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Week 129: How Grief Transforms You: A Raw, Healing Reflection on Loss, Love, and Coming Home to Yourself

If you’ve ever grieved, or felt like you lost yourself somewhere along the way, I hope this meets you where you are…

If you’ve ever grieved—or felt like you lost yourself somewhere along the way—I hope these words find you. Gently. Honestly. Just as you are.

I didn’t expect the silence to be so loud.

Not just the absence of my daughter Lily’s voice or laughter—but the echo of her presence in everything. Nearly three years have passed since she died, and still, the world feels like it’s whispering her name, quietly and constantly, in ways only I can hear.

Grief, I’ve learned, transforms your relationship with everything: time, your body, and most of all—yourself.

Grief Isn’t Linear, and Healing Isn’t a Checklist

For a while, I told myself I was healing.

I checked the boxes: journaling, meditating, lighting candles, yoga. And yes, these rituals helped—sometimes. But more often, they became tasks I performed to reassure others (and myself): “See? I’m doing okay.”

But I wasn’t. Not really.

I was still holding my breath. Still clenching my jaw. Still avoiding a truth I couldn’t name.

The Moment Everything Shifted

One ordinary day, I pulled a card from my oracle deck. It read:
“Hear and know me.”

I knew instantly who it was.

It wasn’t Lily—not directly. It was the little girl in me—the one I had silenced over the years. The one who had learned to shrink, to be careful, to disappear for safety. The one who forgot how to play, how to rest, how to feel without apologizing.

She had waited patiently. Painfully.

And in that moment, I felt her clearly: Don’t leave me behind again.

The Lessons Lily Left Behind

Lily never did that to herself.

She was vivid and unapologetic. She danced to her own rhythm. She cried when she needed to. She was bold, joyful, sensitive, and gloriously free.

The world labeled her “special needs.”
I called her free.

She didn’t strive to fit in. She simply was.

And in losing her, I saw how much of myself I had abandoned—slowly, silently, over time.

Learning to Mother Myself

In this quiet space grief left behind, I’ve stopped rushing to fix it.

I’ve stopped performing healing.

Instead, I’m learning to meet the version of me that Lily always saw—the spirited, soft, overlooked version I once buried under survival.

I’m learning to listen.
To rest.
To mother myself.

I often wonder: maybe Lily didn’t just come into this world for me to guide her. Maybe she came to guide me.

Living Honestly, Softly, and Slowly

I can’t mother Lily the way I used to. But I can love her by honoring the parts of me she mirrored.

I’m unlearning perfection.
I’m learning softness.
I’m trying—really trying—to be who I was, before the world told me who to be.

Lily showed me that authenticity isn’t something you earn.
It’s something you protect.

So that’s what I’m doing now—softly, bravely, step by step.

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