01/29/2026
Every struggle, pain, constraint in life you have that feels unfair…this is life calling on you to grow.Going through back-to-back losses and then my spouse of 19 years walking out, leaving me to solo parent our child, was unreal. It felt like the punchline to a horrible joke. I wasn’t prepared and I wasn’t laughing. Life was calling me to grow and I wasn’t listening. My instinct was to feel sorry for myself and use those events as excuses to stop participating in life.
Looking back on it today is still difficult, how do you grieve so many losses at once. I've since discovered that I do not have to grieve a certain way, I do not even
Every struggle, pain, constraint in life you have that feels unfair…this is life calling on you to grow.
Going through back-to-back losses and then my spouse of 19 years walking out, leaving me to solo parent our child, was unreal. It felt like the punchline to a horrible joke. I wasn’t prepared and I wasn’t laughing. Life was calling me to grow and I wasn’t listening. My instinct was to feel sorry for myself and use those events as excuses to stop participating in life.
Looking back on it today is still difficult. How do you even begin to grieve so many losses at once? I’ve since discovered there is no “right” timeline, no perfect five-step process, and no gold star for doing grief a certain way. I don’t have to pretend to be okay, and I also don’t have to stay stuck in the story of what was done *to* me.
What I *can* do is choose the meaning I give to what happened. I can decide that these losses are not the end of my story, but the beginning of a new chapter. I can let myself be cracked open and, instead of shutting down, let those cracks become openings for growth, courage, and a deeper version of me that would never have been born without the pain.
And that’s really what I’m learning:
I can’t control what I’ve lost, but I can control what I build from here.
I can’t rewrite the past, but I can rewrite the role I’m playing in my own life now.
If you’re in that place where it feels like life has taken too much from you, you don’t have to be “over it” to start growing from it. You just have to be willing to take one small step that says:
“I’m still here. And I’m not done yet.”