Three months into my healing journey, I’ve learned that healing does not arrive with a finish line. For me it’s arriving so subtly that I don’t notice it at all until I stop and really look back and realize I’ve shifted.

The heaviness of my grief is still here. I carry it with me every day. Some days it sits heavy on my chest and other days it hums quietly in the background while I move thru it. I still don’t have the energy to be fully present or social in the way I once was. Showing up takes effort. Conversations drain me faster than I’d like to admit. There are moments I cancel plans because I simply don’t have it in me. I’m working on nudging myself daily without forcing myself to be who I was before.

Right now, my focus is on finding things that might bring my spark back. Small moments that make me feel full again. Moments where I feel connected to myself instead of lost inside the fog of grief. I’m trying to pay attention to what nourishes me and what depletes me.

One of the most unexpected turns in my healing came after attending a sound bath. I had zero expectations of what to expect but found myself crying. Releasing something my body had been holding onto for years. That experience made me curious. It made me want to learn more about sound healing and how vibration and frequency can reach places words sometimes can’t.

Each small thing I do for myself, I can’t help but think about what my mom would say to me. I hear her voice so clearly: “I think it’s really cool that you’re doing that.” And then, without fail, she would tell me about something she enjoyed. Mindfulness, rocks, crystals, doodling, or some small ritual that brought her peace. There are so many things about my mom that made her so special. Things I’m only beginning to understand. Things that made her silent presence so powerful. I try not to live in a place of regret. But wish I had asked her more about why certain things mattered so deeply to her. Maybe I knew, even then, that the reasons were so deeply rooted in pain that she carried so quietly that I didn’t want to ask and open the wounds she had worked so hard to protect. The loss of her has made me realize that the same things that I’m reaching for when I want to feel closer to her are the things she reached for in her healing. They have become bridges back to her, little moments where I feel her presence instead of her absence.

I’m still in my therapy program, and it continues to be one of the most grounding parts of this journey. I’ve met people there who were complete strangers to me 3 months ago, yet they know more about me than most people in my life. They’ve seen me unravel. They’ve heard the things I struggle to say out loud elsewhere. There’s something incredibly powerful about being fully seen in a room where no one expects you to be okay.

And yet even three months in, I know this; I am nowhere near healed. And who knows if I ever will be. This is my journey and my timeline. Some days I feel proud of how far I’ve come, and other days I feel like I’m getting knocked down at the knees.

But I’m here and I’m trying.

This is me grieving.