THIRTY THREE

April, May, June, and July have been unusual months for me.  As blogging/social media have been in my life for the past eight years, it was strange to step away from it all; yet, for four months, that is what I have done.

The beginning of April was incredibly difficult, one of the hardest times of my life, because a tragedy struck… and it struck me to my core.  I choose not to go into the details of this tragedy because, though I broadcast much of my existence online, there are some moments that I consciously protect as they are private, personal, and sacred.  The beginning of April held one such moment.

The initial step away from my online home was prompted by the spiraling mental and emotional pain that I was feeling due to the tragedy that had occurred.  I simply couldn’t think of anything to post.  It was like my heart and head had become filled with a thick gray mist and the only things that survived were tears and heartbreak.  Each day passed and the pain didn’t dissipate.  I experienced feelings of hopelessness, loss, exhaustion, and extreme heartache.  Time felt heavy, as if I could feel the seconds tick away and nestle their way onto my shoulders until they piled into an unmanageable heap.  Everything hurt.  Physically and emotionally.  The pain was all encompassing.

Without my conscious involvement (thank you, Time), April turned to May and tiny rays of sunshine began to sneak their way back into my life… almost unnoticed.  I was so accustomed to the state of grief that I had been in that I oftentimes failed to feel the sunshine warm my skin.  May was a month of letting my emotional eyes readjust to the light.  May was my month of learning to see again.  May was when I began to try to reacquaint myself with what it meant to live.  In May, I began to post something on Instagram and immediately stopped.  I was going to share that my blog had hit 6 million page views.  Something to celebrate.  Something I had worked so hard for.  Something that didn’t seem to matter much to me in the month of May.  I put my phone down and decided to take some space.  Now the step away from social media wasn’t out of a lack of concentration or a hopelessness, it was something more intentional.

Grief had led me to a time of sabbatical.

I vowed to focus on what was in front of me.  Not what was on a screen.  Not capturing every beautiful moment to post on my Instagram Story or save to my iPhone’s camera roll.  I wanted to live completely in the moment to gain a foothold on my grief and to re-teach myself to feel.  I wanted to feel and experience life in the most intentional of ways.  I wanted to allow the sunshine to melt away the thick mist of grief and I wanted to come back purer, stronger, and more loving… a kind of Light Pheonix rising from the ashes that can only occur when you have been refined by the fire.

May was a month when I rediscovered my senses.  My connections.  Who + what are important.  It is also the month that I began to radically minimize my life.  The people who I allowed in.  The objects that were allowed to stay in the home that I am blessed to share with my boyfriend.  I wanted to strip myself down to the people, places, and things that felt like light.  Each day I meditated, breathed deeply, and mindfully purged what did not elevate my existence.

June found its way onto the pages of my calendar around the same time that my smile began to reacquaint itself with my lips.  This is when I began to view my grief as something selfishly consuming.  I decided that I had felt pain for long enough… I had to pull myself out of it.  There was an external motivator for this mind shift: my sister was due to have a baby in a month… and I wanted to throw her the baby shower she had always dreamed of.  She is my everything (this Love Letter is proof of it) and I wanted to show her what she meant to me and to so many others.  Kaitland’s Baby Shower was the first day in three months that I had seen any of my friends.  My grief had turned me into a recluse, but emerging from isolation to the warmth of friendship helped nudge me toward July.

In July, I turned thirty three.  Thirty three is one of those birthdays that usually falls somewhere in the in-between.  Too old to be thirty, not nearly old enough to celebrate forty.  Two years shy of thirty-five which is the next justifiably over-the-top-celebrated birthdate to target.  Apparently, my friends didn’t get that memo.  They took the opportunity to surprise me with a birthday event that was so spectacular that it shoved me right back into the flow of living.  The magic that was infused into this gathering of the most incredible women helped the last remnants of the gray mist drift away, it pulled the pieces of weighty time from my shoulders, and it secured the smile on my lips.  I felt the shift.  The rising from the ashes.  The ability to spread my wings… all because these women reminded me that I knew how to fly… and they showed me exactly how to do it.

At my party, my sister’s water broke.  Just as my grief left my body, a new life came earthside.  The next day we welcomed Jaxon, with his big blue eyes, into the world.

I have experienced the colorful, painful, beautiful, wonderful spectrum of human emotions over the past four months.  I can breathe again.

It is time for my Sabbatical to end.  I am back.  I am changed.  I am ready.  Here’s to the next chapter.  Here’s to thirty-three.