You did everything right.

You showed up.

You loved hard.

You were the anchor when everyone else was falling apart

Then your world shattered, and the people you expected to show up for you disappeared.

Not all at once.

Not with a blowout. Silence. A text that never got answered.

Support that became “too complicated.” People who swore nothing had changed while offering zero presence when it mattered.

Nobody died, and yet something did.

That is betrayal grief. And almost nobody talks about it.

I’m Not Just Sad. I Feel Betrayed.

If you’ve ever uttered those words, even in your head, know this. It’s not self-pity. It is not a dramatization.

Most mainstream grief models treat loss like a straight line from heartbreak to acceptance. But they miss the core process of betrayal.

If you build your life on the belief that loyalty protects you and showing up for others keeps you safe, you’re putting a lot of faith in one particular worldview.

When that reality collapses, you aren’t just grieving a person or a relationship. You are grieving the discovery that your safety was an illusion. The psychological weight of this pain isn’t just about what you lost. It’s tied directly to the depth of the trust that was shattered.

It deserves to be named. And it deserves to be grieved.

Betrayal grief differ from grief we’re taught

The trust that breaks alongside the loss itself

Ordinary loss breaks your heart. Betrayal grief rewires your entire understanding of the world.

Standard loss involves pain, disorientation, and a profound sense of absence. Betrayal adds another layer of hurt on top of the original pain.

You didn’t just lose someone or something.

Realizing that your foundational beliefs about safety, fairness, and predictability were wrong, it creates internal chaos. It breeds feelings that don't fit into neat recovery model:

• The sharp edge of fury

• The constant disorientation

• The endless loop of “I did everything right, so how is this my life?”

Standard framework, like the classic stages of grief,treat anger as a temporary phase you pass through on the road to acceptance.

But those models don’t have a language for the woman who built her marriage with intention, her career through sacrifice, and her relationships with relentless devotion, only to witness them to collapse.

That anger isn’t a detour from your healing. It isn’t a sign that you are “stuck.”

It is grief with an injustice attached.

The Second Wound

I know this because I lived it.

When I lost my mother, my father, and my sister within fourteen months, I expected the grief to be unbearable. Indeed, it was. The sheer weight of that loss almost crushed me.

But what I never saw coming was the second wound hiding beneath the first.

While I was burying my family, the people I thought would hold me up disappeared. No major blow-ups occurred. Nobody said a harsh word to my face. They bailed without a fuss.

The message, which was ignored for days, eventually went unanswered for weeks. A friend I had known for years quietly blocked me on social media. I spent decades investing in people, only for them to ghost me out of the blue.

My sorrow extended beyond the loss of those three individuals. I was grieving the living who had left.

Back then, there were no words to describe that type of abandonment. I only had standard grief to name it. And standard grief was nowhere near big enough to cover the betrayal.

Why the body freezes up to protect itself.

Unresolved betrayal grief doesn’t disappear with time.

If you can’t trust someone, your brain sees it as a safety issue, not just heartbreak. To survive, your body learns to prepare. It gets stuck scanning every room, every conversation, and every relationship for the next hidden drop.

For high-achieving, devoted women, this heightened awareness rarely looks like breaking down. Instead, it looks like:

• Overworking: Staying so busy that the quiet can’t catch up to you.

• Emotional Numbness: Feeling detached from life, living through a foggy screen.

• Autopilot Mode: Carrying out every responsibility perfectly while feeling completely hollow inside.

This self-protective oneself is understandable. It is your system doing exactly what it was designed to do to keep you safe. But it comes at a cost. The survival instincts that protected you through the storm are now preventing you from embracing life fully.

You cannot think or isolate your way out of a body that feels unsafe.

Healing betrayal grief requires a space where your nervous system can finally relax. A space built on safe connections, clear direction, and a community that truly understands the weight of what you are carrying.

How You Reclaim Your Life After Betrayal

The shift from “Why did this happen to me?” to “I decide what happens next” does not happen through sheer willpower. You cannot force yourself to feel better.

It happens through a steady, intentional process.

This is the philosophy at the core of The Phoenix Legacy Method: loss is not the end of your story. It can become the launchpad for a life built with clearer eyes, firmer boundaries, and real intention.

Reclaiming yourself after betrayal grief never involves replacing what was lost, nor does it mean pretending it didn’t tear you apart.

It’s about stepping into your power and being in control of your path.

You Were Built to Rise From This

Feeling betrayed by life is one of the most isolating forms of pain because it not only hurts but also makes you question your reality.

It makes the ground beneath your feet feel unstable. And because it doesn't fit into neat categories of "ordinary grief," finding people who truly understand can feel almost impossible.

Healing is not about “bouncing back.” It is not about getting over it, forgiving on a timeline, or pretending it didn’t cost you something precious.

It’s about rising differently: clearer, steadier, and far more deliberate than you were before.

The women who walk through this level of loss often become the most clear-eyed creators of their own lives. Not because the pain stopped mattering, but because they refused to let betrayal have the last word.

You Don’t Have to Walk the Ash Alone

If you are reading this and feeling the heavy, quiet weight of betrayal grief, please hear this: you are not broken, and you do not have to figure this out in isolation.

The hardest part of this specific loss is trying to explain it to people who haven’t lived it. That is exactly why we built this space.

When you subscribe to this Substack, you aren’t just getting another article in your inbox. You are stepping into a private, compassionate community of women who understand the exact language of your pain—and who are actively learning how to rise from it.

Inside our private group, you will find:

• A Safe Harbor: A confidential, judgment-free space to share your story, voice your anger, and feel deeply understood.

• Monthly Deep Dives & Guidance: Gentle, structured prompts rooted in The Phoenix Legacy Method to help your nervous system unbrace at your own pace.

• Real Connection: A circle of clear-eyed, courageous women who are moving from survival into intentional life-building together.

You have carried this by yourself for long enough.

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Join us inside. Your seat at the table is waiting, exactly as you are.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

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Where in my body does this betrayal live? Describe the sensations. Where it's heavy, where it's gone.

What is the quiet belief you did not realize you were carrying, until it was broken?"

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I went back to work two weeks after my mother’s funeral.

I answered every email. Made all the right decisions. Told everyone I was doing okay.

And at 11 PM I reorganized my kitchen. I researched grief stages on my phone when I couldn’t sleep.

From the outside I looked like a woman who was handling it.

From the inside, I felt like I was standing at the edge of something enormous and refusing to look down.

This is emotional buffering.

Not the streaming kind. Something far more personal.

It is the act of postponing grief so it does not interrupt your life. The relentless productivity. The midnight cleaning. Staying just functional enough to avoid falling apart.

The loss is acknowledged. We know someone is gone, or a marriage ended, or a career collapsed. But the full weight of it never quite lands.It feels like survival.

It is survival. For a while.

But the cost accumulates faster than most women realize.

In my work with women navigating multiple losses, the pattern is always the same. It often appears months or even years after the original loss.

They pushed through. They held it together. They kept going.

Now something feels permanently off and they cannot name it.

• The sleep that never quite restores.

• The relationships that feel just slightly out of reach.

• The version of themselves if they keep waiting to return to.

What they are describing is the long term consequence of emotional buffering. And it goes far deeper than delayed sadness.

What emotional buffering really means

Emotional buffering is not the same as not feeling grief. It is a pattern of preventing grief from rising far enough to be processed.

The grief is there. It has always been there.

• Waiting behind the activity

• The organizing

• The overachieving

• The midnight cleaning

It just never quite breaks through.

Think of it this way. Healthy grief lets a feeling rise, move through you, and pass.

Buffered grief keeps it in a permanent holding pattern. Never arriving. Never releasing.

You are not avoiding the loss. You are redirecting it every time it gets close to the surface.

And the longer that pattern runs, the harder it becomes to find the way back to yourself.

The Real Cost of Staying in Buffer Mode

When grief is buffered it does not disappear. It accumulates. Avoiding emotions for too long adds up, piling new losses on top of old ones you haven’t dealt with, making the emotional weight heavier than the first event.

What starts as grief over one loss becomes tangled with earlier, unresolved grief from years past. It becomes a kind of rebuffering, where each unprocessed wave returns with added weight.

It’s not just the pain, you know. There’s also dealing with who you were before, mourning the future you imagined, and figuring out how to make this whole thing part of who you are now.

You cannot reinvent yourself around a loss you have never fully acknowledged. The buffer does not protect that process. It prevents it.

The Professional Cost High-Achievers Don't Expect

For women in leadership or entrepreneurship, buffered grief surfaces first as a professional problem rather than an emotional one.

It manifests as:

• Diminished focus

• Decision fatigue

• A flatness where creative energy once thrive

• Loss of innate direction

They are still doing the work, but the passion and clarity behind it have gone quiet.

For many high-achieving women, this professional erosion, rather than grief itself, becomes the tipping point that brings them to seek support. The gap between who they present as and how they actually feel becomes too wide to maintain and the performance can no longer bridge it.

The Woman from the Beginning Deserves More Than "Fine"

She is still functioning. Still competent. Still the person everyone depends on.

And now, perhaps, she also understands that “fine” and “healed” are not the same thing.

The real cost of emotional buffering is not simply delayed pain. It is delayed becoming. Every month spent redirecting grief is a month spent not integrating it, not rebuilding identity around it, not using it as the launchpad it can genuinely become.

Buffering your emotions after loss was never weakness. It was the best available tool when no better option felt accessible. That deserves acknowledgment, not judgment. Welcome your buffer moments.

The women who stop buffering are not the ones who finally broke down. They are the ones who found a space safe enough to enter the discomfort without the fear of falling apart.

A Structured Path from Buffering to Becoming

I built something for exactly this moment.

Not for when you are ready. Not for when life slows down. For right now, while you are still driving and still holding it together and still quietly wondering why something feels permanently off.

It is called the 48-Hour Emotional Audit.

A gentle self-guided audit you do on your own time.

• No therapy waitlist.

• No timeline.

• No one is telling you that you should be over this by now.

Just 48 hours to uncover what you have been filling the space with and what is waiting underneath.

You do not have to dive into the deep end. You just have to stop stepping around it. This shows you how, in three simple phases.

This is not therapy, and it isn’t a long-term commitment. It is one small, honest step for $27. Less than your next takeout order.

Get the 48-Hour Emotional Audit Here!

Become a paid subscriber this summer and go deeper with our Firebird Mourning Risers community.

Right now, we are running a summer retreat special. You can get a full year for $50. This special rate is only available from June through September.

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Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

👇🏾 Now I want to hear from you. 👇🏾

Most of us think we are avoiding sadness. We are actually avoiding this question: if I stop holding it together, who am I?

Drop your answer below.

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Let it start the conversation they do not know how to begin.

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The month after I buried my father, I was alone in a two-family home that used to hold a family.

No one upstairs. No one downstairs. Just me and every room that remembered who we used to be.

The phone had been ringing for weeks. Then it stopped.

So I found some brown liquor and drank away my sorrows. Woke up the next morning with a hangover and did it all over again.

Same house.

Same silence.

Same groundhog day.

Nobody told me that was coming. Nobody told me the hardest part of grief isn’t the funeral.

It is the month after. It is the moment everyone assumes you are okay.

You are not okay. You are just alone.

Why Everyone Stopped Asking

What I did not know then, and what nobody told me, is that this has a name.

Grief researchers call it the support gap. Studies show that people stop checking on you somewhere between two and six weeks after a loss.

Right when the numbness wears off. Right when the reality of who is gone finally lands.

People do not pull away because they stop caring. They pull away because they do not know how to sit with grief for that long. So they switch to the only thing that feels safe.

• They ask about your future.

• They ask about your plans.

• They ask how you are moving forward.

Without realizing it, you learn to play along. You answer those questions because they are the only ones anyone is asking.

That is how grief goes underground. Not because you healed. Because you had no choice but to carry it alone.

I came to call this the Loyalty Loop, love with nowhere to go.

What Pretending to Be Strong Costs You

And here is what that cost me.

My body started keeping score before I did. Stage 1 breast cancer. I was so busy pretending to be strong that I did not notice what was happening inside me.

My friendships quietly disappeared. People were not being cruel. They were just scared of my grief.

It reminded them of losses they had not faced yet. So they stayed away, and I let them.

I stopped trying to make new friends. I was too lost in what was left of my family to have anything to give.

So I showed up to the world in armor. Warrior mindset. Hard edges. Keep moving, keep working, keep avoiding the thing that was going to catch up with me anyway.

That is what the Loyalty Loop does when it goes unaddressed. It doesn’t stay still. It finds a way out.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

A Simple Way to Carry Both Truths

I built something I wish I’d had in that two-family house with no one upstairs and no one downstairs.

It’s called the 48-Hour Emotional Audit.

It is not a retreat. It is not therapy. It does not ask you to pause your life or perform your healing for anyone.

It is a self-guided audit you move through on your own time, over two days, to name and release the exact grief you have been carrying in secret.

Because here is what I know about you:

• You are heartbroken, and you are still showing up for work.

• You are carrying heavy pain, and you are still driving the kids.

• You have been doing both at the same time for longer than anyone around you realizes.

This was built for exactly that.

You do not need to fall apart to grieve properly. You just need 48 hours and a structure that respects both truths at once.

$27. Instant download. Start when you are ready.

Get Your Emotional Audit Now

This is not therapy. It is not a 3-month container. It is one small, honest step, and it costs less than your next takeout order.

The Phoenix Reclaim Session

This is a one-hour, private session with just you and me. We look at everything you have been carrying and map out your next right step together.

I only hold four of these sessions each month. When those spots are filled, they are gone until the next month.

Book Your Phoenix Support Session

Not ready for a one-on-one session yet?

Come sit at the table, anyway.

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👇🏾Leave a comment.👇🏾

👉🏾Have you ever found yourself acting strong or playing it cool just to keep other people comfortable with your grief?

👉🏾Did your support fade after week two or three? What did that silence feel like for you?

👉🏾If you feel safe sharing, drop a comment below. You do not have to carry it alone here.

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Let it start the conversation they do not know how to begin.

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It is an ordinary Tuesday.

You crushed the meeting.

You answered the emails.

You showed up for everyone who needed you.

And on the way home, without planning to, you reached for your phone to call her.

Just for a second. It is a matter of habit.

And at that point, the memories returned in full force.

This is what compound grief looks like. Not a breakdown. Not a dramatic moment anyone around you can see.

Trying to reach a number that no longer rings. A conversation with nowhere left to go.

A Tuesday that suddenly feels heavy with significance.

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When Grief Brings Its Whole Family

Most people understand grief as one loss.

One person.

One absence.

One before and after.

But that is not what many of us are carrying.

When my mother died, I lost more than her. I lost the one person I called before I called anyone else.

The woman who held my secrets without asking for explanations. The conversation that had nowhere to go after she was gone.

Then the friendships started disappearing too. One by one. Quietly. Without announcement.

And I realized something nobody prepares you for.

Compound grief does not just take people. It takes the places where you were fully known.

The mother who knew your secrets.

The friends who remember you from before. The version of yourself that only existed in their presence.

Compound grief does not come alone. It brings its whole family.

Still Showing Up. Still Falling Apart.

Here is what it looks like from the outside.

You are still functioning.

Still showing up.

You’re managing everything behind the scenes while handling a heavier load than anyone realizes.

You’re crushing it so hard, nobody’s even asking if you’re okay.

My own actions confirm this. For longer than I want to admit.

• I staged a recovery instead of saying I needed help.

• I showed up as if everything was fine, when deep down I was drowning in losses that did not even have names yet.

• I started building new things, filling every quiet moment with something and anything to outrun the pain of what I had lost.

• I had no idea what to name it. Not until the pandemic stopped everything and the silence finally caught up with me.

I was not grieving too much. I was grieving too many.

Some of what you are grieving never had a funeral.

The friendships that quietly disappeared.

The identity that existed only in her presence.

The version of yourself that died alongside the people you lost.

Nobody sends flowers for those.

No casseroles arrived at the door.

No one takes time off work.

No one checks on you three months later, asking how you are holding up.

The places where you once felt secure have disappeared without a trace.

In the midst of it all, on a typical Tuesday, you’ll grab your phone to call a person who has passed away.

I still miss my mother’s phone calls.

I wish heaven had a payphone. Only one time. To have a heartfelt conversation about life without you. But deep in my heart, I know she’s with me, guiding me when I feel lost.

If you’ve experienced that feeling of reaching, forgetting, and then remembering, you understand compound grief.

You have been living it.

It had remained unnamed until this very moment.

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The name changes something.

It stops you from asking why you are not over it yet.

It replaces shame with understanding.

It allows you to grieve everything you lost, not only the people but also the places where you were fully known.

You are not broken.

You are not weak.

You are not grieving wrong.

You are grieving too many. And that is a distinct thing.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Now I want to hear from you.

Who do you still reach for even for just a second before you remember? Drop their name below if you want to honor them.

A few sentences. Drop them in the comments. This is a safe space.

Leave a comment

If this found you at the right moment:

I created the 48-Hour Emotional Audit for exactly for you.

Not a therapy workbook. Not a 47-step healing plan.

A 48-hour guided framework to help you name your emotional buffering, identify your compound grief backlog, and take your first honest step forward without losing your edge.

$27. Instant download. Start when you are ready.

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If you are ready to go deeper:

The Phoenix Reclaim Session is one hour, only us. We take everything you have been carrying and map the next right step together.

I hold four per month. When they are gone, they are gone.

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My father died in February 2015.

By June, Father’s Day arrived. Four months. That was all the grace period the world gave me before it demanded that I celebrate a bond I was mourning.

I remember trying. At the mall restaurant, I ordered a meal, thinking I could force myself into a normal routine.

I took one bite.

Around me, daughters were laughing with their fathers. Easy. Loud. Alive!

My throat tightened. I was not hungry anymore.

I left the full plate on the table, walked to my car, and cried until the windows fogged.

I was still carrying the heavy, unhealed weight of losing my mother, and now I had to learn how to survive losing a father, too.

For years, Father’s Day was a manufactured holiday I avoided.

But this year is different.

This Sunday, I am walking straight into the cemetery. On the day itself.

I’ll be carrying marigolds, sunflowers, and lilies. I’ll have balloons that say Happy Father’s Day.

He will never see them physically, of course. But I like to think he will notice the tender, rebuilt heart of the daughter bringing them, anyway.

My whole family is there. Together. In one place.

For the first time, I am not running to my car to hide from the world’s celebration. I am walking toward something instead of away from it.

The Wisdom He Gave Me Before I Knew I Would Need It

My father gave me three pieces of wisdom that still carry out my life.

The first came after 9/11 cut off my career as a travel agent. He didn’t offer a hollow “I’m so sorry,” or a defeated “This is unfair.” He looked at me and said, “Move to the next.”

That closed door redirected me into event planning. A career I loved and would never have discovered otherwise.

Years later, when profound grief ended that career too, I heard his voice echoing through the silence: Move to the next.

The second was a lesson in self-worth disguised as a lesson about money. He’d always tell me, “Don’t let anyone take advantage of you.” I did not fully grasp what he meant back then. I understand it now, every single time I spot someone trying to overstep my boundaries.

But his third line that still completely steadies me.

Trust yourself. People who have not walked in your shoes do not require a response from you. They are just insecure.

He gave me these three anchors long before he died, unaware that I would eventually need every single one of them to survive losing him.

Sitting in the Empty Space

After my father died, I learned a brutal truth about the systems we trust.

My mother had already passed away, and my father lived just one year without her before following her into the quiet.

Decades earlier, he had signed up for a pension. A promise that his labor would protect his family.

But under the system’s rules, only a spouse or a dependent child qualifies to receive what is left behind.

I was over forty, working and building my life. By the law’s definition, I was independent. By the system’s definition, I didn’t qualify.

Just like that, the wealth my father had spent forty years sweating for, sacrificing for, and trading his life for vanished.

It went right back into the belly of a machine that had no place for a grieving adult daughter.

I spent the next three weeks surrounded by family, but the isolation only deepened. No one asked how I was holding up. No one acknowledged the giant, father-shaped hole in my world.

The only person who seemed eager to speak to me was the estate lawyer, whose call sliced right through the silence of my grief.

I came home, made the appointment, and drove to his office.

When I pushed open the heavy door, I didn’t have a partner, a sibling, or a counselor by my side. I walked into that room completely alone.

I sat in the chair across from his desk, the air between us quiet and still. This was my father’s attorney, a man who had guided dozens of families through their darkest hours.

He had seen it all, handled the worst of it, and understood the mechanics of loss better than most.

Yet, in that moment, he stripped away the rigid professionalism of a lawyer. He looked at me not as a file to be processed, but with deep, genuine human concern.

He gently asked why I had vanished so quickly after the funeral, worried that it had taken a few weeks for us to finally connect. He knew the legal timelines, but he was far more worried about my spirit.

Sitting there, enveloped by his kindness, the reality of my new world fully settled in.

Even with his immense empathy. Even with his decades of experience, he could not carry this for me.

I realized then that this next chapter was mine alone to navigate.

Protect myself

Protect my father’s legacy.

Nobody was going to do that for me.

Forward this to someone who is still performing okay for everyone watching. They need this more than they will admit.

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Forty Years of Life in a Filing Cabinet

In that office, out of sheer necessity, I became a pretend lawyer for a season.

Suddenly, words like probate and executor duties consumed my days. I had to learn the stark difference between wealth and income. This is the practical money knowledge you won’t learn in class, and it’s the worst time to get a handle on it when you’re deep in mourning.

It took months of grueling, painstaking work. Some days, it felt like I was studying for the bar exam in a language I didn’t speak.

It is a quiet shock to realize that a man’s forty-year collection of life, labor, and assets can take months of exhausting paperwork to unpack.

But as I sorted through the files, my father’s three anchors steadied me.

I did not let anyone take advantage of me.

I trusted myself.

And when the door closed, I moved to the next.

Now, whenever someone asks me about estate planning, I offer them the wisdom I paid for in tears.

A well-prepared estate isn’t the one with the most assets.

It is the one designed to spare the people you love the most frustration.

Rebuilding Despite What Was Loss

I used to see Father’s Day as a manufactured milestone that I just tried to survive.

Now it is something I walk toward. Not because the grief is gone. I learned how to build with what was left.

My father gave me the instruction, “Move to the next.”

He gave me, “Do not let anyone take advantage of you.”

He gave me a season alone in a lawyer’s office that taught me how to protect what matters.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Now I want to hear from you.

What did your father give you, and what are you building with it?

A few sentences. Drop them in the comments. This is a safe place to name it.

If you are ready to work with me, join the community or join my email newsletter. Here are your options.

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Mondays began at 5:00 AM.

Cold air. Empty streets. A gym that was just waking up. I chose this hour on purpose. Only a handful of hardcore regulars were there, moving in silence.

My family used to go to this gym. People here knew my mother. My sister. My father. Within fourteen brutal months, all three of them were gone.

Every time I walked through those doors, I passed my mother’s favorite StairMaster. Still there. Still waiting.

For someone who was never coming back. The gym wasn’t just a place to sweat. It was a battlefield of memories.

To survive, I crafted a protective suit of iron. I kept my head down. I ignored the pitying looks.

I tuned out the world and focused on the sharp clatter of weight plates. No talking. No crying. Just action. If I lifted heavy enough and stayed disciplined enough, the grief could not catch me.

The shield gets heavy when you never take it off.

The Year Grief Finally Caught Me

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Then, 2020 arrived.

The gym doors were locked. The alarm clock went silent. The structure that had held my shattered world together dissolved into soft, blurred mornings where time had no meaning.

Several years of constructed armor. Dismantled in a single week.

With the world locked down, the grief I had been outrunning finally caught up. It walked right through the door, as if it had been waiting on the porch the whole time.

That is when the battleground shifted to the kitchen.

Without the gym floor to support me, I looked for a different kind of anchor. I found it in the familiar tastes of my favorite comfort foods. McDonald’s French fries. An iced caramel latte.

Crispy. Salty. Sweet. Cold.

In those moments of quiet isolation, those flavors offered a brief escape from a sadness that felt too massive to look at directly. Savoring each bite was a temporary shield.

It wasn’t a failure of willpower. It was a soul trying to survive an emotional earthquake

THE TRUTH NOBODY NAMES

But here is what I know now that I did not know then.

I was not hungry for food.

I was hungry for a witness.

Someone to sit across from me and say, “I see you. You do not have to carry this alone tonight.”

But everyone who could have been that person was either gone or had moved on without me.

By 2020, my grief had long expired in everyone else’s eyes.

A few years had passed since my last loss.

Nobody called.

Nobody checked in.

Nobody asked how I was doing with the losses that had never stopped living in my body.

The world had moved on.

I had not.

And when the pandemic locked everything down, I was not just isolated from the world. I was finally alone with a grief that had been waiting in silence for a witness.

So I cried into my fries.

I ate, and I wept, and I ate some more. Not because I was weak. Because I was human. And I was alone with a grief that the world had stopped making room for.

It’s not a willpower problem.

It’s a problem of loneliness, but wearing a hunger problem’s clothes.

But a container of fries can only hold so much sorrow.

Weeks bled into months. Some mornings my body refused to get unstuck. Getting out of bed felt like lifting something that had no business being that heavy.

The sadness was not a feeling anymore. It was a physical weight. Sitting on my chest before I even opened my eyes.

I used to laugh easily. Somewhere between the losses and the lockdown, I forgot how. Every morning I fought my body. Every midnight I filled myself with comfort food.

The salt and the sugar gave me a twenty-minute boundary from my pain, but twenty minutes of numbness always wore off. The grief was still there, sitting on the edge of my bed, waiting for me.

By midnight, I was in the kitchen.

Fridge open. Fries waiting. Eating. Weeping. Starting over tomorrow.

I knew I couldn’t keep fighting my appetite when the real war was in my heart.

I needed a shift. I just didn’t know what it looked like.

THE TURNING POINT

The news was relentless. The world outside my window appeared to be falling to pieces. So I went looking for something that understood what I was living.

I found a podcast.

And one simple instruction stopped me cold. Go outside. Walk. Let the fresh air be your gym.

So, I went to Gantry Plaza. Just me, the East River, and whatever was waiting to come out.

No trainer.

No weight plates.

No structure to hide behind. Just walking.

And something shifted.

With no one to talk to, my walks became my thinking space. Every uphill path became a physical reminder. Grief is hard. But each step leads you forward.

My daily walk became my new lifeline. Moving therapy without the bill. And slowly the fries stopped being my only witness.

I learned how to fulfill an extraordinary life with courage and grace.

No program. No prescription.

Just me. The East River. The open sky.

And the quiet discovery that when total disruption arrives — and it will arrive — I can still find my way through it.

The gym may close. The flights may cancel. The people may leave.

But nature does not lock its doors.

And neither does the woman who finally learned to walk through her own grief instead of around it.

Forward this to someone who is still performing okay for everyone watching. They need this more than they will admit.

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The Invitation

For a few years, I thought my problem was a lack of discipline. I thought I needed to try harder, eat cleaner, and force my body into submission. But I was wrong. The armor couldn’t save me, and the food couldn’t fix me.

If you recognize that 24-hour cycle — the fighting and the feeding and the starting over tomorrow — this is my invitation to you.

I will not give you a meal plan.

I will not tell you to drink more water or swap the fries for a salad.

You have heard that advice. It did not touch what you were actually hungry for.

Because this was never about the food. It was about the grief that had no witness. The loneliness that had no name.

The version of yourself that got lost somewhere between the funeral and the silence and the friends who stopped showing up.

She is still in there.

Hungry. Waiting. Ready.

Ready to stop keeping the grief private and start MOURNING out loud.

Because mourning is not weakness.

Mourning is grief finally finding its witness

And the Phoenix Reclaim Session is where you finally sit down at the right table.

Not the kitchen table at midnight.

The table where someone actually sees you.

One hour. Just you and me. We look at what you have been feeding and figure out what you are starving for.

$197. Seven spots are open in June.

👉🏾Book your seat here.

You have been hungry long enough.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Now I want to hear from you.

What was your armor after loss?

The gym, the work, the busyness, the food?

What kept you performing so the grief could not catch you?

A few sentences. Drop them in the comments. This is a safe place to name it.

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I was sitting at home when the anger hit me.

Not sadness. Not longing.

Anger.

My 50th birthday was approaching and for the first time in nine years I had no one to call.

No mother. No sister. No father.

Just the particular silence that grief leaves behind when it takes everyone at once.

My friends had disappeared too. Not all at once. Grief does not work that cleanly. They just slowly stopped showing up. There is an unwritten rule that says grieving people should be over it by now. They followed it. I didn’t get the memo.

I was supposed to celebrate fifty years of being alive.

Instead I was sitting at home wondering who celebrates alone.

Then I saw her.

A radiant woman dancing alone on a sun-drenched beach. Her solitude looked powerful.

I did not feel sorry for her. I felt something else entirely.

If that is what alone looks like, I’ll have what she’s having.

Something cracked open in me.

What I had not said yet is that I almost did not make it to fifty.

A breast cancer scare and reconstructive surgery in February 2022 had left me in bed, healing, and staring at the ceiling wondering what I was going to do with whatever time I had left.

I started a new notebook. I called new realities-reinvention.

St. Lucia was the first entry.

December 2022. Ten months after surgery. My first solo trip in nine years.

What Grief Travel Actually Is

I found it from my bed.

Still healing from reconstructive surgery, laptop open, searching for wellness retreats that felt like something other than what everyone told me grief was supposed to look like.

I did not know grief travel was a thing yet. I just knew I needed to surrender. To finally acknowledge what I had been carrying without anyone telling me which stage I was supposed to be in.

So I searched differently than I had ever searched for a trip before.

Not which resort has the best pool. Not which flight is cheapest.

Which place will hold me while I fall apart and help me find my way back?

I found St. Lucia.

French Creole influence. Thrilling hikes to peaceful forest reserves. Nature was so breathtaking it demanded I show up fully present just to take it in.

It was scary to book alone. But what did I have to lose?

My friends had stopped showing up. My body had been through surgery. My grief had no witnesses.

But my feet still worked.

So I kept in constant motion.

Not because I was running from grief.

Because travel was the only language I had left when everyone else went silent.

Horseback riding. Volcanic mud pools. Excursions that required my body to show up even when my heart was not sure it wanted to.

And then there was Sulphur Springs Park in Soufrière. The world’s only drive-in volcano. You soak in warm dark mineral pools, apply purifying mud to your skin, let it dry, then rinse in the adjacent hot springs.

The tour guide looked at me and said “go in that mud and you will come out looking ten years younger.”

I went in that mud.

And not a single person on that island believed I was fifty years old.

Neither did I. For the first time in a long time.

This was not a wellness retreat.

I did not know it then. But what I was doing had a name.

Grief travel is not somewhere you go to escape your life.

It is somewhere you go to finally meet yourself in it.

I met myself. Have you ever taken a trip alone after loss? Would you?

The woman who was grieving. The woman who was still here.

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My Parents Gave Me a Love of Travel.

I Did Not Know It Would Lead Me Back to My Grief.

My parents were wanderers.

Adventure travel was in my roots before it was ever in my resume.

They showed me the world was worth exploring. That travel was not just transportation. It was how our family expressed being alive.

When I became a travel agent it felt natural. It was in my blood.

Then 9/11 happened and the travel industry changed overnight.

My career shifted to corporate event planner. But the love of travel my parents planted in me never did.

What I did not realize until much later was that after I lost them I used that same love of travel to outrun the one journey they could not take with me.

And when grief arrived and took everyone I loved within fourteen months, I kept in constant motion.

Before grief rewrote me

I was a lover of life.

Parents who gave me unconditional love. A corporate career. A male partnership that felt like the future. All the things society told me to collect to prove I was doing life correctly.

I had titles.

Daughter. Employee. Partner.

Then grief arrived and took them one by one.

And I discovered something nobody warns you about.

When the people who defined your roles disappear, the roles disappear with them.

I was no longer somebody’s daughter.

My sister and I were never close but losing her still took something I didn’t know I was holding onto.

The friendships that survived the first loss did not survive the next two.

And I was left standing in the ruins of an identity I had spent forty years building.

I was fifty years old. Single. Child free. No family unit left to return to.

Just me. A journal. My sister’s journal tucked beside mine in my suitcase.

And a round trip ticket to St. Lucia with absolutely no guarantee I would come back the same person.

I did not.

Horseback Riding on My Birthday

I had never ridden a horse on a beach before.

We cut through narrow hillside trails, the island rising and falling beneath us. Then the path opened.

Wide. Empty. The sand and turquoise water as far as I could see.

And for two hours I was not a grieving woman. I was not a cancer survivor. I was not someone whose family had disappeared.

I was a woman on a horse in St. Lucia on her 50th birthday.

Fully alive. Fully present. Completely alone and completely free.

When I returned to my hotel room that evening I was not prepared for what was waiting.

A yellow streamer decorated my door. A Happy Birthday banner. Inside, champagne chilled beside a cupcake with a handwritten note from the resort staff.

I stood frozen.

In my solitude. On my birthday. Three thousand miles from everyone who had ever celebrated me.

I sat down and opened my journal.

And wrote until I ran out of words.

I realized then that the most profound souvenir from St. Lucia was not a trinket or even a memory.

It was permission.

Permission to celebrate my birthday again. To feel joy without guilt.

To carry grief differently than anyone expected me to.

Every single time I came home to something I had been missing.

Not answers. Not closure.

Just myself.

And here is what I have learned after years of guiding women through this work.

You do not need to go far to go deep.

You just need to be willing to arrive.

Your Travel Agent Is Ready. Your Grief Journey Starts Here.

I spent years booking trips for other people.

Finding the perfect destination. The right resort. The itinerary that would make them feel alive.

Now I want to book one for you.

Not to St. Lucia. Not to Morocco. Not anywhere that requires a boarding pass or a bag you have to pack.

I want to book you on the most important solo trip of your life.

Here is your itinerary:

Your destination is yourself.

Your departure date is now.

Your luggage is everything you have been carrying since the funeral.

And your travel agent is right here. The woman who made this journey herself and came back changed.

Ready to help you arrange every detail.

I am booking four spots this month for the Phoenix Reclaim Session.

One hour. Just you and me. Consider it your first class upgrade to the journey you have been postponing.

👉🏾Book your seat here.

Your solo trip is waiting.

I will help you find your way home.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Now I want to hear from you.

Who am I now that they are gone? What do I actually want? What was I before grief rewrote me?

A few sentences. Drop them in the comments. This is a safe place to name it.

Leave a comment

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It’s 3am. Again.

You are not falling apart. You are not a diagnosis. Despite popular opinion, you are not an overthinker.

You are exhausted. For three years, your mind has been running the same loops, replaying conversations that can never be finished and asking unanswerable questions.

Why did this happen?

What could I have done differently?

Why does my mind refuse to let this go?

Everyone had a name for it. Your doctor called it rumination. Your friends called it overthinking. The self-help books handed you breathing exercises and told you to journal it out.

Nobody called it what it was.

A mind still looking for the people it has lost.

That is not a flaw. That is not a diagnosis.

Grief does that to a woman who loved someone completely and was handed a casserole and told to be strong. Her mind kept searching for the people who were gone whenever she had a quiet moment.

What they called it

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes when someone who loves you misunderstands you.

He had known me for thirty years. When my family died, he sent flowers to the funeral home. Beautiful arrangements that arrived before I did. He never came himself.

Months later, he opened his door wide enough for me to bring my grief inside. I thought finally. Someone who will understand.

He listened. Then he leaned forward and said:

‘You need to stop living in the past. You should be over this by now.’

The flowers made more sense after that.

Because I was not living in the past. I was looking for the people I had lost in the only place they still existed.

My memory.

My conversations.

My 3am loops.

Stopping would not have been healing. Stopping would have meant letting go of the last place they had lived.

And I was not ready for that.

Neither are you. And that is not a flaw. That is love that has nowhere left to go.

What it really was

Nobody hands you a moment of clarity in grief. It does not arrive like a lightning bolt or a breakthrough session on a therapist’s couch.

I fought the loops every way I knew how. Work. Workouts. Netflix. Dark chocolate almonds at midnight. I performed the version of recovered that everyone around me needed to see.

None of it worked.

So I went outside.

Mine came slowly. On a path. One step at a time.

On those walks, something shifted. Not all at once. The process was gradual. Grief moves that way when you stop fighting it.

I started noticing that the loops always circled the same people. The same voices. The same unfinished conversations. And somewhere between the trees and the fresh air and the sound of my own footsteps, I understood something nobody had told me:

My mind was not broken. It was looking for them in the only place they still existed.

Every loop was not a rumination. My mind did the only thing it knew how to do. It faced an absence it could not accept and kept looking anyway.

The overthinking was not the problem. There was silent grief hidden underneath.

That is what nobody names. Not the loops. Not the rumination.

The grief that never got to be seen, spoken or held ran quietly underneath everything. It kept the mind searching long after the world had forgotten its mourners.

The loop nobody names

Here is what I eventually understood: nobody was coming to name this for me.

Not the doctor with his clinical terminology. Not the friend who sent flowers but never came. Not the self-help books with their breathing exercises and journal prompts. Not the grief frameworks with their neat little stages.

Nobody had a name for what happens to a high-achieving woman who loses a parent and a sibling and keeps functioning on the outside while her mind runs grief loops on the inside for three years.

Research shows that unaddressed overthinking affects sleep, resilience, and coping. What the research does not say is why the loop starts in the first place. It describes the symptoms. It never names the grief underneath them.

So I had to name it myself.

I call it The Loyalty Loop. The mental noise that is not a diagnosis and not a personality flaw and not a character weakness. It is sorrow that was denied its rightful space. It is love that has lost its address. It is a mind doing the most loyal thing it knows how to do. Keep searching for the people it cannot find.

Does any of this sound familiar? If The Loyalty Loop has been running in the background of your life — come find me. The discovery call is free and the conversation might be the one that finally names what you have been carrying.

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Here is what nobody tells you about carrying this alone: the isolation is not just emotional. It’s cognitive. Your mind is working overtime processing a loss that the world stopped acknowledging months ago.

You are exhausted not because something is wrong with you, but because you are doing the invisible labor of grieving without a witness.

That labor deserves a name.

That labor deserves to be seen.

And if nobody else was going to see it. I decided I would.

What finally lifted it

I did not find healing in a therapist’s office. I did not find it in a breakthrough moment or a perfectly timed revelation.

I found it outside.

Not on any particular trail. Not following any specific program.

Just outside. Fresh air. Movement. One foot in front of the other until my body remembered something my mind had forgotten.

That stillness was safe.

For three years my mind had been running ‘The Loyalty Loop’ in every quiet moment.

Searching.

Replaying.

Circling.

I had filled every silence with noise because silence meant feeling. And feeling meant admitting what I was not ready to admit.

But outside, something was different. The silence was not empty. It was full of something my apartment walls could not offer.

Space. Air. The sound of the world continuing, demanding nothing from me.

I did not have to perform out there. I did not have to be okay or recovered or strong.

I could just walk. It was not all at once. It was not a single afternoon. Slowly The Loyalty Loop began to quiet. Walk by walk.

Not because the grief was gone. Because the grief finally had somewhere peaceful to land.

That is what three years of searching had been looking for.

Not an answer.

Not a reason.

Just a place to rest.

If you are still running The Loyalty Loop, if your mind is still searching at 3am, I want you to know this: you do not need a breakthrough. You do not need a framework or a five-step plan.

Sometimes you just need to go outside.

Let the silence hold what you have been carrying alone.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here is my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Now I want to hear from you.

What would change if you stopped calling it overthinking and started calling it loyalty?

Where does your Loyalty Loop take you?

A few sentences. Drop them in the comments. This is a safe place to name it.

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If this found you today

If you recognize The Loyalty Loop during quiet moments, 3am or ordinary Tuesday afternoons, I want you to know you do not have to keep carrying this alone.

Sometimes the first step is just a conversation.

If you are curious but not quite ready; start with a free discovery call. No pressure. No agenda.

Just two fabulous women talking honestly about what you have been carrying and where you want to go.

If you are ready to go deeper: the Phoenix Support & Reclaim Session is one conversation where we name the loop, find the trigger and give you a real tool to begin breaking it.

Either way — you deserve to be witnessed. Not next year. Not when you feel more ready. Now.

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Someone lied to you about grief. Not maliciously. I bet they were just trying to help.

They handed you the five stages like a roadmap and sent you on your way.

1. Denial.

2. Anger.

3. Bargaining.

4. Depression.

5. Acceptance.

Five stops on a journey with a clear destination.

What nobody told you is that bargaining is not a stage you pass through. It is a room you return to. At 3am. On a Tuesday. Three years later. When the what-ifs find you anyway.

What if I had called more?

What if I had been there?

What if I had said it out loud?

And then. The quietest, most devastating one of all: What if I am never actually over this?

That last one. That is the one that keeps you up. It’s not because of damage. But because you are afraid you might be.

The lie we were handed.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief in 1969. She developed them while working with terminally ill patients. People facing their own death, not the death of someone they loved. The model wasn’t built for what you are carrying.

But somewhere along the way, it became the universal script for grief. The thing well-meaning people hand you at the repast along with a plate of patties and a bowl of soup. The framework that makes grief feel manageable to everyone watching from the outside.

The problem is that grief is not a linear journey.

It does not move in stages.

It moves in spirals.

You think you have passed through something and then 3am arrives, and you are right back in the room you thought you had left.

That is not a failure of your healing. That is how grief works.

Bargaining is not a stage you pass through. It is a room you return to, and the door has no lock on it.

I know this betrayal firsthand.

I did everything right.

I read every grief book I could find.

I understood the framework.

I told myself that if I could pinpoint my current emotional map of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — I’d understand how far I had left to go.

What the map did not reveal is that endless bargaining cycles would trap me for three years. Every time I thought I had moved through it, I found myself right back at the entrance.

Turns out the roadmap I trusted would leave me more lost than before. Because no one ever drew the map for what I was carrying.

I was not just grieving a loss. I was asking a question that no stage could answer: why did I survive this when they didn’t?

That question does not settle in bargaining. It exists across all five stages at the same time. It’s the ground the entire map rests on, yet nobody bothered to name it.

Why them?

Why not me?

Why did I get to keep going when they didn’t?

Read more

It is 11pm. You are on your third episode of a show that makes you cry harder than you have all week.

There is a half-empty bag of dark chocolate almonds next to you.

Tomorrow you have an early call, a mountain of emails, and a workout session with your trainer. A small island of control in a sea of obligations.

You tell yourself that you are coping.

You are functioning.

You are fine.

I know this scene because I lived it. For three years.

Let me introduce you to buffering

After I lost three family members in fourteen months, I did what every high-achieving woman I know does when life becomes unbearable. I kept moving.

I worked. Not because I loved it, but because the alternative was stillness. And stillness meant feeling.

And feeling meant admitting that the people who made me who I was were gone, and nobody had handed me a roadmap for what came next.

Buffering is what we do instead of grieving.

It’s numbing: the Netflix, the chocolate, the glass of wine that becomes two.

It’s performing: staying busy, staying useful, staying strong so nobody worries about you.

And it’s avoiding: filling every quiet moment before the grief can find you there.

We all do it. Nobody talks about it.

And the surrounding silence is making us sicker than the grief itself.

“Buffering isn’t weakness. It is what a nervous system does when the pain is bigger than its current capacity to feel it.”

The part nobody wants to admit and I tried to outrun it with discipline

Here is the thing about being a high-achiever in grief: you don’t just numb.

You perform recovery with the same intensity you brought to everything else.

I hired a personal trainer. I worked out hard. I told myself I was taking care of my body, investing in my health, doing all the right things.

And for a while the endorphins helped. The structure helped.

Showing up somewhere with a clear goal — lift this, run this, finish this — felt like proof I was still capable of something.

But the body keeps the score even when the mind refuses to cooperate.

The weight crept back. Not because I stopped trying, but because discipline cannot outrun grief.

You can out-schedule it for a season. You cannot out-discipline it forever. My body was grieving even when I wouldn’t let myself feel it.

I felt ashamed of that for a long time. Now I understand it differently.

What your body is actually doing, and why it makes complete sense

My coaching training introduced me to a concept called the Compassionate Observer. The idea is simple and revolutionary: what if, instead of judging the way you are coping, you simply noticed it?

Without shame. Without verdict. Just an observation.

I learned this framework through my training and then did something nobody else seemed to do: I brought it into my grief work.

Because the high-achieving woman who lost a parent or a sibling knows this feeling well. At the post-funeral reception, neighbors filled her plate with patties and spooned a bowl of soup for her.

Everyone around her ate, drank, and shared memories as if grief had an expiration date. She does not need another reason to feel broken.

She needs a witness. Starting with herself.

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Messy. Chaotic. Just me.

Sometimes the work is showing up before you’re ready.

Tell me — what have YOU been waiting to start? 💜

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I‘ve attended three funerals in fourteen months. What nobody puts in the obituary is that sometimes, grief brings its own casualties.

Mine was the woman who worked every room.

I was the one you called when you needed an event planned, a gathering hosted, a mood lifted. I thrived on high energy — the louder the room, the more alive I felt. I networked without trying. I made friends in airport lounges. I showed up early and stayed late, and somehow still had energy left over to check on everyone else on the way out the door.

People-pleasing wasn’t something I did. I thought it was something I was.

The phone call I didn’t answer

A few months after my last loss, a friend called to check on me. I watched the phone ring from across the room.

The old Sandy would have picked up immediately. Would have said, “I’m fine” before the question was even asked. Would have somehow turned the conversation around to make sure the other person felt good about having called.

Instead, I let it go to voicemail.

Not out of anger. Not because I didn't care. But I had tried — really tried — to let this person into what I was carrying. And somewhere between the explaining and the being misunderstood, I realized something quiet and devastating. This relationship had always required more of me than it gave back. Grief had finally made me too tired to pretend otherwise.

Watching that call go to voicemail, I felt two things at once. Relief. And sadness.

Relief that I didn't have to perform being okay for someone who wasn't really asking. Sadness that grief doesn't just take your people. It audits every relationship you thought you had, and not all of them survive the accounting.

Both things were true. I let them be.

What solitude taught me that a room full of people never could?

Here is what nobody tells you about grief turning you inward: the solitude isn’t empty. It’s loud in a different way.

In the quiet, I started hearing things I’d been too busy to notice. What I actually wanted versus what I’d agreed to. Who filled me up versus who I performed for. What I valued when there was no audience left to approve of my choices.

For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t managing anyone else’s comfort. And in that discomfort — that unfamiliar, unwanted stillness — I met someone I hadn't been properly introduced to yet.

A quieter woman. More selective. Harder to impress and easier to please myself, because she finally knew what actually pleased her. A woman who had stopped outsourcing her sense of worth to a room full of people and started building it from the inside out.

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This isn’t just a grief story. It’s a mental health one.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And the conversation I want to have this month isn’t about grief broadly. It’s about the unique, quiet cost of being the forgotten mourner. The high-achieving woman who lost a parent, a sibling, the people who made her who she was. And then watched the person she used to be quietly exit the room too.

If you've been cancelling plans and couldn't explain why. If you've watched a call ring and chosen the voicemail. If you've sat in a room full of people and felt lonelier than you do in your own company, you are not broken.

You are being rebuilt. And what grows back after grief, when you let it, is more honest than what was there before.

Both things are true: you lost someone irreplaceable. And you are becoming someone worth knowing.

If you’re still here

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here’s my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

And I’d love to hear from you in the comments: In the storms of grief, did you go from extrovert to introvert? What surprised you most about who you became?

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It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon at Gantry Plaza State Park.

The pandemic was still rewriting the rules of how close we could stand to each other. I had my earbuds in. Binaural beats. The Manhattan skyline across the East River resembled a postcard I wasn’t allowed to touch. I was walking along the path by the water, trying to manage my thoughts about love.

About a woman who used to be my friend.

I Wanted It to Be True

I met her years earlier at a networking event. She was an associate at first. Then somehow, in the way grief makes you reach for anyone who claims to understand, she became a friend. She told me her divorce had taught her about loss. She said we had something in common.

I wanted that to be true. I wanted it so badly that I ignored the part of me that knew it wasn’t.

So she drifted. And I hated her for it.

What Hate Sounds Like at 3 A.M.

I want to be honest with you about that. Not disliked. Not disappointed. Hated. The kind of hate that lives in your jaw when you wake up at 3 a.m. The kind that builds a case file. The kind that grief turns into a second loss you weren’t prepared to carry.

Her loss was real. I would never deny that. But she didn’t need me to witness her pain. She needed me to mirror it.

I tried to share what I was learning. The slow, brutal beauty of grieving. She grew smaller and sharper. “I have a therapist. I don’t need your advice.”

I wasn’t trying to give advice. I was being myself out loud. That was the part she couldn’t handle.

That Tuesday in the park, I was carrying it.

And then my mentor’s voice came through the earbuds and said this:

“Unconditional love means you love someone no matter what. You love them when they don’t meet your expectations. You love them when they come up short of basic decency. You take responsibility for how you feel and then decide to love within.”

I Stopped Walking

Not because it was beautiful. Because it was hard. Because somewhere in my body I already knew she was about to ask me to do something I didn’t want to do.

Here’s what I learned on the rest of that walk: loving well is a skill set. It’s a muscle. And like every muscle, it gets sore before it gets strong. I had been treating love like a feeling that happened to me. I thought it was something other people earned. Or didn’t. But love isn’t a verdict you hand down. It’s a practice you build.

So I started practicing. Right there. On the path. With her face in my mind.

It Happened in Stages

First, I had to see her clearly. Not as the friend who failed me. As a woman drowning in her own unhealed divorce, swinging at anyone close enough to hit. Once I saw it, I couldn’t hate her anymore. You can’t hate someone you finally understand.

Then I had to release the story. Stop rehearsing what she did. Stop letting her live rent-free in the rooms of my mind I was trying to make sacred. That part took weeks. Some days it still asks for a rematch.

Then I had to wish her well. Actively. Not the silent, passive-aggressive kind of wishing well. The real kind. The kind you say out loud when no one’s listening.

And finally, I had to love her from a distance. Because here’s what I want you to hear, especially if you’ve been told that love means access: You can love someone with your whole heart and never speak to them again. Distance is not the opposite of love. Sometimes distance is how love survives.

I never saw her again. I still love her from across the river.

She Wasn’t a Villain

She was a lesson. And the lesson was this: human-divine connections are not one-sided. Real connection takes two people willing to show up. When only one is showing up, love doesn’t have to die. It just has to change shape.

This is what the Phoenix Legacy Method calls both things being true. You can grieve someone who is still alive. You can release someone you still love. You can choose unconditional love and choose a closed door, in the same breath, on the same Tuesday, in the same sunlit park.

I didn’t choose unconditional love because she deserved forgiveness.

I chose it because I deserve freedom.

If You're Still Here

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

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Someone looked me in the eye, a year after the last funeral, and told me to move on.

Not a stranger. Someone who had shown up, in his own way, after my father died. The last of the three I lost in fourteen months. My mother first. Then my sister. Then my father. Three people. Fourteen months. And someone decided that twelve of those months was enough to grieve all of them.

What I didn’t expect was that the people standing closest to me would pick up where grief left off.

The Roof Without a Witness.

After my father died, I was the only one left in the family house. No mother. No sister. And no father. Just me and the silence. Then, my cousin phoned and invited me to head south and stay with his family for a bit. It looked like care. It was “proximity without presence.”

One year after my father’s death, he told me to “move the fuck on.”

I smiled. Because that’s what you do when someone guts you and thinks they’re helping.

What I wanted to say, what I rehearsed in the dark and never let out, was this:

“You told me to move on after one year. ONE YEAR. I lost my mother, my sister, and my father in fourteen months, and you gave me twelve to get over it. Where were you when I was cleaning out my family’s house alone? Where were you when I couldn’t get out of bed for three days and nobody called? You had time to tell me what I was doing wrong with my grief, but you didn’t have time to sit with me in it. That’s not friendship. That’s spectatorship.”

I didn’t say it. I looked at him with a half-smile while something inside me broke. Again.

But underneath the breaking, something else was happening.

The Block Button Goodbye

There was the Facebook block first. A woman who had once told me I should consider myself lucky to be her friend. When the tears wouldn’t stop and I needed someone to sit with me in the mess of it, she chose the effortless road.

A digital exit with no conversation, no goodbye. Blocked. Gone. The 21st-century equivalent of a dramatic exit, performed by someone who left nothing but ash; and not the kind you rise from.

She didn’t know how to show up when I hit rock bottom.

The Journal Entry That Ended It

And then there was my cousin again.

Around 2019, he called, outraged that I hadn’t reached out in a week. Instead of rushing back with an apology, I answered on my timeline. A text about storytelling with kids and brunch with new friends. I was already building a life that didn’t revolve around his approval. I hadn’t really accepted it yet.

Coming off a Tony Robbins event, everything became clear. My journal entries shifted. I went from writing, “What shall I do about this confrontation?” to “I’m not aligned with you anymore.” I stopped asking how to fix the relationship and started naming what was true.

And then I anchored myself in the only voice that had ever told me the truth.

The man whose death had been used to put a clock on my grief became the voice that set me free from it. He didn’t tell me to move on. He told me to move forward. On my terms, in my time, carrying him with me.

That’s not moving on. That’s a legacy.

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Seven Days of Silence

There’s a word for what they did; all of them. The cousin who gave my grief a deadline. The friend who chose a block button over a hard conversation. Those who showed up just long enough to decide I was doing it wrong.

The word is ancient. It comes from the Book of Job.

Job lost everything. His children. His wealth. His health. And when his three friends came to sit with him, they did something remarkable. They sat in silence for seven days. Seven days of just being there. No advice. No fixing. No timeline.

And then they opened their mouths and ruined it.

They told him he must have done something to deserve it. They told him to repent. In no uncertain terms, they basically told him to get over it, accept what’s happening, and quit asking questions. They turned his suffering into a problem to be solved instead of a truth to be witnessed.

Job called them what they were: miserable comforters.

Not evil people. Not strangers. Friends who showed up and still got it devastatingly wrong. People who couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of someone else’s unresolved pain. People who needed his grief to have a lesson, a timeline, a silver lining. Because sitting in the wreckage with no answers was more than they could bear.

Sound familiar?

Read more

All month, we’ve been talking about trailblazers.

Women who crossed borders nobody gave them permission to cross. Women who walked without a compass and trusted themselves anyway. Women who edited their lives down to the essentials and built something new from what remained.

And every week, I watched you nod. I watched you highlight the sentences. I watched you send these articles to your sister, your best friend, the woman at work who’s been “fine” for two years.

But I need to ask you something, and I need you to sit with it before you answer:

When are you going to realize I’ve been talking about you?

The Woman in the Mirror

You didn’t plan this life. Nobody wakes up and says, “I’d love to lose the people I love most and then figure out who I am from the rubble.”

But that’s exactly what happened. Instead of collapsing into grief and staying down, you rose. Perhaps not gracefully, perhaps not swiftly. You might have crawled before you walked, and walked before you ran. Some days, you still pause mid-journey, questioning if you’re on the right path.

That’s not a sign of weakness. That’s the trailblazer’s journey. Nobody who blazed a trail did it with a map. They did it by putting one foot in front of the other and refusing to go back to a place that no longer existed.

You’ve been doing that. Whether you named it or not.

What “Trailblazer” Actually Means

We throw that word around during Women’s History Month like confetti. We attach it to women with Wikipedia pages and TED Talks, and book deals.

But a trailblazer isn’t defined by visibility. A trailblazer is defined by the decision to keep moving when the known path ends.

The moment your mother died, and you had to learn how to exist without the person who taught you how to exist. That was a trailblazing moment. The moment your sister’s number stopped showing up on your phone and you had to figure out who to call at 2 AM. That was a trailblazing moment. The moment your father’s voice stopped being the one that guided your biggest decisions, and you had to learn to trust your own. Whatever your loss looked like — every single one of those moments was you, stepping into unmapped territory and refusing to turn back.

You don’t need a Wikipedia page for that to hold significance.

Proof It’s Possible

I know this because I lived it.

I lost my mother, my father, and my sister within 14 months. Not one loss. Three. Back-to-back to back, as if grief was testing whether I’d break or bend.

I broke. And then I bent. And then I did something I never expected: I built.

I wrote a book about it. Not because I had it figured out, but because I realized the mess was the message. The book is called Overcoming Grief, and it came from the same place these articles come from: the belief that no woman should have to walk through devastation alone, and the proof that walking through it can lead you somewhere you never imagined.

I became a certified grief and life coach. I created the Phoenix Legacy Method. I built a practice dedicated to the women who were told to “give it time” and knew in their bones that time wasn’t the answer. Transformation was.

None of that was in the plan. The plan died with my family. What replaced it was something I built with my own hands, from my own fire, on my own terms.

That’s what trailblazing looks like. Not the highlight reel. The building.

And you? You’re building too. Even if you don’t see it yet.

Claiming the Title

This is the part where I’m supposed to give you a neat little exercise. A journaling prompt. A five-step framework.

But I’m not going to do that today.

Instead, I’m going to ask you to do something harder.

Say it out loud.

“I am a woman who survived devastating loss and chose to keep building.”

That’s it. That’s the whole sentence. No qualifiers. No “but I still have bad days.” No, “but I’m not as far as I should be.”

Just the truth.

You crossed borders nobody gave you permission to cross. You walked without a compass, and you’re still walking. You edited your life down to what matters, and you’re building something from what remained.

That’s not something that happened to you. That’s something you did.

Women’s History Month isn’t just for the women in the textbooks. It’s for you. Right now. In the messy, imperfect, tear-stained middle of your rebuild.

Claim the title. You’ve earned it in the fire.

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying ‘I see myself in this’ without having to find the words.

Here’s my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

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Claiming the title is the first step. Building what comes next is the work.

If you’re tired of doing that work alone: carrying the grief, chasing the vision, and wondering if you’re on the right path with no one who truly gets it. I created something for you.

The Phoenix Reclaim Hour is a single, focused conversation where we look at where you are, what you’re carrying, and what’s ready to be built. One hour. No fluff. Just clarity.

And if you already know you’re ready for more: the Phoenix Legacy Method Beta Cohort launches April 17th, and of the 7 founding member spots, only 5 remain. Six weeks of building your legacy from the fire, alongside women who already said yes to their transformation. Founding member pricing won’t come back. Jump on a Discovery Call if this is a right fit for both of us.

You’ve already proven you can survive the loss. The question is: what are you ready to build from it?

Sandy Linda is the author of Overcoming Grief and the creator of the Phoenix Legacy Method — a transformation framework for high-achieving women who want to build something meaningful after devastating loss without abandoning their grief. Her book is available link attached on here.

If this article found you at the right moment, forward it to the woman in your life who needs to hear this today.

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Viola Davis won an Oscar, an Emmy, and two Tony Awards. The only African American woman to win all three. She built a production company. She married a man who loved her well. She stood on stages in front of millions.

And she was still running from a little girl in Rhode Island.

In her memoir Finding Me, Davis doesn’t give you the highlight reel. She gives you the backpack. Everything she carried from a childhood of poverty, abuse, and shame into a life nobody from Central Falls was supposed to have.

But the book isn’t really about what she survived. It’s about what she chose to do with it. What she kept. What she set down. And the years it took to know the difference.

She wrote, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past.”

Read that again.

Giving up all hope of a different past.

You are doing the grief edit right now, whether you’ve read her book or not.

The Edit Nobody Tells You About

After loss, there is a quiet editing happening inside every woman. A slow unpacking of what’s in the backpack. Most don’t even realize they’re doing it.

Sure, there’s the closet cleanout and the “what do I do with her things” conversation. Those are the edits everyone sees.

I’m talking about the invisible unpacking.

The one where you quietly stopped returning certain phone calls. And the one where the phone just stopped ringing because she’s not here to call anymore. The one where your old career goals started sounding like they belong to a stranger. The one where you dig through your entire belief system and wonder, “Who packed this?”

You wake up one day and your friend group is smaller. Your tolerance for nonsense is lower. Your life got quieter. And you’re not sure if that’s healing or just exhaustion.

Do you know that edit is not a breakdown? It’s a rebuilding tool.

The women who stay stuck after loss aren’t the ones who lost the most. They’re the ones still carrying everything. Including the stuff that was never theirs to begin with.

What Viola Kept

In Finding Me, Viola writes about her sisters. They survived together. Through poverty. Through things that didn’t even have names back then. Through brutal seasons like depression. And they emerged with laughter and perspective.

Not because the pain wasn’t real. But because sisterhood held them together when nothing else could.

That chapter stayed with me.

I did not have the kind of sisterhood that looked like a highlight reel because my sisterhood got disrupted. The past articles I’ve written have touched on that. But as I’ve been rebuilding this life that got disrupted by loss, I’m learning something Viola’s book confirmed for me.

Sisterhood doesn’t have to be blood.

I kept the meaning of sisterhood. I set down the expectation that it had to look a certain way. I kept laughter. I set down the old pain. I kept the desire for connection. I released the requirement that it come from the people I expected.

That’s my grief edit.

And I’m still doing it.

Your Turn

Here’s what I want you to know: you are already editing. You’ve been doing it since the loss hit. Every relationship you quietly stepped back from. Every belief you stopped defending. Every version of yourself you stopped performing. That was the edit.

Most women don’t give themselves credit for it because it doesn’t look like progress. It looks like withdrawal. It looks like “she changed.” It looks like the friend group getting smaller and the Friday nights getting quieter.

But what if the smaller life isn’t smaller at all? What if it’s just more honest?

The grief edit isn’t about throwing away your old life. It’s about choosing what comes with you into the next one.

Viola chose her fight. Her vulnerability. Her sisters. Her love of the craft that saved her life.

What did you choose? And what are you ready to set down?

Now This

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying ‘I see myself in this’ without having to find the words.

Here’s my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

📚 If this resonated: I recommend reading Finding Me by Viola Davis. It’s not a light read. It’s an honest one. And if you’re in the middle of your own grief edit, her story might help you see yours more clearly.

💬 I’d love to hear from you. What’s one thing you carried forward from your old life that still serves you? And what’s one thing weighing down your backpack that you’re ready to set down? Drop it in the comments. Even one sentence. You might be surprised who needed to read it.

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Know someone going through her own grief edit right now? Forward this to her. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is let someone know she’s not the only one opening the backpack.

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P.S. If reading this made something click and you’re thinking “I need to do this edit on purpose, not by accident” — that’s exactly what the Phoenix Reclaim Hour is for. One hour. Just you and me. Sorting through the backpack together. More on that soon.

She’s on the couch.

Brown leather recliner. Black sweats. Lavender candles trying to make the room feel peaceful instead of like a waiting room.

She’s carrying news she can’t share with anyone because the people she would have called are gone.

Then something unexpected happens.

She laughs.

Not a polite laugh. Not the “I’m fine” laugh she’s been performing for months. A real one. The kind that catches you off guard and almost makes you choke because your body forgot it could do that.

A comedy is playing on the screen, but she doesn’t remember turning it on. There’s a scene about a woman who gets paid to cry at funerals. A professional mourner. Someone who shows up, performs grief on command, and collects a check from families who need the room to feel sadder.

And she’s sitting there in real grief. Unpaid. Unscripted. Wondering who she would even call to tell this story to.

The absurdity hits her like a wave.

Think about it: somewhere out there, someone’s job description includes “cry convincingly at strangers’ funerals.” They practice their sad face in the mirror, perfect the shoulder shake, and clock in, clock out, and go home to dinner.

Here she is— doing the real thing. The kind of grief that wakes you up at 3am. The kind that ambushes you in the produce aisle. The kind nobody would ever pay someone to fake because it’s too messy, raw, and impossible to perform.

People get paid to cry for strangers. And here she is, doing it for free, alone, for the people she loved.

She laughs harder.

The Unwritten Part

Chapter one: The phone call, the diagnosis, the funeral, the neighbors bring food. The world stops. Everyone shows up.

Chapter two: the reinvention. She built a business. She found her purpose. She rose from the ashes. Standing ovation.

But there’s a chapter between those two that gets ripped out of every book: the messy middle. The crisis is technically over but nothing feels right. Where people ask “so what’s next?” like you ordered a life plan on Amazon Prime and it should arrive soon.

Nobody writes about the messy middle because it doesn’t look good on a book cover.

It looks like wearing the same black sweats for the third day in a row. It looks like being fine at 10am and crying at a Progressive insurance commercial by noon, not even a sad one. It looks like knowing you need to “move forward” but having no idea which direction that is.

It looks like walking without a compass.

The Compass Nobody Gave You

Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I was on that couch.

The messy middle isn’t a detour. It’s the road itself.

It took me five to six years to find my footing. Between the couch and the certification. From the lavender candles to the podcast microphone. I laughed at a show I barely remember and learned to help other women find their laughter again.

That timeline isn’t failure. That’s what real rebuilding looks like when nobody hands you a map.

During those years, I wasn’t stuck. I was doing something I didn’t have language for yet. I was walking without a compass. Putting one foot in front of the other with no guarantee the path was leading somewhere. Some days the only movement was getting off the couch. Some days it was laughing when I didn’t think I could.

Both counted.

Laughter Isn’t Betrayal

There’s an unspoken rule in grief. You’re supposed to be sad the right way, for the right amount of time, in front of the right people.

Laughing feels like breaking the rules.

I know because the first time I really laughed after my losses, my first thought wasn’t joy. It was guilt. Like I’d betrayed someone by feeling something other than pain.

Here’s what I learned sitting on that couch, watching a woman get paid to fake the thing that was destroying me.

Grief and laughter aren’t enemies. They’re awkward roommates, constantly bumping into each other in the hallway. But they share the same house. And sometimes the only way to survive the messy middle is to let them exist at the same time.

Both are true.

You can be grieving and laughing. Lost and moving forward. Wearing black sweats and building something extraordinary.

The messy middle isn’t pretty. But it’s yours. And the fact that you’re still walking means you’re still moving forward. That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

Share Your Unexpected Laugh.

We’re all walking without compasses here. What unexpected moment caught you off guard with joy when you least expected? Your moment reminds someone else they’re not alone in feeling both things at once. 💜

A few sentences. Drop ‘em in the comments!

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Now This…

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying ‘I see myself in this’ without having to find the words.

Here’s my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

If this essay resonated with you, please share it with someone who might be walking through their own messy middle right now. You never know when the right words find the right person at the right time

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If reading this felt like someone finally described where you are, imagine what one honest conversation could do. The Phoenix Reclaim Hour is here when you’re ready.

In our last article, we talked about the moment the path disappears. The life you planned, the future you expected, gone. And how every woman reading this has been quietly trailblazing her way through without a map, a guarantee, or a single signpost from society to guide her.

Today we’re doing something different.

Today we stop walking for a minute. We sit down. We pull out a journal. And we start drawing the map.

Not the old map. That one’s done. The new one. The one that starts exactly where you are right now.

This is what I do with my coaching clients. Not the inspirational quotes version. The actual work. Three questions, a pen, and the willingness to be honest with yourself on paper.

Fair warning: this might feel uncomfortable. Good. That means you’re doing it right.

Grab your journal. Let’s go.

Question 1: What did I think my life would look like at this age?

This is where we start. Not because I want you to feel bad about where you are. But because you can’t draw a new map until you acknowledge the old one.

Most of us were carrying a mental blueprint. By this age, I’ll have the career. The partner. The house. The family holidays that look like the ones I grew up with, or better. The body. The savings account. The peace.

And then life did what life does. It edited your blueprint without asking permission.

Here’s what I want you to journal:

Write down what you thought your life would look like right now. Don’t filter it. Don’t judge it. Just let it land on paper. The career you expected. The relationship you imagined. The version of yourself you thought you’d be. All of it.

What to notice when you’re done:

Pay attention to which parts make you sad and which parts make you shrug. That gap tells you something important. The things that still sting? Those point to what you actually valued. Not what you were told to value. What YOU valued. That’s compass data. Hold onto it.

And if something on that list makes you laugh now? “I thought I’d have it all figured out by 45.” That’s not failure. That’s wisdom earned the hard way. Only people who haven’t lived yet think life is figureoutable.

Question 2: What parts of who I’ve become would surprise the old me?

This is the question most women skip. Because we’re so busy cataloging what we lost that we forget to inventory what we gained.

Grief doesn’t just take things away from you. It also builds things inside you that weren’t there before. Boundaries you never would have set. Tolerance for discomfort that used to terrify you. A radar for nonsense that could cut through a boardroom. The ability to sit with someone in pain without trying to fix it.

You are not the same woman who existed before your loss. And some of those changes? They’re upgrades you didn’t ask for but couldn’t have earned any other way.

Here’s what I want you to journal:

List 5 things about who you are NOW that would genuinely shock the version of you from five years ago. Not the painful things. The powerful things. The things you can do, tolerate, see, or feel that the old you couldn’t.

What to notice when you’re done:

If this list was hard to write, that’s normal. We’re trained to see our deficits, not our deposits. Read the list back to yourself out loud. Slowly. Let yourself hear it.

This list is not a consolation prize for what you lost. It’s evidence. Evidence that you’ve been building something this whole time. You just didn’t have a name for it.

Now you do. It’s called a legacy.

Question 3: If I’m the trailblazer of my own story, what am I blazing toward?

Now we look forward.

This question scares most of my clients. Because looking forward after loss feels dangerous. The last time you had a plan, life shredded it. Why would you risk making another one?

Here’s why: because you’re already moving. You’ve been moving this entire time. The only question is whether you want to move with intention or keep walking without a direction.

And I’m not asking you for a five-year plan. I’m asking for a direction. A feeling. A word, even.

Here’s what I want you to journal:

Finish these three sentences. Don’t overthink them. Write the first thing that comes:

“I want to feel more _______________.”

“I want to stop pretending that _______________.”

“If I gave myself permission, I would _______________.”

What to notice when you’re done:

Read your three answers together. Out loud. What you just wrote? That’s your compass bearing. That’s not a plan. It’s better than a plan. It’s a direction that came from the woman you actually are right now. Not who you were before. Not who everyone expects you to be. YOU.

The old map was drawn by a woman who hadn’t been through what you’ve been through. This one? This one’s drawn by a trailblazer.

Now What?

You just did something most people avoid their entire lives. You sat with yourself honestly and asked real questions.

Look at your journal. You now have three things:

What you actually valued from your old life (not what you were told to value). Evidence of who you’ve become (not who you lost). A direction forward that’s based on truth, not fantasy.

That’s a map. It’s rough. It’s incomplete. But it’s YOURS. And it’s more than most people ever give themselves.

Here’s what I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my coaching clients: these questions are the starting point. They open the door. But walking through it? That’s where the real work happens. And you don’t have to do it alone.

I’d love to hear from you: Which question hit the hardest? Drop it in the comments. I read every one.

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The Phoenix Reclaim Hour is where high achievers turn these insights into action. In 60 minutes, we craft your personal roadmap for moving forward while honoring your journey. This isn't about rushing past your loss. It's about building something meaningful from where you are now. [Book yours here.]

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When Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat sat beside her dying mother, she didn’t reach for comfort. She reached for a pen.

In The Art of Death, Danticat wrote that writing was the primary way she tried to make sense of her losses. Not therapy first. Not a support group. Not the five stages of grief laminated on a hospital wall. She picked up a pen and wrote her way through it. Word by word. Sentence by sentence. Because the path she’d been on had just disappeared.

She also wrote: “One of the tragedies of death is that it interrupts a lifelong dialogue, rendering it a monologue.”

Read that again. If you’ve ever picked up the phone to call someone who’s no longer there... you know exactly what she means.

She also described grief as “circles and circles of sorrow.” Not a straight line. Not five tidy stages with a graduation ceremony at the end. Circles. The kind where you think you’ve moved past something and then you’re standing right back in it on a Tuesday afternoon for no reason at all.

Sound familiar?

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The Trailblazer Nobody Posted About

It’s Women’s History Month. And your feed is filling up with tributes to bold, fierce, unstoppable women who changed the world and blazed trails.

Beautiful.

But can we talk about a different kind of trailblazer for a minute?

The one who didn’t set out to change the world. She just woke up one morning and the life she planned was gone. The marriage. The person. The career. The health. The future she thought was guaranteed.

And she didn’t have a five-year plan for what came next. She didn’t have a Canva template for rebuilding. She had a blank page and a whole lot of “now what?”

But she kept going.

Not because she was brave in the way movies show bravery — soundtrack swelling, hair blowing in the wind. More like brave in the way no one photographs. Brave at 2am when sleep won’t come. Brave in the grocery store when a song hits wrong. Brave in the circles and circles and circles of sorrow that don’t follow a schedule.

That woman. The one quietly creating a path where none exists. She’s the trailblazer I want to celebrate this month.

She’s you.

Here’s what I’ve learned, both in my own grief and in coaching women through theirs:

What No One Tells You About Making Your Own Path

The path doesn’t disappear because you did something wrong. It disappears because the life it was built for, no longer exists. And in that moment? That terrifying, disorienting, “who even am I now” moment? You have a choice you didn’t ask for.

You can wait for someone to build you a new path.

Or you can make your own.

Most of you reading this? You already chose. You just haven’t called it what it is yet.

You’re not “getting through it.” You’re not “just surviving.” You’re doing the thing that every trailblazing women in history has done — walking forward when the known road ends.

The only difference? Nobody wrote a history book about your Tuesday afternoon breakdown that turned into a breakthrough. Nobody made an inspirational graphic about the night you cried in your car and then drove home and made dinner anyway.

But that doesn’t make it less historic. It makes it more.

This month on Lost in the Woods, we’re not doing performative empowerment. We’re doing something harder and more honest.

We’re turning the mirror toward you.

Every week, I’ll be exploring what it actually looks like to make your own path after loss. The messy middle. The things you carry forward. And the moment you finally claim the title you’ve earned.

Because Danticat was right. Grief moves in circles. But here’s what she also showed us: you can pick up a pen. Or whatever YOUR version of a pen is. And start writing a different story inside those circles.

That’s not just surviving. That’s authorship.

Thank you for reading to the end.

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying “I see myself in this” without having to find the words.

Here’s my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Please comment below

I'd love to hear from you: If grief moves in circles, what's one circle you keep coming back to?

Drop it in the comments. You might be surprised how many women are circling the same thing.

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And if you’re reading this thinking “I’m ready for more than just reading” — the Phoenix Reclaim Hour is 60 minutes where we turn what you’re feeling into a real plan for what comes next. No scripts. No toxic positivity. Just clarity. [Book yours here.]

It’s 11pm.

You told yourself you’d go to bed an hour ago.

But instead, you’re on your third episode of a show that isn’t even holding your attention. Or you’ve reorganized a drawer. Answered emails that could wait until morning. Texted a friend something light and easy. Scrolled until your thumb went numb.

And somewhere underneath all of it lies the grief you haven’t gotten to yet, quiet and patient in its waiting.

You’re not lazy. You’re not broken. You’re not “bad at grieving.”

You’re buffering.

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What Buffering Actually Is

Buffering is what happens when the pain is real but the moment doesn’t feel safe enough to feel it. Instead of facing our grief, we keep staying busy. Staying strong. Staying helpful to everyone except ourselves.

And the negative consequence? We stay stuck.

It’s not denial exactly. You know they’re gone. There’s often this low hum of awareness. A heaviness disguised as boredom. A restlessness nothing seems to cure.

One reader described it this way: “I was bored in a way that I knew something was absent.”

That sentence stopped me cold. Because that’s it. That’s buffering in one line.

Not numb. Not fine. Just... occupied. Just away from the thing that needs tending.

How Smart, High-Achieving Women Buffer

Here’s the part that might sting a little. Gently, I promise.

The women I work with are exceptionally good at buffering. Because the same drive that makes you capable and competent and able to hold everything together? It’s also the thing that keeps you one step ahead of your own grief.

Buffering doesn’t always look like avoidance. Sometimes it looks like productivity. Sometimes it looks like being the strong one. Sometimes it looks like helping everyone else process their loss while yours quietly accumulates in the corner.

The buffer wears many masks.

A glass of wine at 5pm sharp.

A Netflix queue that knows you better than your therapist.

A to-do list that breeds faster than rabbits.

Or my personal favorite: becoming an expert on grief while carefully avoiding your own

The goal is always the same: keep moving. Keep the space filled. Don’t let the quiet get too quiet.

Why Your Mind Does This (And Why It Isn’t a Flaw)

Here’s what I want you to hear before anything else:

Buffering was kind once. It was your nervous system saying “not yet” when the full weight of the loss was too much to hold. That deserves some tenderness, not judgment.

But the thing about buffering is that grief doesn’t actually go anywhere while you’re doing it. It waits. It gets heavier. And eventually the buffer stops working as well as it used to. The boredom gets a little darker, the restlessness a little louder.

That’s not a crisis. That’s an invitation.

The Question Worth Sitting With

You don’t have to stop buffering today. You don’t have to dive into the deep end.

But I want to leave you with one honest question:

What are you filling the space with — and what might be waiting underneath?

Just notice. You don’t have to act on it yet.

That noticing? It’s actually the first step toward something different.

Now This…

If this essay found you at the right moment, hit the 🐦‍🔥 below. Think of it as saying ‘I see myself in this’ without having to find the words.

Here’s my 🐦‍🔥 back to you for being brave enough to keep reading.

Now that you have the word — does buffering show up for you? Where does it hide?”

Then, if you’re ready: Share in the comments what you’re filling the space with right now.

Even one word counts. Your story might be exactly what someone else needs to hear today.

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