met and fell in love with the man of my dreams. He was the most romantic, loving, amazing person I had ever met and for some reason, he wanted to be with me.
I was a nobody. I was the little girl who had lost her mommy and had control issues. I was the princess needing to be rescued by a prince. And I was rescued, whisked away to a whole other state, and loved and adored by this wonderful man whom I eventually married.
We were together for almost nine years. But my history of eating disorders caused a disconnect. I obsessed over food, exercise, and the slightest interference in my perfectly planned day. We no longer could talk with each other. We no longer could connect on a physical, spiritual, or emotional level.
Two days after Christmas, he told me he didn’t love me. He filed for divorce in early 2021.
I admit, the facts remain foggy about when husband’s affair started, but the emotional truth is this: I felt raw, exposed, ripped apart from the inside. My heart broke into pieces and then those pieces broke into more pieces.
Each time he left the house, I knew where he was going and who he was with. A pickaxe constantly chiseled away at the hole in my chest, making the constant ache and longing for the return of my former life, my husband, greater and greater.
I wanted him next to me, in our bed. I wanted to feel his weight while he slept, see his silhouette in the darkness. Hear his breath and occasional snoring. I thought I would run out of salt from the tears I shed, but they kept coming, night after night, day after day.
I blamed myself for all of it: losing my husband, my house, my dog. It was because of me that my marriage failed. I was unlovable and unworthy of love. Broken. That is why my husband didn’t love me enough to want to work through our problems.
If I had only gotten help sooner, then we would have stayed together. If I wouldn’t have been so obsessive over exercise and what I ate, then he wouldn’t have stopped loving me. If I would have loved him perfectly, then he wouldn’t have found the love he needed with another woman.
Good and bad memories of him haunted me in my dreams. Harsh words I said, unloving things I did, waited for me in my bed and pounced when I tried to sleep. Wherever I went, the constant flood of tears threatened to destroy me.
When he filed for divorce, I made up my mind. I refused to allow the eating disorder to take any more of my life away.
I realized I couldn’t blame myself entirely for the end of my relationship. For the first time in fifteen years, I threw all of my energy into my healing process instead of achieving the perfect body.
I needed to heal for me. I needed to take real control of my past and learn from my mistakes so I wouldn’t make them again. I had experienced other life-changing trauma, and knew I finally needed to work through it. But I didn’t know where I should begin in the healing process. This is what helped me:
1. Gratitude and Prayer
I am reminded every day that there is always something to be grateful for. The light of the sun after the darkness. The gentle rain that falls after a long dry spell. The changing leaves on the trees. A functioning mind and body. People in your life who love you unconditionally.
I still experienced all of these things, and I still had people who loved me in my life, even though they were hundreds of miles away. I vocalized my gratitude for even the smallest things out loud each day.
At night, I wrote down at least three things that I was grateful for that day: I am grateful that I rose from my bed free of pain in my body. I am grateful for the ability to make my bed. I am grateful for my job.
When you express gratitude for even insignificant things, you begin to see the good in your life, and not dwell on what is going wrong.
I have always been a spiritual person, believing in a connection with a higher power. Each night, I prayed for my family. Then for my friends. And eventually for myself, something I’d never done before because I didn’t feel worthy.
I wanted the gnawing ache in my stomach gone, and my broken heart to mend. Blaming and berating myself all my life had not worked, so what did I have to lose. What I had to gain was a stronger and more confident self.
2. Counseling and Self-Love
I sought a counselor. It helped to relay my story to someone who could help. By telling someone my story from the beginning, I was released from its power. It didn’t own me anymore.
But I still had a long way to go.
The energy around my husband was cold and uncomfortable. I knew he felt it too. He avoided me. When we did encounter each other, he looked at me with disdain and disgust. I went straight to my default thoughts; he must think I’m ugly. It put me in another downward spiral of self-loathing, but not for long.
I was determined to get better, to stop struggling with low-self-worth and lack of self-compassion.
Counseling helped put things in a new perspective. In one of our sessions, she told me something I will never forget: There was nothing you could have done differently. He was going to leave anyway. To know that I hadn’t failed at my relationship and it wasn’t all my fault was a huge relief.
My counselor introduced self-love activities, which sounded so counter-intuitive. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Despite the awkwardness of looking at myself in the mirror and giving myself positive compliments full of compassion, I did it. The more I practiced compassion toward myself, the more I began to see my intrinsic worth.
I began with the simple phrase: I love you.
That turned into: I deserve love.
I kept saying these every day, wherever I was. My thinking changed my reality. I began to truly believe I was worthy of love.
3. Acceptance and Forgiveness
Even though I spoke with a counselor regularly, I still rode on a rollercoaster from hell. While I still lived at the house, my husband had told me he was going on a fishing trip a few hours away. Every fiber of my being told me he was lying.
The Monday he returned, I searched the room he slept in and found the receipt for a hotel room for two people only twenty minutes away. I confronted him and he denied anything was going on. I couldn’t mention the receipt because I was ashamed for trying to find proof.
I said horrible things to him that night, not because of what he had done, but because he was lying. After being together for almost nine years, how could he still ignore my feelings? How could he continue to lie? His behavior made it perfectly clear that our marriage was over, he had someone else, and he had nothing else to lose. Why not admit it?
I felt as though he never loved me at all. The tension between us worsened and I felt like a stranger in the home I had lived in for six years.
I wanted him to hurt like I did, to understand my pain, my devastation, to empathize with me in some way. He had never experienced a devastating loss of a parent like I had as a child. He had never experienced abandonment of people who are supposed to love all of you, the imperfect parts too. He could not begin to understand the pain and grief I experienced. He had no idea how it festers inside like a dormant volcano for years, then spews out in forms of self-harm.
Despite my mistakes in our relationship and my feelings of unworthiness, I knew I didn’t deserve his lies. The next morning, I promised myself that I would stop trying to find proof of his affair. It wasn’t worth the pain. I knew the truth and if he wanted to continue to lie, that was his choice. I also stopped berating myself for what I had said.
I knew I could never go back in time and redo everything. I couldn’t take anything back. I had to learn from it all and move forward. I had loved this man, and a part of me still did. It was at that moment I forgave my husband for what he had done. I just couldn’t forgive myself yet.
4. Meditation and Breathing
I tried meditation on my own, but I was in the same boat as so many other people who say they can’t meditate because their mind wanders. I didn’t have the patience to meditate, but I still tried.
I sat down on the floor, closed my eyes, and began thinking of all the things I wasn’t supposed to think about. I tried hard to stay focused on the present moment, like I had read so many times. I needed help.
I found a Meetup group about mindfulness and the healing process. I learned tactics for finding awareness and my own inner peace, like repeating a mantra over and over, “I am here. I am love. I am enough. I am okay.” I learned about the power of breathing and the breath cycles: inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, exhale for eight.
With practice, I was able to retrain my brain to stay in the present and not dwell in the past or worry in the future. Meditation helps to change the mind’s thoughts, too.
With meditation came awareness and acceptance of my emotions. When the sadness came, I let it. I crumbled to the floor and allowed my tears to fall for as long as needed and eventually, I rose from the floor and moved forward, telling myself that it’s okay to feel whatever it is you feel.
When loneliness threatened to debilitate me, I let it in, sensing it poke and pry at every vulnerable part of me. But then it eventually went away too. I learned that emotions are like unwanted guests: they are annoying when they are around, but they will eventually leave.
Over the next few months, I could feel a shift within me. I felt empowered. I felt more confident.
5. Writing
Writing is in my soul. It helps to put things in a new perspective. Since I was a child, I wrote my thoughts down to help process what happened to me. I can see the events anew with some distance and perspective.
I kept a notebook and carried it with me wherever I went. When I felt overwhelmed by my thoughts, I wrote them down. It served as a kind of brain dump for all the streaming thoughts in my head.
Writing is tangible proof and a reminder that the only constant thing in life is change. Our viewpoint on life never looks the same when we look back on it from the rearview mirror.
I am a work in progress. I am healing. I am growing. I am learning. I am rising stronger every day. Even if one person cannot see my value, my worth, and my intrinsic goodness, I have countless others who can and who have shown me that I am worthy of love.
Love is what humans truly crave when they futilely use money to buy new gadgets, clothes, or make fancy renovations to their homes. But at the end of the day, humans thrive and prosper on love. No amount of money or material wealth can replace the desire to feel loved and be loved in return. The most important love of all is that for yourself.
I still question myself and my value. But I am getting better at recognizing those thoughts and shutting them down sooner, then replacing them with more compassionate ones.
I have learned that mental illness is not something to be ashamed of or kept secret.
Mental health is okay to talk about. It is okay to ask for help. Don’t hold it in no matter what you assume other people will think. You are worthy of finding peace and healing. You deserve to be the best version of yourself. Accept yourself so you can forgive yourself. Choose to love yourself first and everything else will fall into place.
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5 Important Life Skills I Learned in Grief After My Husband Died
“Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Even though you want to run. Even when it’s heavy and difficult. Even though you’re not quite sure of the way through. Healing happens by feeling.” ~Dr. Rebecca Ray
When my husband died from terminal brain cancer in 2014, I learned all about deep grief. The kind of grief that plunges you into a valley of pain so vast it takes years to claw your way out. In the beginning, I didn’t want to deal with grief because the pain was too intense. So, I dodged grief and circled around the pit of despair, trying to outrun or outwit it.
My biggest grief fault was imagining an end. In my naiveté I figured I’d reach a point where I could wash my hands of it and claim, “Whew, I’m done!” But that’s not how grief and living with monumental loss works.
Grief doesn’t like to be ignored. The hardest lesson for any griever is learning that grief never goes away. You just figure out how to make room for it.
A few years after my husband died, I kept seeing the quote “what you resist persists.” It was like grief sending me a message to stop running and pay attention.
This message reached me at a critical time because I was exhausted from avoiding the pain, so I decided to let myself feel the sadness and see what happened instead. I stopped asking, why me? and started asking, what am I supposed to learn from this? Instead of evading grief, which was too grueling anyway, I let grief teach me what I needed to know.
Much to my surprise, amid the discomfort and sorrow and suffering, I learned a whole new way of living.
I didn’t realize I was morphing into a new, more self-actualized me because it’s hard to see the changes happening in real time. You can’t possibly appreciate your progress until you look back at how far you’ve come.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how grief’s guidance taught me the following important life skills I never would have learned without it.
How to Accept My Feelings
Prior to my husband’s death, I didn’t have time to feel my feelings. I kept busy with distractions, and whenever a tsunami of emotion surrounded me, I shut down.
The mistake I used to make was thinking my emotions meant something about me as a person. I convinced myself that sadness meant I was weak, and I couldn’t possibly be healing if I still cried over my husband’s death years later. I thought, I must be an angry person because I get angry so often, or something must be wrong with me because I feel overly judgmental sometimes.
Because grief brings with it a whole slew of emotions, it forced me to get better at feeling everything. With practice, I started naming my emotions, and I uncovered what I was feeling and why. Instead of labeling my feelings as good or bad, I accepted them as nothing more than the brief emotional surges they are.
I took a deep dive into all the self-help guides I could find to determine that every emotion has its place. We feel things so we can process what’s happening in our lives, learn from it, and eventually express its meaning. None of my feelings were better or worse than the others. None of them meant anything about my healing or how well I coped.
I learned I’m not an angry person, I’m just a person who occasionally feels anger. I’m not a judgmental person, I just feel judgmental sometimes. And sadness doesn’t mean I’m weak. It means I’m a human being experiencing a human emotion.
It took me a while to believe that my feelings were nothing more than blips on the radar screen of my human existence. If it weren’t for grief, I might not have uncovered the secret to accepting all my feelings –they mean nothing about me as a person.
If I’m being honest, I still get angry way more than I want to. But I don’t keep busy with distractions anymore. I feel my feelings when they come up, let them pass through and thank them for giving me an opportunity to understand myself on a deeper level.
How to Be More Vulnerable
In the past, I rarely admitted when I made mistake, when someone hurt me, or when I was afraid. As far back as I can remember, people viewed me as strong, brave, and determined because that’s what I portrayed. Few people ever saw the anxious, disappointed, or terrified side of me.
So, it was no surprise after my husband died, when card after card poured in with the same sentiment: “I’m so sorry for your loss. But I know how strong you are. If anyone can get through this devastation, you can.”
It comforted people to think I was “strong” enough to endure my loss. As if “strong” people grieved less than their more fragile counterparts. But their condolences were of little comfort to me after I learned a very basic principle of grief; it doesn’t discriminate. It tests the mettle of everyone’s soul.
Grief forced me to expose myself emotionally. I had to show my vulnerable side because fear took over and I didn’t know how to conceal it anymore. It seeped out of my pores
The upside of exposing my vulnerability was building deeper, more authentic relationships. I never knew how much people craved to see the real me until I noticed a favorable shift in my personal connections after I admitted my fear, shame, and regret. When I was honest about the intense stress of grief and the toll it took on me, others trusted me with their innermost secrets too.
I much prefer letting others in now. I never want to go back to keeping people at arm’s length and pretending to be someone I’m not. I did a grave disservice to myself by appearing so aloof for so long. Before my husband died, I got away with it. After he died, there was nowhere left to hide.
I’m not afraid of being afraid anymore. I can readily admit now when I’m scared. I also admit that I cry and break down and throw an occasional temper tantrum when life gets to be too much.
If it wasn’t for grief, I would’ve never known the benefit of letting others see the real me.
How to Ask for Help
As a person who avoided feelings and shunned vulnerability, I never knew how to ask for help. Not that I didn’t need help. I just hated asking because I assumed people would say yes when they secretly wanted to say no.
I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone.
After my husband died, I needed help with lawn maintenance, household repairs and childcare, among other things. I realized quickly I couldn’t do it all on my own and it took everything I had in me to ask for help because it was such a foreign concept.
One of the biggest things I learned on my grief journey is that healing requires honesty. And honesty requires practice. When people said, “let me know what you need” I understood what they really meant was, “I have no idea what to do! I feel so helpless and I’m begging you to please just tell me what you need, and I’ll do it!” People aren’t mind-readers, so I practiced being as honest and explicit as I could.
It took me a while to get good at asking for help. But I appreciate how wonderful it is for the person on the receiving end to get specific instructions. People want to help and now I let them.
My healing heart and relationships have vastly improved by implementing this one simple change.
How to Settle in with Uncertainty
I used to think I controlled the universe—until my husband died. Control is an illusion, and that truth smacked me upside the head the day his doctor diagnosed him with terminal cancer.
I’ve never liked uncertainty. I’m not a spontaneous person. My world works better when I know what’s going on and no one has any surprises up his or her sleeve. But after my husband’s diagnosis, we lived each day with uncertainty because we knew for sure he would die from his disease—we just didn’t know when.
The twelve months between his diagnosis and death were pure torture. However, we settled in with uncertainty anyway because we had no choice. Instead of focusing on the when of the future, we made the most of the present.
After he died, I learned that grief and uncertainty go hand in hand. When you’re grieving, you don’t know what emotional wave will hit you from day to day. You go through life without the security of knowing what will happen next because something terrible already happened and it could happen again. And you can’t control it. This is both a blessing and a curse.
The curse is the uncertainty, of course, but the blessing is you get to take the responsibility of the world off your shoulders. You surrender because you understand you were never in charge, anyway.
Now, I welcome the peace of surrender and not knowing. I discovered it’s easier to live in the moment instead of focusing on things outside of my control. Talk about lifting an enormous burden! I ride the emotional waves as they come and remind myself to stop forcing things and just let them be.
Whenever the control urge starts to churn and makes me think I have a chance to influence an outcome, I imagine my husband tapping me on the shoulder and whispering, “remember how we used to surrender? Please do that with me until this feeling passes.”
How to Allow Others to Have Their Own Feelings
When I got better at feeling my feelings, allowing vulnerability, and settling in with uncertainty, I also learned one of the most important life skills—how to let other people have their own feelings, too.
Because I know I’m not in charge and I don’t control the Universe, I know I can’t control what other people think or feel either. If grief has taught me anything, it’s that everyone has their own way of doing things and thinking about things and expressing their feelings about things. And none of it means anything about me.
I used to get upset when someone else was upset or get offended if someone else offended me. I tried to fix people and things to make everyone happy because I thought it was my responsibility to help others live in harmony.
Death put the kibosh on that distorted way of living.
I no longer had the time or inclination to teach everyone how to live in harmony because my world was one breath away from potential collapse. I had to concentrate on myself. When I focused on getting my mind right, making peace with grief, and learning how to handle my feelings, I understood it was an inside job. No one else could do it for me. And I couldn’t or shouldn’t try to do that for anyone else. Everyone comes from their own level of understanding about themselves and the world.
It took me a long time to understand this because it took me a long time to understand me.
Now I don’t pretend to know what or how or why someone else should think or feel a certain way. When other people tell me how they feel, I believe them.
It’s not my job to try and change someone else’s feelings any more than it’s their job to try and change mine.
The Way It Is Today
I don’t wish my monumental loss on anyone, but looking back now, I see how my crooked, confusing, and soul-crushing path taught me essential life skills I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
Even though I’ve had my fair share of hard days and months and years, I became a more compassionate and considerate person with grief’s guidance. I changed my worldview because pain changed me. And these days, I surrender to what is instead of trying to change circumstances outside of me.
It’s only after spending time with your pain that you develop an understanding of its purpose. I never thought I’d find an upside to grief because I thought grief was all about death. But I found out that grief teaches you about more than just death and surviving loss.
It teaches you how to live.
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Why Fibromyalgia Is the Greatest Gift of My Life
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” ~Rumi
TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains discussions of difficult topics, including suicidal depression and a fatal car accident.
I’ve always been an active, athletic person. In my twenties I was huge in tennis, squash, and swimming, and I began every morning with an intense workout that cleared my head and let me confront the day’s challenges with a relaxed, positive attitude. So, when I started experiencing mysterious pains and fatigue that didn’t go away no matter how much sleep I got, my life was turned upside down.
After two years of doctors’ visits, I finally received the earth-shattering diagnosis: fibromyalgia. My worst nightmare had come true. The doctors told me I would have to stop exercising as all the sports I loved are hard on your joints, and according to them I needed to take it easy. But physical activity was my life, and I quickly found that “taking it easy” was emotionally devastating for me.
Without my workout routine, my depression and anxiety spiraled out of control. I couldn’t find meaning or purpose in my day-to-day life anymore. The days blurred together, and all the energy I usually released through exercise turned inward, against me, in the form of daily panic attacks.
Worse than anything was the sense that my body—my best friend and my #1 support system for so many years—had betrayed me. And on top of this, the symptoms of my fibromyalgia were not getting better despite the enormous sacrifice I had made of giving up exercise. In fact, they were getting worse.
My turning point came several years after my diagnosis, when I was in my early thirties.
My condition had continued to decline, and I was ready to give up—on my body, on myself, and on life. It’s not something you can really understand unless you’ve experienced it yourself, but I had reached a point where I had no interest and no motivation to go on living. The uphill battle just wasn’t worth it to me anymore.
I remember the moment like it was yesterday. It was nighttime, pouring rain outside my third-story bedroom. I opened the window, put my head outside, and screamed from the top of my lungs into the howling wind: “Why, God, why do I have to go through this?” Then, overtaken by a sudden urge, I lifted my leg to climb out of the window, to fall to my death and put myself out of this agony.
At that moment, something happened that I still, to this day, cannot rationally explain. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a child standing by my side—a child I quickly recognized as the younger version of myself.
She looked up at me with pleading eyes and begged me to keep going. She told me to go back to my workout, that exercise would be my remedy, and that fibromyalgia, my greatest struggle, would lead me to my destiny.
I closed my window, feeling like I had just woken up from a dream. That night I made the choice not to give up on my life, somehow knowing my story would not and could not end here. I realized I had more to offer—instead of turning my misery into someone else’s grief, I could turn it into a gift that I could share with the world.
Although I had promised my friends and family that I would take it easy and not work out anymore, the next day I spent an hour swimming at the public pool. While I was there, I shared my story with a lifeguard who in turn shared some unexpected wisdom with me: “A doctor reads the book, memorizes it, and repeats it to the patient, but the patient knows her body.”
His words resonated with me. I started doing a mild exercise routine: a few hours a day of swimming, which was easier on my joints than tennis or squash. After a while, I decided to retry some of the other sports I had loved to play before my diagnosis and found that, as long as I was careful, I could enjoy them without too much pain. The trick was knowing my body—learning and recognizing its warning signs, keeping a close eye on how I felt, and not letting myself overdo it.
The young girl, the one who had stopped me from taking my own life, was right: exercise was my remedy.
My mental health started to improve, and while I was still experiencing body aches, swollen joints, and all the other joys of my disease, I had a renewed, intentional outlook that made them possible to manage. I couldn’t choose to live my life without pain, but I could choose to live it without suffering.
I will not lie to you and tell you it was a smooth recovery. I had bad days—days where all I could do was curl up in bed and cry, days spent feeling sorry for myself and angry at the universe. Days where my symptoms got so bad that I forgot all about my positive mindset and the mission I had set for myself, to turn my struggle into something positive and use it to help others.
I experienced a serious setback when, almost ten years after my diagnosis, I was driving with my best friend and we got into a horrific car accident. I was the one at fault. My friend, who was thrown from the car, ended up being declared brain dead at the hospital; I myself suffered severe injuries that badly worsened my fibromyalgia symptoms, and I was told by doctors that I would likely have to start using a wheelchair if my condition did not improve.
(Incidentally, while receiving psychiatric treatment for extreme suicidality in the days following my accident, I was also diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia—a fact that might once have given me consolation or comfort in understanding why I am the way I am, but given the circumstances, only served to depress me further.)
My physical decline combined with the trauma of causing my friend’s death was more than I could bear, and I again spiraled into hopeless agony. It was one of the darkest periods of my life, even worse than the few years after I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia. But I did not succumb to misery as I almost had back then. And now, looking back, I see why.
This disease, and my active and consistent determination to make the best of a bad situation, had given me the best possible tools to deal with whatever hardship came my way.
I was in worse physical and emotional shape than ever before. But years ago I had made a choice to keep going, and followed through with that choice for many years, and because of this my mind was in perfect shape to keep me from falling apart when I hit rock bottom.
So I kept going. Through my tears and my pain, I got up each morning and faced the day, whether I wanted to or not. Not only did I continue working out, I became certified as a yoga and Pilates instructor. It was during this time that I got my black belt in Taekwondo, though it took me six years. I even started working as a fitness trainer, finding that my experience with fibromyalgia gave me a unique perspective on physical and mental health that my clients appreciated.
This realization was the beginning of a much larger realization about the struggles each of us will face in our lives.
First, setbacks are an inevitable part of any recovery process.
If you’re not seeing forward progress on a day-to-day basis, that doesn’t mean you’re not still moving forward! I went through long periods of nothing but bad days, but I wasn’t giving up, and that’s what mattered. Continuing to fight is an active choice—you are making progress every day that you choose to stay alive.
Second, no matter what you’re dealing with, you have the power to turn it into something amazing.
Fibromyalgia made me a better, more compassionate, and more open person, allowing me to connect with people on a deeper level and help them more than I could before. It opened up opportunities and put me on personal and career paths I would never have followed otherwise. It taught me patience, gratitude, and—more than anything—that I am capable of so much more than I think.
Fibromyalgia has been the greatest gift of my life, but I need you to understand that it is a gift because I chose to turn it into one. The universe handed me an awful situation, and as you now know, I came close—too close—to letting it destroy me. It was my own decision to turn my pain into the blessing that it has become, for myself and for those around me.
Life is full of hardships, but the incredible thing about being human is that we have the ability to choose how we respond to them. You can choose to fall apart, or you can choose to turn your pain into a gift.
What will you choose?
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From Bombs to Bliss: Peeling Off the Layers of Childhood Trauma
TRIGGER WARNING: This post mentions bombs and executions and may be triggering to some people.
“Into your darkest corner, you are safe in my love, you are protected. I am the openness you seek, I am your doorway. Come sit in the circular temple of my heart, and let yourself be calm.” ~Agapi Stassinopoulos
I was six years old. My mother and I entered the bus to head home from downtown. Suddenly the sirens went off.
I felt a knot in my stomach. People started running around. A cloud of dust formed in the air. I could taste the panic. Sirens meant that it was time to seek shelter. They were the very loud sound of the thin veil between life and death. A moment in time where our brief existence on earth felt palatable.
My father and twelve other family members had been in one of the worst political prisons for almost five years. Ever since his arrest and as far as I can remember, the bitter taste of fear and distrust has never left my side.
I caught a breath when my mother squeezed my hand. I could feel my little heart racing in my chest. When we finally got home, I saw my grandmother running through the yard. Tears were rolling down her face.
“I was worried sick,” she said.
We weren’t sure they had made it either. We all felt temporary relief. We had survived.
It’s hard to think about life without smartphones in the eighties. You never knew if someone was going to make it back home alive. Not until they physically walked through the door.
For the years to come, the government ordered the execution of all political prisoners. My father miraculously survived while his family was executed. The war ended when I was eight years old. The sound of the sirens and terrifying moments passed. As a young girl, I witnessed a lot of physical beatings, oppression, and abuse of young people by the religious guard in my country.
Experiencing war and turmoil in Iran as a child shaped my adult life in so many ways. The feeling of not being safe never left my body, and I continued to live in survival mode as my body carried years of trauma like a heavy weight.
Living in survival mode meant that I was in a constant state of fight, flight, or fawn. I was angry. I lashed out at people very easily. When things got tough, I either fought or froze.
For years, I had a tough time getting out of bed in the morning. I also had a tough time with my identity. I didn’t know who I was. I was a people-pleaser. I did anything to keep the peace around me, and when it got chaotic, I got angry and threw whatever I could get my hands on at the wall.
Suffering was the only thing that made me feel alive. It was the only thing that made sense.
We immigrated to Germany when I was fourteen years old. A whole lot had happened to me up until that point, but now there also was the added pressure of surviving in a new culture. Two worlds collided. German kids weren’t very nice to the foreign girl from Iran. Once again, I was in complete survival mode.
Years passed. My family immigrated to the United States, and I met my American husband (a male wounded version of myself) as a twenty-five-year-old exchange student in Arizona. We instantly connected over our childhood traumas.
Six years into the marriage I got pregnant. I didn’t know it back then, but becoming a mother was the best thing that ever happened to me.
The birth of my daughters became the turning point in my life. Symbolically speaking, I gave birth to a new me. The process was physically and mentally difficult, and when my first birth didn’t go as planned, I struggled with my post-partum recovery and suffered from depression.
Experiencing a difficult time meant that I was feeling all my emotions including the anger that already lived within me. And as my anger got louder, I realized that I had given birth to a child who now was depending on me to survive. I saw love for myself through the eyes of that child, and for the first time I saw the possibility of a new life.
The possibility of a life where I would find the real me underneath all the layers of trauma. The possibility of a life where I could see my childhood in a new light: A light of appreciation. A light of love for who I had become. A celebration of my strength and perseverance.
I didn’t have to hate myself anymore. “It is safe for me to be me,” I declared to myself.
Becoming a mother gave me the strength to push through everything from my past that was holding me hostage for so many years. I was determined to break free the cycle of suffering for my daughter. It wasn’t just about me anymore. Healing doesn’t happen overnight, but life conspired to make it happen for me.
While I was pregnant with my second child, tired from many sleepless nights with my first baby, and stuck in a stressful job in finance, the climate at my corporate job took a turn for the worst. I got rejected from a promotion I was more than qualified for because I was pregnant (or at least that was my perception at the time).
At the same time, my husband received an incredible out-of-town job opportunity. It was an easy decision. I quit my job, and we packed up and moved.
Not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I got my real estate license in hopes for a new career that would allow me to have a more flexible work schedule. This was the beginning of my healing journey.
Although real estate and healing have nothing seemingly obvious in common, what led to my new journey was the fact that for the first time ever, I was depending fully on myself.
I wasn’t going to have a consistent paycheck, PTO, and personal days. I was the only one in charge of what my days looked like. I was in charge of my own mind. If I didn’t wake myself up in the morning, aside from my children, no one else would.
On the day of my orientation at my new real estate office, the company owner played a motivational video for the class. I remember thinking, wow, this makes me feel good on the inside.
I felt a fire burning in me that I had never felt before.
YouTube became my best friend after that. I consumed every motivational video compilation that I could find. I felt alive. Possibly for the first time ever. What came after this time, aside from my childhood, turned out to be some of the hardest but most rewarding times of my life.
As I learned about how my thoughts and emotions create my reality, I became more self-aware. I was able to distinguish between what was my trauma and what was truly me by observing how certain situations and people made me feel
I understood that what triggers me comes from a subconscious part of me that needs to be heard and seen. I started to take radical responsibility for my own feelings and emotions.
For example, if my daughter did something that triggered anger in me, I would explore what within me was unhealed to cause such a reaction. Was it because I wasn’t heard or seen as a child? Was it because I didn’t feel safe to process my anger in a healthy way?
I would sit with these thoughts and give myself permission to feel my anger, my fears, and my sadness. It was all going to be okay. I am safe. I am loved. I am supported. These became my new daily mantras.
Underneath the weight of anger, there was that little six-year-old. I could finally see her with new eyes and wrap her in a soft blanket of pure love. I started to appreciate my childhood for making me the person that I am today. Brave. Strong. And worthy of a happy life!
This work isn’t over yet. It probably never will be. If you have experienced trauma like I did and you have embarked on a healing journey, know that it takes time to become whole again. And that is okay.
This work is ongoing because the subconscious mind has many layers, and there are always opportunities to explore what is deep within them.
Just as the layers start peeling off, just as you hear, see, and hold your wounded inner child, you will start to see yourself and your life more clearly and feel safe in your body. By bringing those dark aspects of yourself to the light, you’ll start recognizing and addressing your triggers so you won’t feel so emotionally charged all the time.
As you try to visualize a different life for yourself—one less limited and defined by your trauma—you will see what emotions pop up to the surface. You will need you to sit with those emotions so you can identify the harmful self-beliefs that aren’t yours. Beliefs about your worth, your capabilities, your potential. Ideas that are hidden deeply in your subconscious mind that you only adopted as your own because of what you endured in the past.
The more you up level your life and the bigger your dreams get, the more you will unpack. You will unpack all the lies that were fed to you to hold you small, and you will start finding the strength and confidence required to become the person you want to be.
Healing is a journey, don’t rush it. Trust the process and take time to sit with your emotions to feel them fully. And if things get tough just keep going. One foot in front of the other. One moment at a time. The past is behind you, and it made you who you are today. Love yourself and honor your journey. You can overcome the darkness and see the light. If I did it, so can you!
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4 Powerful Lessons I’ve Learned from Grief Since My Mom Died Suddenly
“Losing my mother at such an early age is the scar of my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today. I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I did to be here.” ~Mariska Hargitay
At 6:07 pm on July 18, 2020, I was sitting on the couch with my boyfriend. It was a Saturday night, and I had canceled plans with my friends because I had a migraine. I had eaten dinner already, and I was in my pajamas, watching TV. My phone rang—my dad. “I’ll call him back later,” I said, flipping the phone over on the couch and returning my attention to the television.
Three minutes later, I received a text from my dad to my sister and me.
“Girls, I do not want to alarm you, but I am at the emergency room in Asheville. Your mother and I were riding our bikes, and she was hit by a car. An ambulance came very quickly, and they have her right now. I am doing some paperwork at the front desk, so I don’t know her condition. I will keep you posted. Love.”
I read it to my boyfriend, concerned. I worried she had broken an arm or perhaps even a leg. My mother had never broken a bone before. I answered my father’s Facetime. I could see the hospital waiting room behind him. Crowded. I looked back at his face. My stomach tied itself into knots, and my migraine pounded.
“God almighty, shit.” My dad’s refrain.
I looked at my sister’s face. I stared at her, a tiny square on my phone. As my dad described what had happened, my eyes bore into my twin’s, as if I could make everything okay if I just looked at her hard enough.
My dad told the story, occasionally stopping to speak to doctors or the hospital chaplain, Jim, who remained close by. That was the first sign to me that something was very wrong. All those people in the waiting room, and the chaplain was only speaking to Dad.
I’ve heard this story thousands of times by now. I know every detail by heart. So I’ll tell it in my words, not his.
Around 3:32 pm, Jane and John Beach left their cabin in Saluda, North Carolina, with their mountain bikes hitched to the back of their twenty-one-year-old Toyota Four Runner. They drove to Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, where they planned to go on a bike ride before stopping by their favorite brewery for dinner.
At 5:21 pm, Jane and John were finishing their ride. They took a right on Brevard Road. John went first. And Jane followed.
At 5:22 pm, twenty-five-year-old Hannah was driving down the road. If Jane had turned right seconds later, at 5:23 pm, Hannah would have sped right past. Instead, Jane was hit from behind by Hannah’s tan Buik Sentry.
John heard the impact, skidded to halt, and threw his bike across the road. Sprinting to his wife, who was now lying in the street. Her bike was destroyed. Her helmet split in two. At the same moment, Hannah, with blood on her hood and a cracked windshield, drove away as quickly as she came.
At Mission Hospital, Jane was intubated and treated with attention and care. At 7:18 pm, I learned over FaceTime that my mother had died. My father was crying.
“God almighty, shit.”
He continued to repeat.
That day, the moment my mom died, I joined a community of hundreds of thousands of others who were grieving. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably part of my community, or maybe you love someone who is.
During the months after my mother’s death, I would lie in bed at night and think about everyone I was connected to, everyone else who was lying in bed, unable to sleep because they were thinking of someone they loved and lost.
Since then, I’ve learned a lot about grief through articles, books, podcasts, and speaking to other people who were going through similar experiences. I wanted to understand grief because I wanted to know how to recover from it. But what I learned along the way is that grief is not something you heal from. When you lose someone, you carry that around with you forever, and it becomes a part of you.
Grief can actually mold itself into something beautiful that reminds you of your strength and your capacity to love and be loved so fiercely that it hurts.
Dumbledore said it best when he said, “To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”
If we can learn how to live in harmony with grief, it can teach us so much and help us grow. Here are four powerful lessons I’ve learned from my grief.
Lesson 1: Love yourself harder.
After my mom died, I was a mess. Not only was I in physical pain, but I felt as if all of the mental health struggles I’ve wrestled with for most of my life (anxiety and hypochondria, to name a few) were bubbling back up to the surface and threatening a takeover.
Grieving can bring up old wounds and make other emotions seem unbelievable overwhelming. That’s why self-love and self-compassion are essential to ease the suffering that comes with grief.
Self-compassion isn’t an easy thing to learn, but a good way to begin is by making a list of things that comfort you and making time for those things. Put in an effort toward just showing yourself some love.
Grief taught me the importance of nurturing myself. I like to take baths, curl up with a good book, and take long walks. I’ve found that these moments of stillness and calm help me get through the moments of chaos and sadness and fear and frustration.
Lesson 2: Fully feel your emotions.
Grief often stimulates an overwhelming range of different emotions. People who are grieving feel their emotions very strongly, whether it’s sadness, joy, fear, or relief. Even a year and a half after my mom’s death, my emotions still hit me like bricks, and sometimes I really don’t see them coming.
It’s natural to try and avoid the more uncomfortable emotions, like anxiety or fear, but that just makes them stronger. Instead, try sitting with your emotion. Fully feel it, and allow it to exist without any avoidance.
Mindfulness, or grounding yourself in the present moment, can really help when you find yourself pushing an emotion away because it’s too painful. Try sitting quietly in an empty room. Imagine your emotion sitting beside you. Remember, you are not your emotion. It doesn’t have to control you. You don’t have to push it away out of fear.
Another thing that’s important to remember is this: it’s okay to feel things. It’s okay to feel sad or angry or frustrated. Don’t push away any feelings because you think they’re “wrong” or “not helpful.” When you’ve gone through the trauma of losing someone, all feelings are valid. Let emotions live freely and recognize that you’re going to have good days and bad days.
Lesson 3: Rituals and reminders can be therapeutic.
When my mom died, I struggled to think of her without feeling pain. I hid everything that reminded me of her and took down all of my photos. Remembering her felt like staring directly at the sun. But eventually, I started to take comfort in reminders. I wanted to talk about her and see her face.
Now, I wear her wedding ring every day and think of her often when I look at it. I drink earl grey tea and remember the days we used to spend sipping hot drinks in the Barnes and Noble coffee shop. I wear her favorite sweatshirt and think about the day she got it when she wasn’t much older than I am now, and she was pregnant with me and my sister.
Staying connected with your loved ones after they’re gone can be tremendously comforting. There are many rituals that can help you accomplish that feeling. Here are a few of my favorite ideas:
- Read their favorite book
- Sit in a spot they loved in the house
- Talk to their childhood best friend and ask to hear stories about them
- Look at old photos
- Listen to the music they loved
- Plant a tree or flowers in their memory
- Donate to a charity your loved one supported
Lesson 4: Find people who understand you.
Talking to other women who have lost their moms in their twenties has been an essential part of my healing process. I’ve met so many strong women who have overcome loss and trauma and used their grief to become better versions of themselves.
One of my most meaningful connections formed through an organization called The Dinner Party. A few weeks after my mom died, I signed up without thinking that I would really get anything out of it. A few weeks later, I got an email saying that I had a new “buddy”—a girl only a few years older than me who had lost her mom in a biking accident just one month before I lost mine. A year and a half later, we still facetime regularly and are a big part of each other’s lives.
Talking to someone who shares such a huge life experience with you is a relief, and it feels great to be able to express your full range of emotions to someone who understands because they are feeling all of those things too. From how to support our newly single dads to how to bring up your dead mom to a new friend, we’ve talked through so many things that are meaningful and important to me. We’re close friends, and she has been a great joy to come out of this difficult tragedy.
Losing my mom has undoubtedly been the most difficult experience of my life, but I’ve learned to love my grief throughout my journey. It has made me stronger and more compassionate, and I know myself and my purpose better now than I ever would have without my grief. I would trade it all to have my mom back, but I know she would be proud of me if she were here right now.
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Scared of Losing People You Love? How to Work through the Fear
“People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.” ~Joseph F. Newton
“Oh my God, Mom…” she said with a verbal eye roll.
“What?” I responded, sure that I had said too much or overshared like I normally do.
I can’t recall what my daughter and I were discussing openly about while standing in line at the grocery store checkout, but I do remember the girl ringing us up laughing and saying we sounded just like her and her mom.
I paused, unsure what that meant.
“Is this what a healthy mother/daughter relationship sounds like?” I questioned to myself. It was a completely foreign concept to me.
I wanted to create a strong bond with my daughter, but my own relationship with my mother was dysfunctional and boundary-less when I was a child, leading me to overthink everything when it came to creating a relationship with my daughter.
My mother had significant mental health challenges, which eventually led to her death by suicide.
I had no idea what healthy felt like.
Insecurity plagued me when it came to connecting with my daughter. Was I giving her too much or not giving her enough? Did she trust me? Did she feel comforted by me? Was I too lenient? Was I too distant?
It was hard to tell when the voices of doubt chimed in.
I’ve watched other moms with their daughters since I was a young girl. I wasn’t exactly sure what normal was, but I knew it was not telling their daughters how depressed they were or talking through their marital issues. I knew it was not asking their daughters for advice and relying on them to feel good enough to get out of bed by midday.
I knew my relationship with my mom was different, but it was the only one I had. My normal was gripping codependency and making sure she was okay so she would be there the next day.
I didn’t want that relationship with my daughter. I wanted her to feel whole and complete and deeply loved without having to take care of another human being to feel it.
My journey into motherhood was far from easy. With few role models and almost no experience with children, I felt like I had nothing to go on besides instinct alone. And my instincts were part of my problem. I couldn’t always hear them.
When a child grows up in a volatile environment during their early development, they learn to distrust connection. When what feels comforting and loving one minute can turn to betrayal and rejection in the next, trust in others does not come easily.
A human’s natural inclination is to want connection, but inconsistency or harm against a person creates a fear in that same connection. When this happens during early development, the child learns to fear what it also deeply desires—which develops into an adult who is quietly terrified to experience and trust reciprocal love.
The only way I knew how to create that healthy connection was to look deeply into myself and be aware of my patterns and how I was passing them on. And so I observed—a lot.
I observed other families and the way mothers spoke to their daughters. I observed the way the daughters responded to their moms. I watched what drew my daughter in, and I watched what pushed her away.
I learned to listen without speaking (which is absolute torture when codependency feels like home), and I learned to ask more questions instead of giving unsolicited advice. I’m still learning, and most likely will be for the long haul since old habits die hard.
But it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t just learning how to respond to normal discomfort when someone I love was uncomfortable. It was learning to respond to normal discomfort when I was uncomfortable. It was learning to not shut down and begin to emotionally detach when insecurity started to get loud.
Raising my children is one of the biggest challenges I’ve had to navigate with these embedded fears. To give birth to a part of you and know your job is to let this soul grow into themselves while they slowly leave you a little more each day. Pulling them close to me to feel safe and loved and teaching them to leave all at the same time. It’s like one long continual dance of love and grief.
My daughter started college this year and I knew it was going to be tough when she moved on campus, but I had no idea the depth of the grief I would feel. It’s not logical. And the logical part of me likes reason and boxes to put my feelings in. I cognitively knew it was temporary, but my body did not know. It stores memories of every loss and every time I’ve felt left behind, and it was eager to remind me.
“Life will never be the same again. It’s over.”
And that is true. But until those old pangs of grief retell their stories without being dismissed and reprimanded for being dramatic or “too much,” I could not see that the new life may even be better than the one before.
When I let myself experience the sad and angry feelings without reacting to them, they moved through me faster and I could see what I needed to stay connected.
I requested we have small doses of consistent communication during the beginning stages of her being gone so I could show my fears they were unwarranted. We sent pictures on snapchat most days, and it was just enough to feel connected without being intrusive. It worked for us and comforted my childhood-driven fear until it passed.
The first time she came home was over a month after she left. Our oversized puppy expressed it best with his big cries and leaping happiness to be with her again. We missed her and our little family felt the absence of her presence in a big way.
The joy of her energy filling our house was immense. To be in my space again and under my care felt like she never left. She was in and out and visiting friends and doing her thing, but her presence was the reassurance I needed.
It felt like the scared toddler in me re-experienced object permanence. Proof that it’s safe to trust that if love walks out the door, it also returns. Maybe not in the same shape or the same way, but it comes back when it’s ready… and maybe it never truly left to begin with.
My little-girl heart, still quietly afraid of loss, was healing.
Fears of re-experiencing old pains and heartache are the norm in the human experience, and the more we understand our fears, the more we can work with them to keep our connections strong and secure. It also helps us to not pass them on to our children, our partners, our friends and family.
Our job is not to silence our pain or our fears. Our job is to invite them to the table, let them speak, let them breathe, and let them share their story to completion. Their interrupted cycle is what keeps them around longer as they impatiently wait to be noticed.
When a fear shows itself through strong surges of emotion (sadness, anger, loneliness, etc.), ask it for more information like you would someone else.
You can do this verbally out loud or write it out. Ask, tell me more about that pain or fear. What does it feel like? Where do you feel it in your body? Does it hurt or feel restricting? Have you experienced this feeling before?
Then ask when was the last time you recall feeling this way. What was happening? Who did it involve? What were you scared of? What was the outcome? What might you be doing right now to avoid that same pain? Is it working?
As you start to uncover the sensations and emotions, ask, what would you tell someone else who was experiencing this same pain? What would you tell a child?
And my favorite question, what is the most loving and compassionate thing you can do for yourself right now?
Questions like these give us the opportunity to feel our feelings without transferring them on to someone else and give them a voice they might not normally have. Our inherent need to be seen and heard is met, and we are not ignoring what is asking to be felt.
The more we let ourselves feel, the more we can hear the voice underneath the feelings once they pass. The quiet intuitive voice who always knows how to nurture us, heal our wounds, and instructs us how to have the courage and ability to have loving relationships with those we care about.
It’s normal to have fear in our connections. It’s part of our experience as humans and often how we learn about ourselves most. But to let those fears dictate the way we connect keeps us from connecting in the ways we truly crave. True intimacy requires vulnerability and a trust that starts within ourselves. The more we are willing to listen to the fears that drive us, the more we are open to the love that feeds us.
What are you really scared of? Let your fears be heard, but let your heart lead the way.
