When the Spark No Longer Felt Dangerous

There was a season where grief occupied almost every corner of me.

I could still function. I could still lead. I could still show up with purpose and momentum. But underneath it all, grief was the dominant frequency — shaping how I saw the world, how I held my body, how I imagined the future. Even my growth was born inside it. Motivation and mourning lived side by side, inseparable. I didn’t know how to have one without the other.

And then—something changed.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. But in a way that was undeniable. Almost like a heartbeat.

I felt the spark again.

It wasn’t forced optimism or a decision to “move on.” It was a quiet internal recognition: I’m still here. Not just surviving. Not just pushing forward out of obligation. But alive. Curious. Oriented toward what’s next in a way that felt natural instead of strained.

For the first time in a long time, grief wasn’t leading the conversation. It was still present—but it had softened. It had moved out of the foreground of my every day. And in that space, excitement returned. Not reckless excitement. Grounded excitement. The kind that comes when you reconnect with who you actually are beneath the weight of loss.

This season I’m in now feels different because it’s honest. I’m no longer trying to separate the past from the present or pretend that grief didn’t shape me. It did. Deeply. But it doesn’t get to define me anymore.

There’s an in-between space that so many of us get stuck in—looking toward the future while still grieving the past. It’s complex. Tender. Easy to misunderstand. We tell ourselves we should be “over it” by now, or that hope somehow invalidates what we’ve lost. But that’s not how healing works.

The present deserves acknowledgment. The past deserves respect. And growth requires room for both.

What shifted for me wasn’t the disappearance of grief—it was my relationship to it. I stopped trying to outrun it. I stopped treating it like something I needed to conquer. I learned how to hold it without letting it hold me.

And in doing that, I came back to myself.

Not the version of me from before the loss—but a truer one. More self-aware. More emotionally fluent. More grounded in my own nervous system. Able to sit with feelings, name them, and still move forward with clarity and confidence.

I’ve written before about how last year held some of the hardest moments of my life alongside some of the most meaningful. Today, I can say this with certainty: I’m back in that space of forward energy. The belief in what’s possible has returned. The excitement about what I’m building—personally and professionally—feels real again.

If you’re in a season where grief is all you can see right now, I want you to know this: the spark doesn’t disappear forever. Sometimes it’s just waiting for enough safety, honesty, and space to return.

And when it does, you’ll recognize it.

Because it feels like coming home.