How journaling through grief taught me not to trust my pain
When the circumstances of your life throw you to the ground and stomp on you, there is a moment, almost imperceptible, where you choose what to believe about yourself. You can decide, somewhere inside your mind, that you must be a piece of shit, that this sorrow is what you deserve. Or you can refuse that belief. You can simply not trust it.
I did the second thing when I was thirteen; I refused that desperate belief that I was deserving of sorrow. I didn’t know I was doing it. I had no language for it. But now, with the perspective the years have given me, I can see clearly that this small, quiet refusal set me on a course that changed everything.
When I lost my parents at the tender age of 16, everything went upside down. Whatever rituals had once soothed me became obsolete, useless against the size of what had happened. So I sat down, and I started to write. I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of a journaling practice that would carry me through every hard season for the rest of my life.
Those early entries were fire. They fought back through the page like a caged animal. I clawed at my journal with my pen, sadness pouring out of me, anger right behind it. Everything I couldn’t say out loud had somewhere to go. And when I finished for the moment, I would sit back and cry until there was nothing left inside of me.
What I didn’t know then, what I’m only now able to fully see, is that some part of me, so much more brilliant than my mind, was already taking care of me. In the utter desperation of that loss, I was willing to be guided. And I was. Toward the page. Toward journaling as release. Toward a practice that would shape the rest of my life.
These words have been with me lately:
They asked her, “How do you get through tough moments?”
She answered, “Do not trust the way you see yourself when your mind is turbulent, and remember that even pain is temporary. Honor your boundaries, treat yourself gently, let go of perfection, and feel your emotions without letting them control you. You have enough experience to face the storm and evolve from it.”
I read them and thought: yes. This is what the thirteen-year-old in me already knew.
She knew not to trust the version of herself the storm was offering up. She knew, somehow, that the turbulence, the dread, the fury was not the truth.
This month, this entire year really, I’m getting to the bottom of the thoughts and the circumstances and the energies that keep me stuck in tired ways of being. And what I keep returning to is this: the part of you, Sarah, that knows what to do is already there. It always has been. Grief, exhaustion, fear, the loud insistence of a turbulent mind, none of these are the truth of who you are. They are weather moving through.
Your work, and mine, is not to fight the storm. It is to refuse the version of yourself the storm shows you. To honor your boundaries even when it feels easier to abandon them. To treat yourself gently. To let go of the impossible standard. To feel everything, and to keep walking.
You have, as those words so courageously say, enough experience to face this and evolve from it.
L O V E. From my corner by the sea.
