Duality

Life is really lifing right now.

No one prepares you for losing your mother; even if they had tried I wouldn’t have listened. The anticipatory grief was so overwhelming that I couldn’t, even for one second, imagine what life would be like without her.

The duality of January could not have been made more stark - starting a week in New York, the bright lights of Times Square, an adventure with friends, feeling cool, glamorous, successful. Enjoying the opportunities that entrepreneurship had created for me.

Going from such a high, to such a low. A beige NHS hospital room, the sounds of her final breaths the only noise.

Everyone tells you to take your time, to look after yourself.

But until you are in that moment, it’s hard to know what that means.

I am lucky, I know that. To have the people I have around me, my husband especially, taking care of me and allowing me to navigate blind. My friends have stepped up in ways I never knew I would need.

And my clients, allowing me space to work and not work depending on what I need at any one time; I will forever be grateful to the pair I coach who were my first meeting back after the loss - who allowed me to not mention what had happened, who didn’t ask, didn’t bring it up at all. They gave me the space to exist outside of my bubble of grief.

My biggest challenge at the moment is giving myself permission.

Permission to allow work to be my distraction.

Permission to actually enjoy my work still.

Permission to accept that the trajectory of my business still has upwards momentum, and I don’t have to slow it down or press pause.

I have had concerned people worrying that I am not allowing myself to grieve; I appreciate their concern but it shows a wider issue.

My biggest fear is not that grief will slow me down, if it happens it happens.

My fear is that I might allow grief to be the excuse I use to step back entirely, not because I need to but because I fear the unknown of the heights I am reaching.

And

I worry that this fear could become the bulldozer that tramples over my fragility and does not allow me to grieve the way that I need to.

It is a balance, on the thinnest of knife edges.

There are no answers here, just musings, just reflections.

The thoughts of a moment in time, captured for future me to look back on. And, perhaps, they will speak to you too.