by thegriefreality

Waking UP

I have been writing so many posts lately. Every day, two or three posts ease through my fingertips and into my laptop. I don’t share them with you all. Writing on the blog is deeply personal. I imagine I sit you down, offer you tea, hold your hand and look you in the eyes. Whilst you may read this and throw it away, or never think of it again, I think of it every day. The power of you sitting with me, and giving me space to share my thoughts.

This is my third attempt of writing this particular post. I do not want to ramble, I want to direct you through my mind as I am today. Maybe I will look back on this in months to come and marvel again at how much I have changed.

Recently, I have been shedding my skin through words. I’m dancing and words fall off of my mind like clothes. It is a celebration of change, but a private one. I’ve been keeping a diary of sorts on my laptop, which I didn’t even realize I was doing until it was done.

I feel like I am waking up. My body has been doing things on autopilot since July I think. January saw me start to love myself again, and since then things have changed so very much. Follow me closely, my friend, because I don’t even know how to express this.

Yes, I enjoyed my breaths, and I enjoyed the sky. I enjoyed talking with people and seeing the birds wheel. But now it simply feels different. 

I feel everything I previously simply enjoyed. I ate a £1.50 sticky toffee pudding, and I slid my spoon through that damn pudding as though it was a miracle. Every taste was an explosion. I felt like I was locked in a personal reverence with the pudding gods. I couldn’t even think about it. My mind was perfectly blank, and I just enjoyed every bite. This is the tiniest microcosm of the moments I am experiencing. Clearly, it impacted me so deeply that in this sacred conversation I’ve decided to tell you about it.

It started off in my yoga practice. I would bend and stretch and my body simply had energy locked in my joints. I would be in child’s pose, yet I wanted to spring up and jump around my flat.

I started a new hobby, and I swear, it makes me feel more alive than anything I have done before. I was dancing to music and every song lifted my body like a hymn. I would sing and each lyric felt like I was a champion.

I used to tell Katie that I was resigned to being alone now; I didn’t care for people, I just wanted an easy time. Slowly I became open to the prospect of friends. It took me sometime to realise that is what I wanted. It’s definitely easier now restrictions are easing in the UK. In Eat, Pray, Love, one character says to Liz that he reckons she will realise that one day she has the ability to love the whole world.

People aren’t individuals who might hurt me, they are books with pages that I marvel at and pore over. I feel like I have to be wearing gloves when I pick them up, because each new book I read feels sacred. I feel for the people who don’t feel like this. I also feel joyous in the fact that I have people in my life who treat me like a beautiful, old book as well. As soon as you realise why you think you deserve the type of love you settled for, the game is well and truly changed.

For so long, I was still. Dust settled on me, and it felt like it’s soft coating had turned to stone. 

Violently, painfully, I feel as though the universe shook my foundations and threw me up into the air. I spread my arms and screamed, yet I started to fly. 

I thought I knew about feeling the wind on my face; but I didn’t know how to feel it. I became lost in the woods, and now I’m out I realize that I had been settling, not living.

Nothing I did had any drastic emotion behind it. I felt everything about 40% of what I should be. I put this down to lockdown, but now when I watch films I laugh to them, I even almost cry sometimes. Walking outside takes my breath away, even though I’ve done the same walks over, and over. Although nothing has really changed, I have the world at my fingertips. I have not just the land, but the sky and the ocean to explore. 

And you know what else? I sleep. I swear I am sleeping the deepest sleeps of my life. It must be tiring for my body to be experiencing 60% more than it was for such a long time.

Even my workouts have started to change. My muscles ache as if every time I move a whisper runs through my body saying “you’re alive Evee, you’re so alive.”

I was numb for so long that I have fallen in love with life again. I am healing and realising (I’m almost laughing as I write this) that what I loved so deeply before was the very reason I was numb.

Love is the most vibrant emotion of them all. There I was, a ghost of myself, because of it. When I was numb I would write all the time about how I felt like a poltergeist haunting a house that didn’t want me in it. No one could see it, but it made noise and knocked stuff over. I felt like one of the ghosts in Harry Potter that would float through mouldy food to remember for a moment what it used to taste like. It hurts my heart to think of that now. There was no place for me. I have found my place; not because I wanted it, but because it is my right. Everyone has a place in this world built just for them.

Do not be scared when your foundations are rocked. The universe will always shift, rumble and rock you until you’re where you need to be. Take up space, my beautiful friend.

Thank you for sitting with me. I appreciate you every day.

Evee x

A taste of peace for you. You are doing so well. You are so loved.

If you want to, you can add to this list of Things That Make Life Beautiful that Katie wrote; I love reading people’s comments over there.

31 thoughts on “Waking UP”

  2. I love this post and relate to so much of what you wrote. I think we must have parts of us die in some very deep basic way in order to shed what no longer fits. Leave the old skin behind. And become shiny and vulnerable and quivering with the awakening of a new life. I celebrate your awakening. I’m right beside you.

    Reply

    1. This comment had filled me with joy. Thank you for sharing this with me x I so agree with what you have said. I do feel new again 🙂 I’m with you also my friend x

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  4. Hi, Evee.
    A quote from C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest minds of the last century (and British, btw!) that just did not seem right to share with you or Katie before now seems appropriate today:
    “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
    ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
    You both are prayed over every day when my Lord and I “take a walk around the world.” We “stop in London” for want of anyplace else to “visit’ you. 😉
    yours and His, c.a.

    Reply

    1. Thank you so much for this. I think that love is to be vulnerable and I’m glad for my big over sensitive heart. I think love is sacred and to love or be loved by anyone should mean the world to the person on the receiving end 🤍
      Have a beautiful day, dear friend! X

      Reply

  7. Having volunteered in a hospice for seven years, I have come to describe grief simply as love split into fragments by the refracting lens of loss. It takes time to scrabble around and reassemble the shattered parts into a new form. It is not a lesser love, just different and no less enduring.

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  9. I feel the same lately.. Its like I was in a cocoon for so long but lately a lot of my fears are falling away and i can move my body too. Dancing is so wonderful and loved what you wrote about words just falling off of you.. that’s so so wonderful….. <3

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  11. Thank you for sharing!!.. happiness can only be found within ourselves and the only way to be happy is being who we are!… “Confidence is knowing who you are and not changing it a bit because of someone’s version of reality is not your reality.” (Shannon L. Alder )… 🙂

    Until we meet again..
    May flowers always line your path
    and sunshine light your way,
    May songbirds serenade your
    every step along the way,
    May a rainbow run beside you
    in a sky that’s always blue,
    And may happiness fill your heart
    each day your whole life through.
    (Irish Saying)

    Reply

  13. You have a beautiful way of expressing yourself. Now I want mindfully experience pudding and treat each blog I read as the sacred sharing that it is 🙂

    When I emerged from the cocoon of grief numbness, I felt intense gratitude. Gratitude for what I learned from the relationship that couldn’t’ exist any more because the person had died. I was also surprised that sometimes that grief cocoon would suck me back in when I thought I was done with it.

    Thank you for a lovely blog.

    Reply

    1. Thank YOU for a lovely comment. Would I be able to share this: “When I emerged from the cocoon of grief numbness, I felt intense gratitude. Gratitude for what I learned from the relationship that couldn’t’ exist any more because the person had died. I was also surprised that sometimes that grief cocoon would suck me back in when I thought I was done with it.” As part of our As Told By You page?
      No pressure to, I just think you have expressed grief so elegantly 🤍
      Feel free to chat any time!
      Evee x

      Reply

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