In 2022 I lost my partner of six years and my grandmother in the same year. I am not going to pretend I have tidy words for what that was. There were months I do not fully remember. There were panic attacks that came out of nowhere and grief that arrived like weather. I looked fine on the outside. Inside, I was barely holding on.
I am writing this not because I have it figured out, but because some of what that season taught me is the reason this whole brand exists.
Faith did not erase the pain
I expected my faith to take the pain away. It did not. What it did was sit with me inside the pain, which turned out to be something better. God did not rush me. He did not require me to perform gratitude I did not feel yet. He met me in the actual, not the polished, and slowly He carried what I could not.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.Matthew 5:4
I needed tools, not just verses
I had the verses. What I did not have was language for what my body was doing, or a way to regulate when the panic came. I had to learn that grief lives in the nervous system, not just the heart. I had to learn to breathe before I could pray. I had to learn that rest was not quitting. Those tools are the ones I eventually wrote down, because I could not believe no one had handed them to me sooner.
Healing is not a straight road
Some days I felt almost normal. Other days I was back at the start. I learned to stop measuring my progress by whether the sadness was gone and start measuring it by whether I was being honest, staying connected, and taking one faithful step at a time.
If you are in a season like that right now, I am not going to tell you it gets easy. I will tell you that you can survive it, that God is closer than He feels, and that you are allowed to heal slowly. That is the whole reason I am still on this journey, and the whole reason I built a place for other women to be on it too.
With you on the journey,
Autumn