I’ve been moving through a season of deep grief.
If I’m honest, I’ve been in it for a while now.
The kind of grief that doesn’t have a neat timeline or singular shape. The kind that rearranges your sense of self. That pulls you down into the undercurrent, in endless waves.
In this season, control has become my friend.
Not because I believe it will save me—but because it knows how to hold me. It gives me something to do with my hands. Something to wrap my brain around when my body feels like its dissolving.
There’s a version of me—maybe a past self, maybe a parallel one—who believed that the spiritual thing to do was to rise above it all. To release. To surrender. To trust that the path is unfolding.
And I do trust that (most hours).
But that trust doesn’t mean I’m not human.
When the ground fell out from under me, I didn’t want to float. I wanted to build something. Even if it wasn’t permanent. Even if it didn’t really matter.
Control became a kindness to myself—a stabilizer, a balm.
So I made the routines. To-do lists. Systems. Plans. I organized what didn’t need to be organized. I made dashboards and timelines and processes—tools that gave my pain a container.
It didn’t solve anything.
But it helped me begin to survive the unsolvable.
Our coping mechanisms are not failures.
They are not things to be shamed or transcended.
We built them to cope. They serve a purpose. There’s wisdom in that.
And yet—there’s this strange tension that arises when you hit a real-life moment that demands actual coping. A moment of rupture, of devastation. A moment where you need something to hold onto.
And suddenly you feel guilty for reaching for the very thing you built to help you through these moments.
Because somewhere along the way, awareness became a measuring stick—we started believing that if we were evolved enough, spiritual enough, self-aware enough, we wouldn’t need anything.
But that’s not how it works.
Sometimes, the most self-loving thing I can do is let the mechanism mechanism.
Let myself reach for what soothes, without also reaching for guilt.
There’s a particular flavor of suffering that comes with being self-aware in crisis.
You watch yourself spiraling. You narrate it in real time. You catch your patterns as they’re unfolding. And instead of giving yourself compassion, you try to coach yourself through it like you’re your own client.
You want to fix it while it’s breaking. Learn the lesson. Have the insight.
Make it make sense.
But grief doesn’t always come with a lesson.
And it certainly doesn’t make sense.
Sometimes, the hardest part is that we start punishing ourselves for not doing better.
For not transcending it. For needing the scaffolding. For still being human.
But what if there’s nothing wrong with that?
What if, instead of trying to elevate, we allowed ourselves to be held—even if the thing holding us is a structure we built with shaking, tear-stained hands?
There’s a Japanese concept called ma—the space between things.
The pause. The quiet. The in-between.
Ma isn’t emptiness. It’s presence.
It’s the silence in a piece of music. The negative space in a painting. The breath before the next word.
It’s what gives everything else shape.
Grief is a long stretch of ma.
A liminal space between what was and what will be.
And it’s, honestly, fucking disorienting to live there—to live here.
Sometimes, control rushes in to try to make the silence feel less threatening.
To give form to what can’t yet be understood.
And maybe that’s okay—for a while.
Maybe that is survival.
But I’m learning that part of healing—if that’s even the right word—is learning to let the space stay spacious.
To stop trying to rush through the pause just because it’s uncomfortable.
To let there be no answer, no fix, no neat next step.
There’s a myth I’ve always loved—the story of Psyche.
A mortal woman tasked with completing the impossible. Sorting seeds. Gathering golden wool. Descending into the underworld. Completing acts no one could reasonably complete.
And she tries. She fails. She despairs.
She gets help. She rests.
She continues.
She is not perfect.
But she is willing.
It reminds me that grief is an impossible task, too.
There is no clean way through it.
Only impossible moment after impossible moment.
Control has been my friend in this season—it’s the thing I reached for when everything else felt like too much.
And I don’t resent it for that. I needed that. I still need it.
But I’m starting to see that there are moments when it can no longer walk with me. Moments when the illusion thins, and no structure, no spreadsheet, no perfectly timed plan can hold what I’m holding.
And, I think, that’s where surrender begins.
Not the soft, feminine, flowing surrender.
But the brutal surrender.
The realization you can’t manage what’s breaking—
And you stop trying to.
The truth is—I don’t always succeed.
Some days, I still grasp for structure. I color-code my chaos. I organize my sorrow.
And that doesn’t make me less spiritual or wise or aware.
It makes me human, trying to get by.
"surviving the unsolveable" will live in my brain forever ♡
“Grief is an impossible task”
Truer words have never been spoken. 🫶🏻