Reading · The Balance Routine

Hey friends..

Just a little life update from me today. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, so consider this a little brain dump.

For those of you who are newer here, or missed my newsletter a few weeks ago - I recently moved out of the apartment I shared with my boyfriend of six years. We made the incredibly hard decision to end things, and the pain is still very much here. It comes and goes, the way grief does.

But I came across a post the other day (from @world_of_flow) that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and I wanted to share it with you.

“You can literally feel when it’s time to move into your life’s new chapter.”

That is exactly what this felt like.

In the weeks leading up to our breakup, we both knew we were at a crossroads - you either take the step toward forever, or you go your separate ways. And what surprised me most was how physical that knowing was for me.

In no world did I think we would actually break up.. but my body knew big change was coming way before my mind could make sense of it.

You could call it intuition, or a gut feeling. I'm still learning to trust it, but I really do believe that when you tune into your body and listen to that quiet voice underneath all the noise... it has a way of guiding you toward the life you're meant to live, even when it's the last place you wanted to be.

The feeling is a strange thing to explain.

You can feel deeply at peace with a decision and still be completely shattered by it at the same time.

You’re scared and you feel like your heart is walking around outside of your body while everyone else just.. carries on with their normal lives. It’s one of the loneliest feelings there is - accepting that a chapter is really, truly over.

And another strange thing about that knowing... once it’s there, you can’t unknow it. You can try to talk yourself out of it. You can hope it changes. But deep down... you already know. Your heart just needs a little more time to catch up.

Accepting it doesn’t happen fast, though. I think it takes a long time.

Growth doesn't feel exciting while you're in it. I think it feels uncomfortable and lonely and scary. I think sometimes it asks you to let go of people you still love because the version of you that's waiting on the other side couldn't exist if you stayed exactly where you were. That's a really painful thing to accept... but I'm starting to understand it.

I'm still heartbroken. But somewhere in all of this... I'm also really proud of myself. I'm proud that I chose something incredibly hard because I knew it was the right thing to do.

If you’re in the middle of your own hard chapter right now - a breakup, a loss, an ending of any kind - I see you. So many of us have walked through this exact pain, and so many of us know exactly how it feels.

You’re not doing it alone, even when it feels the loneliest. No feeling is final. I keep reminding myself of that. So I’ll remind you, too.

What grief has been teaching me

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