Meet the moment

On grief, uncertainty, and learning to trust myself when everything feels like it's falling apart.

When we were kids, we used to lay our bodies on the sand and let the Pacific tide wash over us. Bellies down, the water would pull at our feet while the sand fell away underneath.

Sometimes, as I sank into the earth, I imagined a monster was pulling me into the deepest depths of the ocean. The ground was disintegrating, and even though I was safe, I would scream as if I had no footing beneath me. I would make futile attempts to hang on to the sand, grasping for as much as my fists could hold.

Every time, I came up empty.

I didn’t really know grief until last year. I had lost pets, longed for friends after they moved away, and experienced other kinds of loss. But I had never properly grieved an ending. I had never really experienced this place.

It confused me.

The intensity. The way it unraveled what I thought was me.
Nothing about it matched what I thought grief would be like.
I expected to feel sad. But I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to find myself.

It was April. Eight months earlier I had chosen to end my 26-year partnership. My entire family system — the one I had built to break the patterns I inherited — was changing shape. I anticipated there would be grief, but I expected an exhale. Weightlessness. Peace.

Why didn’t I feel free?
Why was I so scared?

By July, I had rescued a dog. A four-month-old, forty pound Great Pyrenees puppy. She came with the name Reina — Queen — and was promptly nicknamed “The Bear.” She would only eat the good blueberries and had a very serious obsession with sticks. She could quickly be trusted in my house, but wreaked absolute devastation in my yard.

One morning, as my kids were making breakfast, she dug a two foot hole in the dirt beneath a barely rooted honeylocust tree. With mud up to her shoulders, I carried her away, then collapsed into a crying mess on the kitchen floor. I later texted my kids to apologize for the outburst and explain that I was overwhelmed and hurting — and they didn’t need to worry. This wasn’t about them.

I spent the next nine months trying to get out of the dark.

This was an enormous part of my suffering. In the mornings, I would wake up to a dense fog of everything that felt wrong or broken. It brought a surge of anxiety and fear that it would always be this way.

There was grief about the divorce and how my life was being completely rearranged, but mostly there was this strange grief from when I was a kid. I was drowning in the grief of my own needs never being met. Anger, judgment, powerlessness, resignation.

I tried to meet it with self-compassion, but I couldn’t get it to release. Every once in a while, I would get a tiny glimpse of light, but deep in my bones it was gray. Heavy. Stuck. The cycle would repeat.

Why didn’t I feel free?
Why was I so scared?

I wanted so badly not to be here. Not to feel this. Not to be in this place where I couldn’t find levity or joy or light of any kind — for days, or weeks, and then months. I had never experienced this much darkness, and my attempts to fix and solve it made it worse.

I kept trying to figure it out — where the pain was coming from. If I could just understand it, this would all be over. I would be happy again. I could finally move forward. I just needed it to stop.

All of the practices that had supported me in loving and caring for myself as I faced uncertainty had worked — until now.

I would do my sitting. I would seek solace in nature. I would spend time with friends. Travel. But as I sat on a bench in Boston — in between college tours with my daughter — listening to meditations about trusting whatever this is, I knew none of it was helping.

I couldn’t find my footing.

I started to hide so I wouldn’t feel judged for still being here. Some friends fell away, which only intensified the confusion, isolation, and shame.

I was in deep. I couldn’t do this on my own.

In September, I found a therapist who could help me. The only way out of this dark was through. She acknowledged that I was grieving. Could I learn to let the grief come through?

But this wasn’t just grief from the divorce. It felt as though everything I had never processed — across my life —was inside it.

I give myself permission to rest.
It’s OK to have a rainy season.
I’m learning about grief, healing, and joy.
I can take emotional rest.
I don’t always have to figure out my pain.
Sometimes I just need to greet it, welcome it, and let it move through.

Alex Ellie

I fought the pain for a really long time. After a few months, what I started to notice was the difference in the grief that was trying to come through.

The grief about my marriage and my family system changing shape washed over me like a loving sadness. This was grief I wasn’t afraid to feel. I got into the habit of letting it move through as quickly as it came. I would feel temporary relief. Just like the resilience I had experienced before.

But when the heaviness returned, it was coming from something else. This grief was distant. Old.

It was mean.

It would manifest itself in catastrophic, critical voices playing on repeat.

You’re all alone in this. No one is coming to help you.
You made that brave move, and this is as good as it’s going to get.
You won’t ever have enough to support your life.

When I touched something true — I had financially supported our whole family for years, I had a successful business, I had a runway I could rely on — the facts didn’t make a dent. Somehow, my safety and security had been misplaced. Outsourced to anything outside of me: my parents, my marriage, my work. I was more scared than I had ever been and there was no amount in my savings account that could protect me or convince me it would all be OK. That I would be OK.

The ground was disintegrating, and even though I was safe, I would scream as if I had no footing beneath me.

For months and months, I worked with my therapist to learn how to be in relationship with these very young parts of me that felt so overwhelmed, anxious, scared, abandoned, powerless, and sad.

I hated these parts of me.

How was I supposed to love something that was causing me so much emotional pain? They were hurting me so much.

She said to think of it as a set of nested Russian dolls. The outer layers — perfectionist, peacemaker, cynic, fixer, victim — were all acting as protectors of that very interior doll. They had been loud because they were trying to prevent me from feeling the deep wounding of abandonment from my past. And at some point, I would build enough trust with them to gain access — and love on — that very center of me.

I dreaded the work.

I had held so many people in my own work as they traveled through the dark — holding that container as they melted, ugly cried, admitted their worst doubts and fears. But the vulnerability required to let her see me falling apart was excruciating.

I had to learn how to be held.

Outside our sessions, I had to practice being with the parts of me I hated. I had to learn to listen without dismissing what they had to say — that I wasn’t safe, that I was alone, that no one was coming.

Many times, I would come to our sessions convinced this wasn’t working — that we needed to have a conversation about my healing.

But in those early months, the discomfort was purposeful.
If I wanted to feel free — and truly safe — I had to learn how to grieve the hurt and the pain I didn’t realize I had been avoiding: what I wished had been different about my childhood, closing my first company, a marriage and partnership that — in its original form — had expired.

And then one day, I asked:
Will there ever be a time when I don’t feel this way?
When I don’t hate these parts?

She smiled at me and said:
I know you’re gonna get it.

And she was right.

My therapist traveled patiently with me as I moved through the dark and learned to let the discomfort in. To allow the grief and pain to come through.

Nine months of darkness taught me something I didn’t understand before: the fear I was feeling wasn’t coming from the uncertainty of my present life. It was coming from somewhere much older.

It was an invitation to show myself the opposite of what I had experienced in my past. An opportunity to find deep compassion for myself now that I was finally able to be present to my pain.

Where are you turning away from a doorway you must go through?
Sarah Blondin

By the spring of the following year, the weight of all of it met me again. A nearly three-year project with one of my clients was coming to an end. A very normal part of my client lifecycle — something I had moved through countless times — came with a familiar flood of fear.

The uncertainty was here.
And so was the scarcity cycle I’d been repeating my whole life.

Only this time, I could see the pattern more clearly:

The uncertainty comes into focus and I start to feel unsteady.
You’re all alone in this. No one is coming to help you.

Overwhelming fear takes hold as I convince myself the worst possible scenario is inevitable.
You made that brave move, and this is as good as it’s going to get.

Followed by catastrophic stories that I am powerless.
You won’t ever have enough to support your life.

But this time, something was different.

Because I had been practicing moving through the pain — through the grief — I could stay.

I could feel the discomfort in my chest.
The tightness in my shoulders.
The fear in my stomach.
The tears rising in my throat.

I could meet the moment.
I was giving myself a chance.

For most of my life, as soon as uncertainty emerged, I would abandon myself. I would lose trust in myself before I even tried to move through it.

But here’s what I’ve been learning:
It’s not that I can’t face uncertainty.
It’s that I don’t want to feel the pain that comes with it.

And when I was a kid, I had to do that alone. Of course I was scared.

But over this last year, I’ve been building something different.

When I was very much in the painful middle of this undoing, a very wise and wonderful friend told me that trust takes scaffolding.

Trust isn’t a passive practice.
It’s something I build as I stay with the fear, risk being seen, ask for support, and keep moving — even when I don’t know how it will turn out.

I’ve been building that scaffolding in myself.
Rewiring my safety and security back to me.

Not because it’s all up to me, but because I know how to be with myself in the pain and the discomfort now.

There’s a knowing in me when I’m aligned.
A clear, steady signal from that center I fought so hard to reach.
The part of me that finally trusts me enough to be loved.

And I’m learning to follow it. To find it when I’m scared.

So now, the ground still shifts.
The fear still comes.
But I’m not engaging with it in the same way anymore.

I don’t grasp for something to hold.
I don’t try to outrun what I feel.
I stay.

And even when it feels like the sand is disintegrating beneath me, I can meet the moment.