Grief is a Catalyst
This is by far the hardest blog I’ve written to date, as the subject happens to be one of the hardest moments of my life and my first experience of grief. The good thing is I’ve written about it before, in my book Wholeness Within, in Chapter 4 The Phone Call.
This blog will share with you the gifts of grief and the importance of living your purpose. It’s an event that changed me in so many ways in just an instant. There was the version of me before this phone call, and the version of me after this phone call.
Living Life Numb
As you may recall from my last blog, I was numb, living life out of alignment, on autopilot. I was living a life where it was exciting on the surface. But internally, I was just existing. I didn’t actually feel fulfilled or purposeful with my life. Instead it felt as thought I was settling and trapped in the life I had created for myself, based on external markers of success. At work, on a rainy day in New York City, I received a phone call from a police officer with the area code of the hometown I grew up in. Not one to answer random numbers, I knew this was one I should not ignore. It shocked me and fully brought me into the depths of my emotions. A part of myself I had been disconnected from for so long.
Grief Cracked Me Open
That phone call changed the trajectory of my life. I could no longer hide or escape my life for it to seem bearable. With grief, I lost the ability to be fake. There was a wave of emotion I could no longer push down and ignore. The floodgates were open.
I started working with a grief therapist, who gave me life changing advice. He told me to let grief come through and express it. No matter where or when grief comes up, even if it’s inconvenient, to make space for it and to let the tears flow. It would be so much harder to heal and if repressed, grief could show up later in life in a much more extreme way if I didn’t. It would also be a way to connect with my loved one and remember them.
Grief allowed me to access a deeper part of myself I didn’t know existed. It showed me how to process my emotions and find my way through the dark. To embrace this experience fully, without running away, and allowing it to change my path, and guide me to a better one.
We Will All Die One Day
This event so clearly put my life in crystal clear perspective. I was given the opportunity to start over and pursue my purpose and aligned life. Not everyone gets a wake up call like this in their early twenties. I knew it was a gift from my dad to pursue the dreams he was never able to.
With this gift, it offered me the ability to step into my purpose: writing this book, and creating a business around my gifts, and being able to coach other women through uncertainty and pain, home to themselves and their soul-aligned life and career. There was no more time to waste. It taught me that whenever we make a choice to start living more authentically, we have to go within and embody our wholeness, and decide we are going to show up in our brilliance, no matter what obstacles we have to face in this pursuit.
This is a distillation of Chapter Four: The Phone Call, in my book Wholeness Within: Insights from One Woman’s Journey of Creating a Life & Career in Alignment.
xo Emily Grace
