Introduction

When I published my Epilogue post, a wise sage asked me “what does grief look like for you?” This person could surely write her own book on grief. I met her shortly after her husband died in a tragic rock climbing accident. She was a bit older than me, and I was fresh out of college, so I didn’t really know what to say or how to act. And the one time I did say something, I pointed out a neat-looking thing on her mantle and said “that’s cool!” (It was the urn. The whole body didn’t fit inside. There was another one in the corner of the room with the rest of the body.) So for the most part, I quietly watched her move through the grief process…for years, really. I thought she did an excellent job. So when she asked me what does grief look like, I took this question really seriously. What is this that I’m experiencing? Is it grief? What is grief?

Well, here you go, my dear friend from afar. 

I am telling this story not looking for pity or validation or anything like that. My hope is that it can help others who are going through similar things find peace within themselves. It seems as though I’m going through a spiritual awakening, and the loss and grief that I experienced last year was surely a major catalyst. This process can feel very intense at times, and I wanted to shed light on what that feels like as I’m moving through it. First, I’ll give you some backstory. 

Backstory

There was so much motion to 2023 — the shock of the divorce, figuring out where to live, moving, getting laid off and getting another job, helping the kids, selling the house, recollecting parts of my lost identity with urgency, and just making it all happen. I suppose I was in fight or flight mode, and I love a good high-pressure situation. In a way, the journey felt engaging and exciting to me. Sort of like my twin hospital journey. Cortisol! I’m used to that! It’s always the comedown from such a journey where I struggle.  

As I made my way through the fall and the holidays, the reality of this new life hit me hard. My nervous system was in shock, and it needed to land. I also started a new job in October, and I was struggling to adjust. Life felt pretty good when I wasn’t working — I had time and energy to take care of myself and to show up for my kids. I felt like I was building community and working on the stuff I wanted to be working on—making movement and art more central pieces of my life. With the addition of work, I was having a hard time keeping the balance. I couldn’t find my flow. I knew I had to cut back and slow down, somehow. 

I expected the holidays to be emotionally difficult. Thanksgiving with my kids but no family. Christmas without my kids or family (or at least without family as I once knew it to be). There were definitely highs and lows during that period, but it wasn’t as hard as I expected it to be. I was also in a new relationship, which helped pull me forward through all this stuff. 

It was actually January that felt the hardest. I had the kids for the last week of winter break. A whole week with just them, no backup. But it worked, and we had a good time. Swimming at the indoor pool at the apartment complex. Going to University of Washington, Bothell to watch the crows fly home (Every evening just before sunset, hundreds of crows fly over my apartment complex. We love watching the crows, observing how their patterns change throughout the year and depending on the weather. They all live at University of Washington, Bothell). Going to the snow park at Snoqualmie Pass. Going to Red Robin to play in the revolving door. Just hanging out at home. It was fulfilling but exhausting. 

I rolled straight from that back into work. I had a deadline that I had to hit that required threading the needle just right. From there, I rolled straight into an intense shuffle dance convention weekend in Los Angeles. A weekend of nonstop dancing, surrounded by Instagram influencers, staying in a house full of people who I didn’t know that well. I was having a hard time staying grounded. I felt lost in my brain, like I couldn’t connect with people, like there was a void between me and everyone else. By the end of the first day of the convention, I felt like I was settling in and having fun with the dancing. But there was an issue with my return flight due to the grounded Boeing planes, so I had to choose: do I come home a day early and miss half the shuffle convention, or do I come home a day late? Given that I didn’t want to be late for my parenting time or work and given how “on the edge” I was feeling, it was an easy choice to come home early. I thought coming home late would really throw me over the edge.

I was at LAX, and a bout of grief hit me. There is something about airport travel that triggers me. Where am I going home to? What is home? I think this as I’m making my way through the Pre-Check line. It’s all so different than last year. I’m not going home to my kids, or my house, or my dog (he’s dead), or my family. There are a lot of good things emerging in my new life, and of course I can see that a lot of things in my old life weren’t working, but it’s all so very new and sudden, and, in some ways, it’s sad. I let myself acknowledge this. Of course it is sad. 

So I came home and rested. But then the kids had a few snow days. So again, juggling work and kids. More kid than I expected. Then Sam had a week of half days, which I had forgotten about. Again, more kid than I expected. I had also just gotten Sam’s neuropsych evaluation results, and I was working with the school guidance team on figuring out what sort of supports he needs. 

Underneath all this was an undercurrent of neurodivergent unmasking and my fears associated with it. Sam’s results. It’s real. The awareness that I lost a lot of things last year when I started to unmask and show my true self. I lost a job and a marriage. I was fearing what will happen in this new job if I show up more as myself. I am different than I used to be (in a good way). Is that okay? Will I be accepted for who I am now? Can I do this profession if I can’t mask like I used to? I was feeling a lot of pressure to deliver on the tactical parts of my job, which meant I didn’t have as much time to rehearse and craft how I say things like I used to. Did I say the right thing? Did I overstep? Does it matter as much in this new job? (I know a lot of this fear is mostly in my head at this point.) I was also worried for the kids. How can I get them the accommodations they need but also keep them safe from this cruel world?

Throughout this time, I was noticing more turbulence in my emotional state. On edge. Agitated. Dropping more f-bombs. I guess you could call them meltdowns. I’d have days of high highs. Vast, open, free. Excited about this life and what’s to come. And then days of low lows. Like my connection to my soul and the universe would completely shut off. Once I got through the lows, it was like another layer released, and I felt so happy to have gotten through that wave, so much more connected to my soul than ever before. Back to the high. I suppose I also have a bit of an object permanence thing when it comes to my emotions. Once they pass, it’s like someone pointed the Men In Black pen at me and wiped out that whole memory. I can’t tap into what that felt like unless I’m back in it. This leave me wondering what the hell just happened?

I was also struggling with access to my ADHD meds during this time. My new health insurance is not as good as my old insurance, so I had to switch to generic. The first pharmacy didn’t have it in stock and wouldn’t for months. The next one had it in stock but didn’t have a contract with my insurance. I was out of meds, which was surely contributing to my variable emotional state (I need my dopamine, bro!), and my ability to shop around at different pharmacies was nonexistent. Fuck it, I’ll just pay out of pocket. (Note: I have since resolved this issue via online pharmacy)

Over the years, I have learned that it takes me a long time to process my thoughts, and I need to do this processing alone. I guess this is partly a neurodivergent thing. Information comes in at a very detailed, granular level, so you have to sift through it all to find the pattern, to decide what matters. This means that I spend a LOT of time alone. I need this time alone. And I love it (once I let go of the societal dissonance of choosing to be alone on a Friday night, for example). But the flip-side is that I don’t have a lot of nearby, day-to-day community. This feels okay on most days, but it gets harder on the kid days when I can’t catch up with my thoughts or catch enough of a breath to keep myself regulated. The kid demands just keep on piling up. I get overwhelmed, and it can quickly become extremely overwhelming because I don’t know who to ask for help or how to ask or what kind of help I need. Also, the kids visibly benefit from the time with just the four of us, so I try to allow that as much as I can. I’m a living paradox—I need space (which I sometimes struggle to sit with), and I need community (which I struggle to consistently engage with). I know this is a larger societal problem. Everyone is working too hard and too isolated in their nuclear families to be part of a village. I think a lot about how to fix this, but more on that another time.

Okay, back to the way my brain works. The granular information collecting also means that I will get these waves of extreme clarity. I connect the dots from details I’ve collected across the course of months or even years, and I suddenly know exactly what I need to do. This clarity is sort of new for me. I am still learning how to point this clarity laser in the right direction and how to not point it directly in peoples eyes. I used to be such a dysregulated, frozen mess that I didn’t know up from down, or what I cared about. I just rolled with whatever everyone else was doing. I suppose this is also why I need a lot of alone time these days—to understand what my needs even are. Again, it’s all new. 

So, the stacking kept staking. I kept trying to build in space and time to breathe, to catch up with my thoughts, to ground myself, but it wasn’t enough. I was still constantly on the edge, and I was falling off the edge (emotionally) on the regular. 

That new relationship had also gotten heavier. We both unexpectedly found ourselves on pretty intense parts of our healing journeys. I was spending a lot of energy trying to make sense of what was going on. Are these things I’m struggling with just things my nervous system has to adapt to, or is there an issue here that needs to be addressed? What is the nature of this relationship dynamic? I reached a clarity moment that our dynamic was trending in an unhealthy direction. I voiced this concern (poorly cuz I’m a new laser beam operator), and I think we both realized that this isn’t the right time for us. We broke up. I felt some sadness about this, but mostly, I felt clarity and relief. It’s just the right thing for now. 

That was all backstory. Now I’m going to tell you about Monday, two days before Valentine’s Day. I spent the weekend resting and regulating. A little bit of mountain biking, a little bit of running, a little bit of art and work and planning exciting future things, a lot of alone time, and a LOT of laying down. I was feeling good coming into Monday, all things considered. 

Monday

Work has gotten busy. A little contentious. I’m worried about a meeting that went in an unexpected direction. Did I finesse the message enough? Was that the right thing to cover? Will I get in trouble for my autism? I’m actively trying to stay grounded and not internalize too much.

Annalee is sick. Normally I wouldn’t see her until after preschool, but today she gets dropped off in the morning. I juggle her and meetings all day. It’s not bad, though. She’s mellow, and I’m happy to see her. She reminds me so much of little me. Silly, sweet, sensitive, and aware. Eventually, it’s time to pick up Sam from school. Of course, he’s not in aftercare because the one on-site is full, and the one off site doesn’t have bus space. So, I’m aftercare this year. We walk up the hill behind my apartment building and onto a trail that goes to Sam’s school. Sam really loves walking home, so we have to walk. But Annalee is sick and tired, so she can’t walk the whole way. I carry her most of the way to school. It’s about half a mile, and it takes me a bit longer than when I do it on my own because she is heavy. We arrive at school just moments after Sam comes out the door. He’s about to cry, worried that I forgot him. But I reassure him, “it’s okay, Sam! We are here.” We walk back home, down the hill. Again, I carry Annalee most of the way. 

We decide to go get Margo early because we need to get Valentine’s Day cards for the upcoming party at preschool (LOL, I used to get upset that the old preschool didn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. They’re taking away all the fun! But now I wish we could just do away with the whole thing.) The kids are fresh off of a daddy weekend. They are so excited about a party that’s coming up that daddy is throwing. It’s hard for me to hear about this and be excited for the kids. It takes nearly all I have to not react negatively, but I don’t. We go to Fred Meyer. There is Valentine’s Day stuff everywhere. Hearts. Flowers. Cards. It’s intense. And I’m basically going through a double breakup — the marriage and this new thing. We can’t find the Valentine’s card packs. I ask someone for help. We walk around the store again, following the Fred Meyer employee who is looking for the packs of cards. This store is big, so we walk in a big circle. Finally she says they don’t have any more Valentine’s card packs. The girls get very upset, and they both refuse to walk. Sam really wants to leave, and he’s about to start crying. I’m about to start crying, too. We’re at an impasse. Two who want to leave, immediately, and two who won’t walk. There aren’t any shopping carts nearby to throw them in. We are all a mess. This is my life now. How am I supposed to do this forever? Deep breath. Keep it together. Why can’t you just walk?

I see a sticker display within view. “We can make our own valentines!” I point out the stickers. The girls accept this proposal and start walking. We buy the Paw Patrol stickers and make it home. At home, Margo freaks out about making her valentines. She just wants to make two big ones—one for her and one for her friend. I try to tell her that this isn’t how it’s supposed to work. “You have to make them for all the kids, and usually they are smaller than a whole sheet of paper.” She won’t have it. “Okay, fine. Make whatever you want.” We can sort this out later, I think to myself (we didn’t ever sort it out, and we didn’t bring any valentines this year). Sam says his leg hurts and his eyes feel weird. This usually happens when he’s overwhelmed and overstimulated. I tell him to rest and take it easy, but he’s still worried about his leg. The girls miss daddy. “Why aren’t mommy and daddy together?” is a common trope in our home. What am I supposed to say to that? 

Throughout all of this, I’m having a hard time keeping it together. I keep holding back tears. I feel overwhelmed. Maybe I should check myself into a mental institution so I can get a break. So I don’t have to do all of this myself. I start dreaming a bit about my inpatient hospital days, how nice it was to just be there and not have to take care of stuff. Hmm.. that’s a dark thought. What’s that about? I notice that my body is quite stressed and frenetic, and my thoughts are spiraling too. I take a propranolol because sometimes that’s the only way to get through these hard kid days, when the historical baggage stacks with the current-state “this is hard” reality.  It helps take the edge off until the kids settle down and I can sort this out. 

I focus on deescalation. Harm reduction, if you will. These kids are all in rough shape today. You never know what a transition day is gonna be like, especially the Monday ones. I let them eat pizza on the couch. Annalee is sick, so she goes to be early. Oh man, it is a lot easier with just two kids. What is it about the third that changes the dynamic, no matter who the third is? Jesus, this life I got dealt is hard. This didn’t all have to be this way. Why?

After dinner, we go into my room (Sam sleeps in my room too, on the pullout chair). I don’t have a TV, but I have a projector, and sometimes we like to cuddle in bed and watch shows together. Today, it’s Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Finally, I’m laying down, and I can sort through what’s going on with me. I focus on breathing. My thoughts get even darker. Maybe it would be better if I died. 

Imagine that the soundtrack goes “SCREECH” and stops.

Woah there, tiger. That was very dark. What’s that about? 

I have learned to not trust my thoughts, so I let this thought pass by, like water in a river. After all, it’s just a thought. There is no desire for action tied to it. 

That’s probably my ego being dramatic as it dies. This reminds me to go into my body, away from my thoughts.

What do I feel in my body right now? I intuitively start moving my head around to work a knot out of my neck. I push on my trapezius muscle while turning my head. Crack crack crunch. I feel more connective tissue releasing, I see an airy, spiderweb-like thing floating through my vision, then some fluid pooling in my eye. I’m getting closer to releasing the tension in my jaw, but it’s stubborn and it requires working all sorts of things around my jaw, like my neck, ears, face and shoulders. I’ve been working on it for months. Not by choice, but by intuition. 

I think about how I feel bad for some things I’ve said recently. I could have handled them better. I give myself grace and remind myself that I’m just a baby, learning how to navigate this world as the new me, learning how to not just voice my needs but understand what they even are. It’s going to take some time to get it right, and even though this feels shitty, it’s actually an improvement that you are finding your voice. Now you can learn to craft it more carefully and patiently. 

Let go. And feel.

Let go.

Let it go.

Let
It
Go

As I do this work of moving my body around, intuitively working out the knots, reminding myself to let go, and observing what thoughts come up, I ask myself What might I think of next? This helps stop thoughts in their tracks, and it clears my mind to allow me to return to the present moment.

Okay, yeah, there’s a lot of stress in my body. Even with the propranolol taking it down a notch. I feel frenetic energy pulsating through my legs, back..honestly, everywhere. 

I breathe again. Deeply. I shake out my arms. I notice my thoughts are starting to lighten.

What do I need right now? I wonder. The answer is love, comfort and support. Unconditionally.  So I give it to myself. I love you. You are brilliant and beautiful and a gift to this earth. I see you, and you’ve got this.

I think about how a lot of these things I lost were actually quite conditional. Is that even loss? Or is that gain? I may feel alone and overwhelmed in this moment, but I’m actually less lonely than I’ve ever been. I’m free from transactional, co-dependent love, the loneliest kind of all! (No shade meant by this, it’s just a thought)

I think about work, how I feel sort of alone on this journey I’m on. (But I’ve done this process enough to know that I’m not actually alone, this is just a thought/feeling.) So I ask myself If I were my boss, what would I say to me? I give myself an answer of validation and support. 

This is all I needed to crack the demon free. (Also, obviously, none of this was actually about my boss, who is awesome. Thoughts are so funny that way. They usually fixate on the wrong things at first)

Now the thoughts get softer. Brighter. More forward-looking. 

I come back to the surface, as if I was just sucked into a dark underworld and now I am on solid ground again. I notice that Sam and Margo are playing together nicely. I read Margo a book and sing her the two songs I always sing (You Are My Sunshine, which includes 4 verses of made up lyrics about Pandy, Puppy, Piggy Pillow and Monkey, and The Circle Game). We connect, one-on-one because Annalee is already asleep. Then I put Sam to bed. We have a good chat about funny things. We laugh about the time we were making paper, and Margo turned on the blender with the lid off. What a mess that made!

I remember that I am okay. These waves are passing. This new life is beautiful. And all this loss and grief and change is helping to push me forward, into the new me for good.

Retrospective

Okay, so back to the question — what is this that I’m experiencing? Some might call it grief. Some might call it autistic meltdown or burnout. It’s probably all those things. More so, I actually think it’s a spiritual awakening and the thrashing of my ego as I put it to rest and adjust to this new way of things. I imagine that my body is a conduit to the universe, and that pipeline needs to be open and free in order to receive the signals of the universe. To feel the interconnectedness of things. To let go. To trust. The baggage we stack up in life creates this web of blockage in that pipeline. I imagine it’s like a black, sticky spiderweb, but thicker, coarser, and more rigid. I suppose it’s the ego in both physical and cognitive form. As days go by and things happen, things trigger me that snag on this old web, but this isn’t something to fear. It’s actually an invitation to observe what the snag is, process it, and let it go. As I do this work of going into my body, separating my thoughts from my physical sensations, and essentially re-parenting myself, the web is releasing. Cognitively, my thoughts are becoming lighter, more expansive, more abundant, and more aware of the interconnectedness of things. More aware of the natural rhythm of things. And more accepting of those rhythms as they happen around me and to me. And physically, the knots in my muscles are releasing, the connective tissue in my whole body is loosening, my health is improving, and my body feels more open and expansive and alive. In this moment, I wonder if some of my current struggles with ADHD and autism symptoms will go away as I continue doing this work of releasing the old and building a life that’s more aligned with my inner purpose. I want to be clear that I don’t feel attached to these identities. I see them as layers of awareness in helping me understand myself and work through this process.

Grief and hardship are the catalysts for this sort of spiritual transformation. It’s as if the stacking of things is intentional and rhythmic. Things stack up so hard, so high, in such an overwhelming way that I almost get sucked under. It feels like my signal to the universe gets cut off for periods of time. Radio silence. The ego starts to take hold again, the thoughts darken. Fear starts to lead the way. Darker and darker. I grasp at things. Plans get canceled. Attempts at new plans get canceled too. Even though I can’t hear it, the universe is still speaking to me — it’s forcing me to be still. The ebb. I recollect myself, doing the work I described above. Then WHOOSH, the wave gushes through the pipeline, dislodging another piece of the egoic web. I’m back into presence and acceptance. I’m back online with the universe, now more open and free than ever. New plans get made. People reach out to me. The energy returns. This process is always cyclical. Contract. Expand. Contract a little more. Expand a little more. Repeat. 

This process makes me feel like I’m becoming more unhinged sometimes. But actually, I think it means I’m closer to the root. Closer to a clear pipeline. Closer to true acceptance and letting go. As I get closer, the ebbs and flows get more intense, but I think this just means I’m working on some of my deepest, darkest stuff. The stuff that took years to build up the skills to face. It makes sense that it almost knocks me over. Also, when you are surrounded by an ego-driven, unconscious society, it’s really hard to continuously choose a different way. It’s easy to fall back in. And lately, I think I have been afraid of letting go because I was afraid of what that would mean. If I let go of my fear, will I say the wrong thing? Will I lose what I have? Will I blow up my whole life again? Will I make people angry who I have to keep working with? Hah, but that’s fear-based thinking. That’s the ego talking again. 

Something shifted in me the other day. I realized that carrying around this fear isn’t actually going to help anything anymore. It’s exhausting. It burning away my precious energy, and it disrupts my peace and my presence. It causes me to fall back into ego as well, which only adds to any conflict. I either feel stuck in the past — why did this happen to me? Or I feel worried about the future — can I sustain this life forever? That line of thinking only makes the present worse. And even if I hold that fear within myself and have the mental fortitude to refrain from projecting that onto someone else, it’s still just incredibly exhausting internally. 

So I decided that I’m going to intentionally choose peace and presence. Peace doesn’t mean that I’m a pushover, that I avoid conflict, or that I don’t voice my needs. It means that I will listen for signals of peace (or lack thereof) in my body, I’ll try do what’s necessary to get to peace without expectation of anything in return, and I will choose to let go of trying to control the outcome. I need to accept where I am and trust that it will work out. Because it always does and it always has. It just is. And I don’t actually mind the is. I love the is. So what if I lose my job? So what if I lose my apartment and all my money? I just lost a whole bunch of things, and I’m better for it. As more things happen, I’ll figure it out. Day by day. That’s all there is. When I think back on all the stuff that has happened in my life, I believe it was all a true gift. The divorce. The trauma. The hospital stay. The endurance sports. The surprise extra child. The people I’ve met. The internal load I put on myself. All of it had a purpose — to create such a load on me that it forced me to find a way through.

As I do this work, I feel more waves of clarity and awareness and acceptance and letting go. I feel true peace and an absence of thought more often than ever. This frees me to lead with joy and love, without attachment. This is when I feel the beautiful harmony of things, a dance of interconnectedness. This is when life opens back up, and the beauty and the glimmers return. This is when you see that grief, loss, and death are an essential part of that harmony. We wouldn’t be what we are without them. It’s just part of the rhythm of things. And it’s beautiful if we allow ourselves to let go and accept it.