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In the span of less than a year, I lost almost everything I had built my life around, and everything I counted on for my stability and comfort.
I walked away from my career in tech and took time off work for the first time in my life. The life I had carefully constructed — the home, the people, the sense of who I was and where I was headed — came apart in ways I hadn’t planned for. And my dad died. Right after I’d gotten used to having him in my life again, I lost him all over again.
And this didn’t happen slowly or one at a time, in a way I could brace for and absorb. It happened all at once, in the way that life sometimes does — where it doesn’t ask you if you’re ready, it just arrives, and suddenly you’re standing in the wreckage of what used to be your life wondering how any of this happened and what exactly you’re supposed to do now.
From the outside, I imagine it looked like collapse. Like someone whose life was falling apart. Like a situation that called for concern.
And it was (and is) hard. I won’t smooth over that part.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand, slowly, on the other side of it:
Sometimes what looks like falling apart is actually falling open.
I’ve been thinking a lot about pain lately. Not just the kind that happens to us — the loss, the grief, the moments that knock the air clean out of your body. But the other kind too. The kind that’s woven into the cost of living a full life.
Because here’s what I believe: if you choose a big life — if you love deeply, commit fully, show up with your whole self — you are also signing up for more pain. Not because you’re unlucky. Because you’re willing.
Willing to love things that might end. Willing to open doors not knowing what’s on the other side. Willing to build something real, knowing that real things can be lost.
The alternative is to stay small. To protect yourself. To never fully open. And maybe you avoid certain heartbreaks that way. But you also miss the things that make life feel worth living — the relationships that change you, the chapters that shape who you become, the moments that feel almost too beautiful to exist.
I used to think pain was something to get through. Something to endure on the way to the other side. I had a high pain tolerance — I’d built it slowly, quietly, out of necessity — and I wore it like a badge.
People would tell me I was strong. My instinct was always to say: what choice did I have?
But the truth is, we always have a choice.
We can let pain make us bitter. Or we can let it make us bigger.
When everything fell away at once, I didn’t have the option of managing it. There was too much, coming too fast. I couldn’t hold it together and quietly fall apart later. Later came immediately.
And so for the first time in my life, I had to actually be with it.
Not perform my way through it. Not endure it at arm’s length and call that strength. Actually sit inside the feeling — the grief, the fear, the disorientation of not knowing who I was without all the things I had built — and stay there long enough to let it move through me.
I found my way into work that went deeper than I’d gone before. Not just talking about feelings but actually locating them in my body. The tightness in the chest. The weight behind the sternum. The place in your throat where grief lives when you’re trying to hold it back. Somatic work. Emotional processing that doesn’t just analyze the pain but actually moves through it.
What I found there surprised me.
Most of my suffering wasn’t coming from the hard things that were happening. It was coming from my resistance to feeling them. From a part of me that had learned — early, efficiently, out of necessity — that emotions were problems to be solved rather than information to be received.
When I stopped trying to fix the feeling and started letting it exist, something shifted. Not immediately. Not dramatically. Slowly, like light coming into a room you’d kept dark for a long time.
Pain as signal. Not punishment.
Here’s something I’ve started doing when the grief gets loud:
I ask myself a different question. Not why did this happen to me — but what role did this play in my story?
Because when I look back at the people and chapters that I’ve lost over the years — even the ones I’m still grieving — I can see how they shaped me. How they opened parts of my life that might not have existed otherwise. How they were never meant to be forever. They were meant to be exactly what they were.
A chapter.
And I’ve started telling myself that I’m lucky. Not in a forced way. Not as a performance of positivity. But as a reframe I can return to when things get heavy. Lucky that my life has been full enough to include things worth grieving. Lucky that I loved people and places and versions of myself deeply enough that losing them hurt. Because that hurt is just love with nowhere to go — and love at that volume means something.
When I started telling that story instead of the other one, something began to shift. I started noticing the beauty of what had existed, not just the pain of what ended. I started seeing my life not as something that had been diminished, but as something still unfolding.
More ahead of me than behind me.
I won’t tell you I have it all figured out. Some mornings the uncertainty of my life feels enormous. I wake up and the ground beneath me still feels newer than I’d like, and I have to consciously choose not to spin that into catastrophe.
But I know something now that I didn’t know before all of this:
I know how to come back to myself.
I know what it feels like to be in my body instead of just in my head. I know the difference between numbing and resting. Between endurance and actual peace. I know that my emotions aren’t emergencies — they’re messengers, and they deserve to be heard, not managed.
And I know, in a way I couldn’t have learned any other way, that I can lose almost everything and still be okay.
Still be me. That there is a version of myself underneath all the things I built and lost that is steadier than I knew, and more resilient than I gave her credit for, and — this is the part that still surprises me — not too late.
Not too late to begin again. Not too late to become something new. Not too late to let what fell away make room for what’s coming.
This is what I think they don’t tell you about hard years:
They are not detours. They are not evidence that you chose wrong or that life is working against you. They are the cost of having been present enough to have something to lose.
The work mattered. The chapters mattered. The home mattered. My dad mattered — matters — more than I have words for.
And because they mattered, losing them broke my heart. And because they broke my heart, I had to learn to be with myself in a way I never had before. And because I learned to be with myself, I found something on the other side of all that loss that I don’t think I could have found any other way.
Myself. The quieter version. The one who isn’t performing. The one who has stopped waiting to feel ready and started just showing up anyway.
Chaos creates space. Endings make room. And sometimes the walls coming down aren’t collapse — they’re renovation.
The cost of a big life is real. I’ve paid it, and it was steep, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But I’ve started to believe there’s a flip side that doesn’t get talked about enough.
The gift of a big life — of a life with enough room in it for real loss — is that it also has enough room for real transformation. You don’t get one without the other. You can’t protect yourself from the cost and still receive the gift.
So you choose. Over and over again, you choose.
To stay open. To not abandon yourself in the hard moments — because those are exactly the moments when you need yourself most. To let pain be a signal instead of a sentence. To ask what this chapter was for, not just what it cost.
And slowly, without fully realizing it, you find out who you are.
Not the person who had it together. Not the person you were planning to become once everything settled down.
The one who was there all along, waiting for enough space to finally show up.
I’m still meeting her. But I love her now.
And that feels, against all odds, like enough.
With love,
Marissa
❤️❤️❤️