the beginning of the words

I have written in journals since I was 19. 

I have documented my relationships and experiences for the best part of 7 years.

I have delved into my emotions - I have written about falling in love, and out of it, about becoming an aunty, about being a woman and a friend and a sister, a daughter and I have kept them piled neatly together in my bedroom.

In my 7th year of writing in sentences and life stages, with rhyming words and adjectives and quirky phrases - I lost my words completely.

I met grief, and grief ran away with my words.
It ran away with my ability to articulate and analyse. I was just a girl standing in the middle of a tornado of moments spiraling around me.

I watched my mum take her last breath, and it amplified the lingering, underlying depth of grief in every part of my life.

In twelve months, I have been forced to grieve friendships, chapters of my career, deep love, my fundamental understanding of home, my spiritual beliefs, money, my body, and above all else the life of my mum - grief stripped me to the core of everything I have ever known about living, until I woke up and saw a different woman staring back at me, one morning in January.

I have been forced to grieve the woman I was before grief, and meet the me after grief version of myself.

That one morning in January I found my words again, and they poured out of me in their honest, clumsy truth.
That one morning in January, I realised my mum lives on in the art I create, in the words so desperately pleading to be shared from within me, in the painful, beautiful reality of rebuilding myself.

My mum lives on in the GOOD she left, the GOOD she created, and the GOOD we carry on living with.

My words have gifted me a chance to see the GOOD in this grief.