Grief Doesn’t Take Turns
A follow-up to “Blessed and Broken in the Same Breath.” Still unfinished. So am I.
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Last time I told you I was learning to let the new thing be its own thing instead of a stand-in for the one I lost.
I wasn’t done. I’m still not. Let me tell you what I did this week.
I applied to go back.
To the place where I grew up, professionally. The place that made me. I gave that place years and it gave me more — the people, the proving ground, the version of myself I became inside those walls. I saw a posting, and some grieving part of me filled out the application before the rational part could get a hand on the wheel. A position out in the field. Start over. Work my way back to something. As if back were a direction that still existed.
Here is what I know in daylight. It isn’t realistic. The chapter closed for real reasons, and I closed it. I’ve grieved it like you grieve any great love that runs its course — not because anyone was the villain, but because the season ended and I could feel that it had. I know all of this. I knew it while I was clicking submit.
So why did I do it.
Because I wasn’t applying to the job. I was applying to the team. The specific people, the specific time, the brutal days we walked out of together still smiling. Grief doesn’t read the fine print. It just goes looking for a door marked back, and it doesn’t care that the room behind it is gone — that the people scattered, the time moved on, that what I’m aching for isn’t a position I can reapply to. It’s a moment. And moments don’t take applications.
I drove around with a question for two days. If they called tomorrow and offered it to me — and I knew, for certain, that taking it would not reassemble the people I miss — would I still want it?
No.
I felt the answer before I could argue with it. Not on a couch, working it out. At work. In the middle of trying to settle into the new place, insert myself, let myself belong there. The answer arrived through my hands while I wasn’t looking.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about letting go. It isn’t a decision you make once and file away. You re-choose it. Sometimes in a parking lot, against your own worst impulse, with the application already sitting in someone’s inbox. Moving on isn’t a door that closes behind you. It’s a door you keep choosing not to walk back through, even on the days your hand is already on the knob.
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And yet.
My hours at the new place are limited. Part-time, by design — because I built a business, and I needed the room to grow it. That was the plan, and it’s still the plan, most days.
But lately I keep picking up shifts I don’t strictly need. More than I meant to. I tell myself it’s coverage, or being useful, or just saying yes. The truth is plainer than that. I’m trying it on for size.
I’m stuck between two places, unsure where I’m going or where I belong, so I keep showing up to the new one to find out whether it could be home. Home home. The kind you don’t audition for a role — the kind that’s just yours. I won’t oversell it here, because some things you protect by not saying them too loud too soon. But I’ll say this much: I want it to be. More than I expected to. And the wanting surprises me a little, every time I notice it.
Both things, at once. Of course.
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And there’s a third thing in the room I haven’t named.
The business. The one I built from nothing but blood, sweat, tears, and every hour I should have been sleeping. I made a whole language for the invisible work of leadership out of the rubble of what broke me, and it’s good, and it’s mine in a way nothing has ever been mine. Nobody handed it to me. I bled for it. I am not willing to set it down.
It also turned me into the kind of person who reads neuroscience for fun — physiology, psychology, the brain under pressure — self-taught through more hours of academic papers and online textbooks than I’ll admit to here. Anyone who knows me is laughing right now. I don’t do anything halfway, and I apparently couldn’t build a business without first trying to earn an honorary degree in how humans actually work.
So now there are three things pulling at once: a past I loved and left, a present I’m trying on for size, and a thing I built with my own two hands and refuse to let go of. And here I am again — that strange, disorienting, where-the-hell-am-I-going place I keep landing in. Building something real and standing at the crossroads in the same breath.
Both. Always both.
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Here is what I keep circling back to.
I keep waiting to be done. Done grieving the old place before I’m allowed to belong to the new one. Done missing what was before I’m permitted to want what is. Done being unsure, before I’m allowed to build. As if there’s a clean handoff, a day the old thing ends and the new thing is cleared to begin.
There isn’t. That’s the part I got wrong.
Loss and landing are not opposites. They don’t take turns. You don’t finish grieving one thing before you’re allowed to belong to the next, or finish being lost before you’re allowed to build something that matters. They happen at once, in the same breath, in the same body — the ache for what’s gone and the quiet pull toward something that might be mine, beating side by side like they were always meant to.
The new place didn’t have to wait its turn behind the old one. The business didn’t have to wait for me to feel certain. None of it was ever going to resolve into a single tidy answer. It only had to be allowed to coexist — the grief, the building, the not-knowing, all of it in the same chest at the same time.
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So that’s where I am. Not healed. Not tidy. I applied to my own past this week and talked myself back out of it. I’m picking up extra shifts at a place I’m not sure I’m allowed to call mine yet, hoping it’ll tell me. I’m pouring myself into a business I bled to build. Grieving one chapter, trying on another, and constructing a third with my own hands — all at the same time.
If you’re there too — losing and landing and building all at once, grieving what was while something new quietly proves it’s good to you, standing at a crossroads you can’t seem to walk out of — hear me. You are not betraying what you loved by belonging somewhere new. You are not failing because the answer hasn’t arrived yet. You are not lost just because you’re standing in more than one place at once.
Grief doesn’t take turns. Neither does building. It all just shares the breath, and the chest, and the day — and asks you to keep walking anyway.
I’m walking. Some days my hand is on the old knob. I keep choosing not to turn it.
