I’ve come to an immense realization today while texting my friend Emily and I’m going to try incredibly hard to articulate it.

I’ve been trying to make peace with myself the last 6 months: that the darkness I feel is not my darkness. That the light I have inside is stronger than the darkness that tries to cover me.

But, I’ve also spent the last 6 months numb to a point. If I’m not around people, if I’m home, if I’m alone it’s almost as if I have no emotions. Like I’m a vampire in Vampire Diaries and I’ve turned the switch off on my emotions and I just feel nothing.

The numbness has made me battle the thing I’ve struggled with and pushed against most of my adult life: that I’m fake. That people think less of me for my inability to push through.

That I’m not strong.

A couple Sundays ago at church I was told about my strength, and I’ve had to listen to it a few times because I just don’t believe it.

I would like to say I know those things aren’t true aren’t actually true. And the things that are: are. But sometimes, it’s hard to believe in things even when you know they aren’t true or are true.

And for as honest as I am in my writing, as honest as I’ve been. As many things as I’ve said that are difficult for me to say, I know that there have been things I haven’t been able to figure out.

I’m realizing today though something I’ve left a bit behind in my grieving: I need to grieve the person that I thought I was going to become at this point in my life as opposed to the person I’ve become because of the circumstances I’ve faced.

On Sunday I cried for her. I cried for all the ways grief and pain have made me motionless. I cried for the ways the burnout changed how I look at life and the ways I look at the profession I feel so confident in.

I cried for the person who was on the brink of coming back home to herself and then had a house dropped on her and she had to start the process again.

I cried for all the things that have broken me and all the ways I feel broken.

And I cried for all the times I couldn’t text or call my mom to tell her any of it.

We don’t just grieve the people that left, or the places that we had to walk away from or even the things that made us feel less than we are.

We have to grieve the person that would have been without all those things.

We have to grieve the person that would be sitting in our place had none of it occurred.

We have to grieve the other path that got left in dust.

We have to grieve the us that would have been.

And I think that I’ve been holding that woman for awhile.

I think yesterday sitting on my couch crying, I stared at her. I looked and wonder who she was now. Where she lived. What her body looked like.

What she was still doing.

I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted to know in my knower that she was strong in all the ways I currently am not.

I want to know she would have been ok, on that other path.

I know I’m ok on this path.

If I wasn’t; not to mince words, I probably just wouldn’t be here anymore.

I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of my houses that have fallen on me over the last 3 years fell in the correct order.

I’m not saying the houses had to happen- like they happened for a reason- but at the end of the day the storm was going to come and the houses were going to drop.

I grieve my mom every day. Sometimes subconsciously, sometimes incredibly consciously.

My grief isn’t always joyous. I just don’t grieve that conversations that could never be, but I grieve the conversations that were, the ones that sliced like a knife.

I grieve the quiet, still moments.

And all along the way I have to grieve the other part of me.

I have to grieve the person who felt like she had a handle on the things that were broken.

And in a way, I have to grieve the person that accepts that they are broken.

It’s weird, but I feel lighter now. Lighter with the knowledge that I’m beginning to realize it isn’t actually me. It’s the ghost of the me that never was.

Almost as if I’m being chased by the thing that I can’t ever be because I have become who I am.

Bottom line:

Grief is a bitch.

It has more twists and turns than we can ever account for.

We don’t just grieve death. We grieve divorce, we grieve what illness takes away. We grieve friendships that took. We grieve jobs that became places we had to walk away from in spite of.

We grieve faith we’ve had to leave behind in pursuit of the truth that heals us.

We grieve the death of things that still follow us around.

I know I’m not going to finish this pour of whiskey and walk out of this bar and be healed.

I know I’m not going to automatically be able to actually fall asleep before 2 am.

(I know I have friends who would yell at me for those statements).

But I do that I am looking in the correct mirror now.

I don’t what you’re grieving.

I don’t know who you’re grieving,

I don’t know what year the person exist in.

I just do know that at some point we have to remember that the paths might never line up again.

And that’s ok.

With love,

Meg