What do we do when we feel like we’ve lost ourselves? When everything we depended on to get us through tough times doesn’t work? In this past season of my life, I’ve had to let go of what I knew and welcome new friends, like Greif, to return to myself.

Getting Lost

I lost myself. I lost who I was. I lost what I believed. I lost what I wanted. I lost vision. I lost hope. I certainly didn’t feel equipped to talk about that while I was going through it. Looking back, I see that if I had processed through what I was feeling on my podcast, I might’ve moved on a lot faster. (And helped more people at the same time.) I might’ve returned to myself a lot faster.

2020 was a year that I started with a bang. I was ready to do some amazing things. I was all in, committed to my goals, and prepared to become more of who I’ve always wanted it to be.

I started the year by going to a high-energy professional development conference. It gave me the push to move forward in my business. I was rocking and rolling, and then the pandemic hit. And along with the global trauma of a pandemic, I was also facing personal trauma.

The Grief of our Infertility Journey

My wife and I have been trying to start our family for many years. We have been hoping, wanting, and desiring for one biological child. But, instead, we’ve watched from the sidelines as family members and friends announced their pregnancies. Our social media feeds became cluttered with babies, and our hearts became cluttered with grief.

We started our fertility treatments and procedures in 2018 after unusefully trying naturally for some time. (By we, I mean, my wife, who is the most amazing and strong woman. She’s the one who has to go through all of the invasive procedures physically.)

By 2020, we were running out of options and growing weary of manufacturing hope every single month, only to have it crashed all over again.

We went through IUI treatments in our fertility process – an assisted treatment through a fertility clinic, and those didn’t work.

Our last option was to do IVF, which in its simplest form (there’s nothing simple about it) is when they take her egg, my sample (as they call it), and put them together in a lab. The hope is they develop into an embryo that the doctor can then put back inside my wife. Unfortunately, our first attempt wasn’t looking promising, so they had to do something called a rescue IUI.

Then we went back to do IVF a second time. It worked, but we got only four embryos out of that. The hope is for a minimum of 10-20.

Unfortunately, after transferring two of the four embryos into my wife, she had a miscarriage. The other embryos didn’t make it in the lab either. So that was our last medical intervention.

During global trauma, social unrest and, deep grief and pain that the world was experiencing together, we were also experiencing another level of that within our own home – within our place of peace, security, and comfort.

I found that everything I depended on or believed in to help me through hard times didn’t work when the hard time came. What I believed in to help me through the challenging times was not an effective strategy in the hard times. And so, I lost myself because I couldn’t fathom trying to help other people with techniques that weren’t working for me.

Stepping Back

After an accumulation of so much heartache and disappointment, I stepped back. From my podcast. From the personal development world. From life coaching. From all of it because I lost myself! I knew that I could not show up as my most authentic self when lost.

I felt like I was wandering in a wilderness all alone, and I didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t get high ground to see anything. I was deep in grief and depression. I became so bitter and cynical that I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. It turns out that is what I needed.

Finding Myself Through Grief

I needed to discover what was true for me. I needed to decide what I was going to attach meaning to and what I wasn’t. I needed to find out who I wanted to be and how I wanted to show up in the world. So I sat with everything that I was feeling.

I’m an Enneagram Nine, and for those of you who know about the Enneagram, you might understand that nines like to shove things down. I often joke with my friends to “shove that shit down because it isn’t helping.” I don’t actually mean that, and I don’t do that anymore. At one point in my life, I would have, but that’s not an effective strategy. So for almost a year, I haven’t been shoving anything down. Instead, I’ve been feeling it, welcoming it, and allowing it to have a place in my life.

Let’s start with what this looked like for grief and me. Grief wasn’t something that I had experienced on the level that I experienced over the last year of my life. It was something that I didn’t have to deal with, which I say from a place of humility and gratitude. I haven’t had a lot of loss in my life that has caused me to feel incredible grief, and if I did, I shoved it down and didn’t remember.

But now, I had grief suddenly showing up every day in my home, in my safe place. I wanted so badly to shove it down, to push it away, to ignore it, and not to have anything to do with it. But I couldn’t do that!

We can’t ignore the feelings that come and expect to move beyond them. They will take up residence in your mind, body, and heart until you acknowledge them. You have to let them know they are welcome and allowed to be here, but only for a certain amount of time–until what they have come to help with is complete.

Grief became a welcome friend.

I started to look at grief, not as the enemy but as a friend. She is a friend that will hold me during the darkest times. Grief is the most persistent and patient friend that I’ve ever had. I started to see grief as intuitive, way more intuitive than I was because grief knows when to show up, but often we push her away. We try to lock the door and keep her out because even though grief is here to help, she is just a reminder of what we’ve lost. But it’s okay because grief is patient. She gives us the space we need until we’re ready to let her in.

You have to let grief in because, without her, you can’t move forward. Without her guidance, you will stay trapped within your emotional prison.

You have to allow her to do the work she’s there to do. She’s not on a timeline. She’s not in a rush. At some point, you’ll be ready for her to take a step back, and she will, and, and it’ll seem for a while that she’s gone, but you’re going to bump into grief again from time to time. You’ll remember why she’s there, and every time that she shows up again, it’s going to be challenging. It’s going to be challenging because grief reminds you of what you’ve lost, but she’s there to comfort you and to hold you in the darkest times. When I realized that grief wasn’t the enemy and that it was okay to feel how I was feeling and let grief have a place in my life, I learned so much.

What we think is there to hurt us, is there to help us.

You can hear someone talk about the grief they’ve experienced in a situation. Still, until you’re walking through it yourself, you’re not taking that intellectual knowledge and making it a helpful real-life experience.
Until you walk through grief in your way, with your own hands, and your own feet, and your own heart, you don’t know how to handle grief. And you know what? I don’t even want to say “handle grief” because grief is not something you handle. Grief is something you welcome.

When you learn to welcome what you think is there to hurt you, you realize that it’s there to help you. This idea is true of so many feelings, emotions, and situations we face. We think they’re there to hurt us. We believe they are there to harm us. We believe they’re there to scare us. We believe they’re there to destroy us or our relationships or destroy our families or destroy our life, but we only think that because we haven’t taken the time to sit down and ask, “What are you doing here? What is it that you want me to learn? What is it that you’re here to do? Teach me.”

Grief has helped me find my way back. Grief has helped me realign myself onto a path I want to be on, and I’m excited to walk. And it isn’t because the grief is gone. It’s not. It’s because now I have another friend, and she goes by the name Grief, to help through the hard times.

When you shove down all the feelings, all the emotion, all the pain, all the sadness, all the grief, all the heartache, you end up alone with yourself. When you’re in the middle of pain, suffering, and despair, even if you’re not acknowledging it, the worst thing to be is alone.

You have to begin to welcome all of these things that are happening to you. You have to start to accept them, acknowledge them, and sit with them because they are there to help. They are not there to hurt.

I lost myself, and I’m starting to find who I am again.

As I learn and find myself, I hope that you who also feel lost, scattered, and like you’re wandering around can find yourself and return home.