Finding Strength in What Breaks You
Grief has a way of tearing through life like a storm—sudden, disorienting, and impossible to ignore.
It doesn’t just come from death. We grieve relationships, old versions of ourselves, missed opportunities, health, homes, and dreams. While grief is often treated like something to get over, the truth is, it’s not a problem to be solved. It’s a process to be honoured.
Grief has played a heart wrenchingly beautiful part in my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way because it has lent itself to my growth more than any other catalyst.
My first breakup was when I realized there’s a deep beauty to heartbreak and a part of all of us that isn’t affected by pain. It lead me to peace and silence outside the human experience.
My grandparents’ passing was when I realized I could sit in the presence of death and still communicate with the ones who had passed. Even though their body was empty, their soul was not gone.
My dad’s death gutted me but reminded me of my strength and how much it means to live this life while we have the privilege to do so. It reprioritized my life and helped me understand my capacity to hold grief and loss and still be ok.
My post-concussion and injury journey I traveled through taught me patience, toughness and how to stand up for myself against a relentlessly harsh world.
Death is not to be feared, neither is grief. There is more to this life than most of you realize and that understanding, that power, lives dormant inside every single person alive. You can make your darkest moments your absolute strength. This is how you change your life in one moment.
I always emphatically say ‘there is no timeline on healing’. Nobody in this world can tell you that you shouldn’t still be grieving or you’re not healing fast enough.
‘Why is that still bothering you?’
‘You should have gotten over it by now.’
‘Harden the fuck up.’
In our culture, we’re often taught to rush past pain, to stay strong, or look on the bright side and just stay positive. Smile and it will be fine. But grief doesn’t operate that way. It operates on its own timeline. It shows up in waves—unexpected, uninvited, inconvenient and heartwrenching. And yet, it always it has something to offer us.
Grief is one of the most powerful teachers we as humans have.
It teaches us where we’ve loved deeply, where we’ve lost connection, and where something meaningful once lived. We only grieve in proportion to the amount we loved in the first place, remember that. It shines a spotlight on what matters most and keeps the trivialities of life in perspective by cracking us open, gutting us to our core. In doing so, however, it allows light to shine into the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves. A deeper, wiser version of who we are can begin to take root in this place. Our new self is born in that darkness. It’s in this rock bottom place where we find the strength to put ourselves back together after we have been shattered into more pieces than we believed we could pick up again.
If we allow ourselves to fully feel our grief without rushing to numb it or distract ourselves from it, we give ourselves permission to receive that growth and heal on a soul-deep level. Grief, like any emotion, needs space to give us its lessons before moving on.
The strength that comes from grief isn’t loud. Sometimes it’s as quiet as a whisper.
It’s not about forcing a silver lining. It’s about learning how to hold pain and beauty at the same time. It’s about becoming someone who can sit with life’s hardest moments without turning away—someone who knows that even in loss, there is meaning.
Grief changes us, but that’s exactly what it’s here for. Perspective.
But it also grows us into people who are more tender, more resilient, and more fully alive. When you learn how to sit with grief yourself, you become the person who can then hold space for others in their grief because you now learned how to have the capacity to do so.
Be vulnerable with yourself. As you are, you will learn how to be vulnerable with others.
This is how we can heal the world together. With one person’s bravery to face what hurts them the very most, heal, and carry on with an open heart.
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If you crave a deeper dive into healing grief and exploring what is means to be human, pick up a copy of The Art of Being Human.
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