I’m currently a little scared to look at all the things I’ve swept under the rug.

Sweeping things under the rug, shoving them in a closet, chucking them in a bag to deal with later isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes to survive you just have to do that.

Today in church as I sat during worship this line stuck out and played in a loop for me the rest of the morning.

“Everything you’ve lost; love’s returning”.

Now; I’ve felt really ugly for the last year.

I’ve tried so hard.

I’ve tried to not be the daughter who lost her mom. I’ve struggled almost every day with that. That weight of grief. The absolute utter loneliness I’ve lived in. The feeling of not having done enough or been enough.

I will repeat: I’ve felt so ugly.

I have to pause and say that I’ve had the most amazing humans in my life who have held me and fed me and looked me in the face and told me that my mom would be proud of me. Friends who I hadn’t talked to in years who still check on me frequently.

I have not been alone.

But the deep loneliness has been hard to shake.

And I have just had to survive.

My word this year, the one that spun in my brain at the beginning was create.

I tried to run from it, I tried to find any other word, but that was the one.

And today all I could think is that all I’ve created this year has been a mess.

I’ve fallen behind on projects, I didn’t meet goals I wanted, my room is still a disaster, I’ve barely written.

I haven’t created anything.

I know this year held hope, it held newness, it held camp and rocky and working with people I love.

It held good things.

But all I can think of is how ugly I have felt.

How grief was so messy and tormenting and how I wanted to yell and cry and throw things.

All I can think of is the parts of myself I’ve lost and don’t know if I’ll ever get back.

All I can feel are the rough edges that feel like they are permanent.

All I can identify myself as is a daughter who lost her mom.

All I can see is what I’ve lost.

I don’t know what higher power you believe in if you do. I don’t know if you find God tangible. Right now, I’m sitting in the back corner of this brewery, tucked in a corner, (trying not to cry and not make eye contact with the bartender who has clearly watched me cry) and I just know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is here too (yes, God sits in breweries). And the God I know is just sitting there and being in this space with me. Which is a lot for me who’s been dealing with not knowing how to sit in a space with God. But thankfully this God meets me even in places I don’t think I’m allowed to be in.

I don’t know right now what’s on the other side of all this.

I don’t know if things I’ve lost can be returned.

If the pieces of myself that I dropped to make space for pain can come back.

I don’t know how to tie any of this up in a neat bow.

I think what I’ve realized in the last 40 minutes or so of writing is that I can hold both life and whatever this is.

I can hold feeling ugly and moving forward.

And I can choose to keep speaking up instead of believing the voice in my head that I should be stronger than all this.

Sometimes I wish I could be more poetic or eloquent in my writing. But, then I realize that’s not who I am.

I’m just me, sitting here, peering under the rug and deciding what I actually need to keep.

If you’ve made it this far-if any of this hits you, if you’ve felt ugly, I want you to know I’m here with you.

That’s all.

Let’s keep fucking going.

With all the love,

Meg