drowning in hopeful sorrow

my grief is not a problem to be solved nor is my joy a goal to be achieved

“what if this isn’t the end but a beginning?”

I’ve been navigating the reality of another beginning.

It doesn’t feel like a beginning but rather a bitter end filled with grief and rage. For a second there, I thought I had to process the totality of how I feel before I could move forward, before I could feel alive again. But that’s not how emotions work and if I wait, I’ll be waiting for the rest of my life.

Although isn’t that the paradox? The beginning is also the end and the end is also the beginning. They are two sides of the same coin but I ended up only looking at the side filled with deep sorrow. Equating my worth to the end, holding onto the pain despite the knowledge, the need to let it all go.

The weight of this shift is felt everyday, impatient with my pain because I’m tired. Getting upset with my need to recover, having to remind myself that I was homeless merely five months ago. I’ve been yearning for relief, for freedom, for the pain to have been worth it.

But its already worth it because I’m worth it. Yet this understanding does not equate to embodiment. That can only be done in action.

But I’m tired, so tired.

I’ve been making progress with the little, small steps that seem inconsequential. I’m realizing that I’ve been so focused on what to do, that I’ve forgotten to ask questions, the pressure of knowing restricting the freedom of curiosity. Nothing is the wrong step when it comes to your journey, it’s all cause and effect. My desire is the compass so why am I ignoring the directions?

My pain isn’t a destination, merely a state reflecting recent experiences. I don’t have to resolve my sorrow, I don’t have to chase my joy.

I get to exist in the in-between because that’s where I am.

Emotional awareness is a bridge not an obstacle. How I feel is in contradiction with what I want. This tension has been demanding an answer to a question I have yet to ask.

Are you ready to accept what is and reclaim who you are, who you decide to be?

That’s what I’ve been waiting for. A decision. An internal decision, a reclamation to be exact. A reminder of my power and to accept accountability for who I decide to be and for what I want out of my life. In the midst of my pain, I was cycling through the victim - survivor axis. In order to move on, I must make a decision.

Am I a victim of circumstance or am I a survivor of hardship?

It’s messy, it’s all so messy and in my attempt to clean it up, I was trying to erase my journey. Erase my pain, erase my story. Trying to act like it didn’t matter, like it shouldn’t. I have to keep going and in my head, that meant that I couldn’t be sad and rebuild my life, that I couldn’t carry this grief and create at the same time.

But what if I can’t separate myself from the grief? What if the grief is why I linger in joy? What if the grief is why I savor each moment? What if grief is why I build, why I try, why I get back up again and again? What if the grief is a mirror for the depth of my capacity to love?

Grief is a release. It is love through the lense of death. It is the processing of loss, of endings. Release is a sort of destruction. What was before is no longer, what is has shifted. Now becomes unfamiliar while the past becomes distant. The details can impact the depth of grief but the transition is still felt. Who I am is changing because what I’m experiencing is changing.

This transitional space is a strange place to inhabit. It’s easy to get lost in, to forget why I enjoy living, to feel overwhelmed by my own existence. It’s easy to feel weighed down by grief so deep, I can’t help but drown in repeated memories that echo the pain that almost broke me.

Alchemy is the transition, the in-between, the transformation. I had to create distance and not let the pain be so personal. To let it exist and to continue to move on in relation to it. I am renegotiating my relationship to pain and not seeing it as persecution but excavation. Emotions are signals, invitations, possibilities for alchemy. An internal threshold of perspective, an opportunity to expand, pivot, grow.

In what way is up to me. This is when reflection becomes embodiment. This is when I accept the mystery that is my existence, that is my continued experience. Transition is movement and acceptance is presence. My grief will always exist and so will my capacity for joy.

I’ve always been hopeful, even when the odds are stacked in a way that I can’t see beyond them. Everything has felt bleak in my moment of vulnerability, in my moment of transmutation. I suppose that’s the feeling that is attached to destroying one thing and creating another, the ending and the beginning. That destruction isn’t a disappearance, isn’t erasure but a rearranging, a restructure of elements to form something new.

But what is new, when energy cannot be created nor destroyed? Only shifting like water to fit a new container of being? I cannot separate this ending with who I am after. It birthed this version of me through a passage of reckoning, through a chrysalis of grief.

The ending is the beginning and the beginning is the ending, the energy simply transforming.

Grief and hope can coexist because it literally does.

Maybe grief is hope, that this pain isn’t the end, merely a necessary remembrance. Maybe hope is grief, that this is the end and I must believe in another beginning to persevere.

The transition is process and process is arrival.

I suppose I have arrived. Where? That is for me to experience. There is hope. There is joy. There is grief.

And then there’s me.

m.c.