Career,  Friends,  Grief,  New Start,  Surviving Widowhood,  This Life

A New Chapter

It’s been a while. A few things have happened in the world since I was last here. Obviously, the pandemic has been hard on us all and I am standing there with you. When it first happened and the world grieved our old way of life and had to figure out how to survive with so much taken away from us, it triggered a lot of the early grief I felt right after Steven died. So many similar themes.

But guess what? This time it wasn’t just me going through it. The whole world shared my grief and while I wasn’t happy everybody was having such a hard time, it was an interesting experience to go through that collectively.

Let me be clear, it wasn’t exactly the same as after Steven died. No, Steven’s absence was much too destructive and heart wrenching and painful to be even close. Unfortunately, many people are finding that out with so many deaths happening in a different world where we can’t grieve the same way. There is now that extra layer of not being able to go through our normal death rituals; saying goodbye, funerals, meeting with family, etc. Those rituals are so vital when processing such a huge destructive loss in our lives.

And it is so destructive. I am coming up on five years since Steven died and even though so many wonderful things have happened (I fell in love again and got married!) while dealing with the worst, most painful event I’ve ever experienced, I am still not whole. Many people have not had the patience for that. I did not heal on their timeline, so I have had secondary losses of friends, and that hurt, but I’m not alone. Every widow(er) loses friends and family. It certainly didn’t help me while I was trying to claw my way back but I have made peace with it. It’s nobody’s fault. Just as nobody should expect me to heal on their timeline, I shouldn’t expect them to have as much patience as my grief has needed.

So here I am. I’ve been worn down but not broken. I’m as sturdy as leather and I’ll keep going, probably still needing repairs and polishing, but I will never give up. I’m gaining more clarity as I see more clearly out of the grief fog that will never fully clear up. I am feeling a bit more like a person and not an alien in a strange land trying to mimic what the earthlings do. I am feeling like an earthling again.

I am grateful to all of those who had the patience to stick with me through this. As I continue to get stronger, I am changing the course of my path. I am making a new start and figuring out where I want to be. I am re-entering the job market. I love freelancing but I am craving more structure and bigger projects. So, I am pivoting my blog to concentrate more on the business side of things. 

I will still write about grief and mental health as it strikes me. I can’t not write about those things, they are ingrained in me and I love writing about them. It’s therapeutic for me and I have had so many people contact me telling me how it has helped them. I love getting those emails. Thank you to everybody who has reached out to let me know. I am also still writing the grief books that I hilariously gave myself too short of a deadline for. I’m working on them and very proud of how they’re coming along. I can’t wait to release them.

It’s weird deciding that now is the time to do this, you know, with a pandemic and political unrest and everything else that’s unstable in this world and economy at this moment. But what I’ve learned in the last five years is that humanity is resilient. It sucks right now, people are dying, others are suffering and getting hit with long term consequences, black and indigenous people are rightfully angry and it is causing a lot of people who don’t understand to act horribly. The economy is struggling, and we can’t forget about the lack of movement in dealing with climate change. It all sucks. However, we are resilient. We are going to come through this. We will be worn down, and maybe a little broken, but we’ll have a new sense of clarity. Hopefully, this clarity comes with a real sense of equality and reason in dealing with all of our people and our world.

We are all ready for a new start. We had to be pushed into it but we’re ready. We have to be, we have no choice. That’s what you learn in grief. Let’s move into it together with a sense of humanity for each other. We have to be patient with each other as we all get through this and make sense of it. Patience is the only way. Grief taught me that and it will teach you the same thing. Humanity has so much resilience and good in it. We got this.

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