For as long as I can remember, writing has always been the way that I could best check my pulse and see where my heart was at. After losing my mom in 2016, every time I would try to write, even just to journal, it was like being flooded with words and emotions at such a high speed that it left me frozen, unable to express. Eventually this turned to a total numbness because I was too scared and too overwhelmed to even begin processing the immense loss I had experienced. In 2012, my dad passed way suddenly, 9 months later, my mom received a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. She battled for nearly 3 years before her body just couldn’t do it anymore. In the weeks after her passing, it was as though every unfelt and unprocessed emotion I had experienced over the course of 4 years just consumed me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I tried to get lost in my work and that worked for a while, but eventually the dam broke. My numbness and depression terrified me. Fear was just about the only thing I could really feel. I had seen what depression could do to a person and the people around them and I was so afraid of it. It was at this point that I reached out for help and began meeting with a therapist. I have been in therapy for a little over a year now and I am in a completely different place. It has been intense and so difficult facing my pain and walking through it, but in so many ways I feel lighter. I have a long way to go, but to see the progress I have made is encouraging. I can do hard things. I actually believe that now. The trauma I experienced over the course of 4 years certainly did a number on me, but what I’m learning is that my story isn’t finished yet. The night my mom passed away as I sat on the stairs so overwhelmed with the pain, drowning in it, my brother came and held me saying “This is a defining moment, but this will not define us.” I don’t think he knows the power of those words he spoke. It can be so easy to feel defined by the things that have happened to us. And the loss of my parents has been so defining, but it is not the sum total of who I am. It has been a huge and significant part of my story, but it isn’t my entire story. Some of the worst things I could have imagined have happened to me, but it has led to an openness in my heart and from that place I am “cautiously optimistic” that the best really is yet to come.

There was a time not too long ago that I truly believed that my writing days were over…but here I am and in a totally different, but strangely familiar way, I am finding that writing still happens the same way…one word at a time.

This feels like it requires more courage than it used to, but it also feels more freeing than it ever has before. So, here’s to dusting off the cobwebs, doing the scary things; the hard things, and to sharing all the beautiful, broken, magnificent, messy, and mundane pieces of this gift called life.

Welcome back to Fearless Dialogue.

Light and Love,

Leslie Danielle