I always had a hard time finding the right words to talk about this topic. So hard that it’s been almost 2 years that I took a break from writing. Which was hard for me considering the fact that it’s what I love doing and what I’m extremely passionate about. I’ve always been someone that likes to see the silver lining in everything. I still do. Everything I write about and post about is always about finding hope and picking yourself up again and finding purpose. I love being that person. And I want to keep being that person, but sadly unexpected things happen in life that we never see coming so soon. I lost someone very close to me in 2024 and i honestly don’t feel like I’ve been the same ever since. Grief is a journey and there is no right way to grieve. Ever since I lost my dad, it really changed my perspective on many things in life and it made me think about so much and showed me what really matters.
There Was a Version of Me Before Grief
A big part of grief that a lot of people struggle with is understanding that things can’t go back to the way they were. Once you’ve dealt with loss and pain in your life it’s hard to get back the version of you that didn’t know what that felt like. A part of you dies when you lose someone and it changes you completely. It comes as a shock at first and you feel like you can’t comprehend that this is what your life is like now and you can’t go back. You mourn the life that you could have had, experiencing milestones, achieving goals and hoping all the people you wished for to witness all of it were there.
It’s not easy to accept because we want to feel like the old version of ourselves, the one where we felt hopeful, happy and felt like we had purpose. Grief isn’t just about losing someone you love but also about grieving the life that you had before you knew what loss felt like and mourning what could have been. I had a difficult time accepting that the version of me before grief does not exist anymore. I had to accept that things will not be the same anymore. I had to accept that life won’t be the same anymore because of grief.
The hard truth is that grief changes you. You feel distant, you lose your sense of self. Sometimes, you feel like people won’t recognize the person you’ve become. You feel lots of emotions of sadness, anger and hopelessness. You start to question God and life and why you had to go through what you what you went through. You feel like you lost passion for life because the person you lost isn’t there to experience it with you. To me, this felt like the most difficult thing I had to face because my view of the world changed.
What mattered before didn’t matter now and any problems I dealt with are definitely not as big as I thought they were. The way I view people changed. It made me see and appreciate the people who constantly show up in my life and it showed me those who were absent when I needed them most. Grief has a way of revealing the true nature of the people around us. It teaches you who stays when there is nothing to gain from staying. I understood what people meant when they said that “grief is the price we pay for love” because it’s true. Where there is deep grief there was great love. We hold onto grief because it feels like the last remaining thread connecting us to the people we’ve loved.
Purpose Can Still Exist After Loss
A common feeling I’ve noticed is that when you’re grieving, you feel like your world stops. The moment you lost that person in your life is where you stayed and you haven’t moved on since. The hard truth that I had to face was that even though my world felt shattered and everything in my life stopped the world kept spinning. It felt so strange to watch everyone around me continue living as if nothing happened, while my own world seemed frozen in place. To me, the feeling I got was guilt. I kept asking myself how do I move on? How do I continue living without him? How do I do it without feeling guilty? I struggled a lot mentally with the idea that i should just continue living my life after grief until it really hit me.
I’m not moving on, I’m learning to live with my loss.
Purpose can still exist after loss and it’s important that I continue. I have to keep going for him and for myself. I have to make him proud and I have to do all the things I promised I would do for him. I’m going to live my life for him and hopefully accomplish so much and make him proud. I know what he would expect from me, and I know what he saw in me. I just have to see those things in myself again. And I feel like that is what everyone needs to remember when it comes to grief, is that you will find yourself again. It might take you some time to heal but healing is not the end of your story. You still have your own story. You still have so much to live for, you have so much to accomplish, keep that as a reminder. Lastly, grief is heavy, it might not get lighter but we become stronger. And somewhere along the way, we discover that becoming stronger doesn’t mean leaving our loved ones behind- it means carrying their love with us as we continue forward.
Love, L
SHE’S AN ANGEL 
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