The Rebirth of a Woman
Everything starts with a story. Often, we can be so submersed in it that we don’t realize the story being written until we’re knee deep in it, or we are already on the other side of it. I learned my lines as I was going, but I couldn’t see the story unfolding for years. In December of 2021, my coach was sitting across from me (virtually), and she said it so quickly, if I hadn’t been focused on her I might have missed it, “You completely rebirthed yourself.” Almost five years after my world crumbled around me, I sat there with her words spinning in my mind and feeling the weight of all I had been through. Not a heavy weight that made me want to shrink, but a weight that showed me how much I had persevered and how different it had all made me. I remember being a freshman in college and thinking I had never really been through anything hard in my life, outside of teenage heartbreaks (which to be fair can be quite brutal). At 18 I knew I didn’t have a clear understanding of what it meant to truly grieve. I knew, somewhere deep inside of me, I was sleep walking through life; subconsciously numbing the emotions I didn’t know how to handle. I find it interesting that at such a young age I was concerned about the fact I had never met grief face to face. Sometimes I wonder if what I was actually trying to communicate was “I know you (grief) will come for me and I hope I will be ready.”
Of course, we are never ready for grief. And when it arrives for the first time, it’s like a massive wave you think will drag you out to sea forever and ever. As I look back at my story, I can see now that grief and I had met several times, albeit briefly, before I was able to properly name it. April 29th, 2017 is the day grief came to wake me up and this time I wouldn’t forget its name. It felt like a mix of someone gently saying, “come, it’s time to wake up and fully live” and also someone handing me a backpack full of supplies for a treacherous journey up ahead. I sat frozen looking out my balcony doors. I was in shock from trauma and terrified I didn’t have what it would take to survive the journey I now had to go on, yet there was a steady knowing all along that I was deeply loved. There is always Love mixed in with grief; that is what I have found. It’s that Love that carried me on my treacherous journey of rebirthing myself and learning how to fully come alive.
I don’t know where you are on your journey, or even which journey you might be on right now, but my hope is to provide some comfort as you continue to persevere through the ups and downs of life. Each week my goal is to share with you ways that I moved through dark nights and gut wrenching days, how I found a way to cultivate a friendship with my grief, how I rebirthed myself and found a richer way to live. May you not journey alone, and may you always know you, too, are deeply loved.
