On grief, pride, and the freedom that lives between them.
I can bring myself to my knees. Not because life is beating me right now, but because I can look back at my own story and feel it. Really feel it. All the things I went through that I didn’t fully process in the moment, because there wasn’t time, or space, or the language for it. And then years later, it lands. Holy shit. That actually happened to me. That was hard.
There is something profound in being able to feel genuine empathy for yourself. Not self-pity. Empathy. The kind you’d offer a friend without hesitation, but have to work to offer inward.
“I can write the saddest story about my life. I can also write the strongest.” Same life.
Same facts. Same me.
Because the other direction is equally available. When I look at what I’ve moved through, without always knowing what I was up against, without a name for it or a map or even a support structure that quite fit, and I kept going anyway, kept building, kept showing up, I feel something else entirely. Not pride in the chest-puffed sense. More like recognition. There is more here than I have used yet.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about your own story. It isn’t fixed. The narrative is real, but the meaning you assign it is yours to choose. Not once. Over and over again.
I’m not interested in the ten-step program or the productivity framework. I’ve never been able to receive insight that way, and I’ve made my peace with that. What I can offer is the raw version. My version. Which is not your version, because we are not each other. Our histories are not comparable. The weight of the same word, the same experience, lands differently in different bodies and different lives. I won’t pretend otherwise.
What I think I can do is share the simplified version of something I lived through, in a way that lands in your chest before your brain gets to it because sometimes someone else naming a feeling is enough to make you feel less alone inside your own.
Happy, for me, is thin. I feel happy eating good food, swimming in the ocean, laughing at something unexpected. It’s real, but it passes. What I’m after, what I think I’ve found glimpses of, is peace. That’s the thing that can actually hold.
The power is in your own hands. It starts in your thoughts. Yes, that cliché is true.
The cliché is true. I hate that it’s true, because I spent years resisting it, but it is. Thoughts first. Everything else follows. The reason it gets said so badly, so often, is that people turn it into a lecture. Five ways to reprogram your mindset. A checklist. A course. And all of that misses the point, because the timeline is yours. Some people get there in weeks. Some take years. The recipe toward your own clarity, your own version of freedom, is not replicable. It is yours to discover.
What I know is that the decision to walk toward yourself, when you’re ready to make it, is the most consequential one. Not toward productivity or toward achievement BUT toward yourself because that’s where the need becomes a want …and want is where freedom actually lives.
I don’t have this figured out. I’m writing from inside the process, same as you.
0 Comments