It is not merely an emotional space. It transcends emotion, changes our physicality, and moves through the very fabric of our being. We cannot talk about loss without talking about love. Love changes us long before loss claims its piece. And love changes us twice: first when we open our heart, mind, and soul to the touch of another, and then again when we learn to carry the fingerprints they leave upon us with grace and tenderness.

Love changes us irrevocably.

We are creatures of a temporary world and a temporary nature, yet we love as though permanence exists. I like to think permanence does exist, just not in this form. I am not a spiritual guru or master of anything, but I know in my bones that love is never truly lost. It may seek and find no home, but it continues to exist all the same.

A friend asked me some time ago what I thought love was. It is a difficult question to answer, and I do not have a particularly sexy response. But there is something profound about being witnessed in your entirety and apologetically accepted by another. However long that lasts—an hour, a decade, a lifetime.

Love is not merely a physical drive or an emotional connection. It is also a twining of souls. A bond formed, rightly or wrongly, that shapes the architecture of connection throughout our lives. We are relational creatures, carrying years, sometimes decades, of experiences that influence how we connect. Love exists in family, friendships, lovers, animals, places, and communities. It is a powerful force that deserves reverence and care.

But oh, how careless we can be with it.

There is always a balance in life, the yin and the yang. Where love can be pure, blinding, kind, and expansive, so too can grief, pain, suffering, and despair consume us. We cannot have one without the other.

So how do we learn to walk through the dark night of the soul?

How is it that some people continue forward carrying hearts that have been broken open, love suddenly homeless, searching endlessly for somewhere to claim solace?

I do not think we truly learn how, at least not in the way we learn from a course or a book.

I think we survive it one breath at a time.

In the beginning, grief is a tidal wave. It consumes everything in its path. It alters the landscape of who we are. The things that once felt important suddenly seem trivial. Time becomes distorted. The future we imagined fractures before our eyes. We find ourselves standing in the ruins of a life that no longer exists, trying to make sense of the pieces like a broken puzzle that somehow arrived missing some of the parts.

This is the first truth of grief: It asks us to let go of who we were.

Not because we want to. Not because we are ready. But because love has changed our shape and we can no longer return to the person we once were. A part of us dies alongside our loss. It leaves behind a scar, a story, and a choice.

For a ridiculously long time, I thought healing meant finding a way back. Back to happiness. Back to certainty. Back to the version of me that existed before my heart was broken open.

But grief is not a bridge backwards. It is a path forward. A path our human selves never consciously agreed to walk. A path that often feels impossible. And somehow, we continue.

I have often wondered what level of self-preservation exists within us. Why do we cling to life with such ferocity when it can hurt so much? Is it biology? A nervous system wired for survival? Consciousness claiming its place in our journey? Some spiritual traditions speak of an innate drive towards growth and expression. Others might call it purpose. Or it is love? A quiet force within us that insists we remain, even after everything has changed.

I do not know the answer and have too many questions about fate, destiny, and freewill.

What I do know is that the tension between self-preservation and surrender can be brutal. Part of us knows we must let go of our former selves. Another part desperately wants to keep them alive. We cling to old identities, old stories, old versions of who we were because they are familiar. Because they feel safe. Becoming someone new requires us to step into unfamiliar territory.

At some point, grief presents us with a choice.

Instead of preserving the person we used to be, we begin preserving the life that still wants to emerge from the ashes. What I have come to understand is that grief is not asking us to stop loving or erase what was. It is asking us to develop a new relationship with love. To carry the story, the scars, and the memories. The love remains where person may not. The relationship may not or the place may not. But the love itself remains, seeking expression.

What if this is what it means to metabolise grief?

Not to get over it, not to leave it behind, but to allow it to move through us. Allowing pain to become wisdom, longing to become tenderness, surrendering to heartbreak until it softens into compassion.

The love that once was, now homeless, becomes part of who we are. Seeking and forever changed.

Grief that cannot move becomes suffering. Grief that is witnessed becomes healing. Grief that is honoured becomes devotion. And grief that is metabolised becomes love in a different form.

The dark night of the soul is not a punishment. It is an initiation. An invitation into deeper humanity. Into greater compassion. Into a more profound understanding of what it means to be alive.

None of us escape loss. Every one of us will love. Every one of us will lose. Every one of us will one day find ourselves standing in the wreckage of something precious. And when that day comes, the task is not to search endlessly for the missing pieces. The task is to become someone capable of carrying what remains. To carry the love. To carry the memories. To carry the fingerprints left upon our soul. Not as a burden, but as evidence that we were here.

That we loved.

And that, for however brief a moment in this temporary world, we allowed ourselves to be changed.

Subscribe now

Where endings and beginnings align

Nothing hands us our arses faster than loss.

If you’ve ever felt the universal bitch slap of tragedy and found yourself wading through your own primordial soup of grief, confusion, and reinvention, then this space might be for you.

I didn’t set out to do grief work.

My background was in brain health, naturopathic support, assistive technology, and legal advocacy. I spent years helping people navigate complex diagnoses, cognitive changes, and practical challenges. Grief wasn’t on my professional radar.

Until one particular man sat opposite me and quietly changed the direction of my work.

He was doing everything right. And I mean everything.

He ate well—the elusive perfect client in a profession where nobody actually follows the recommendations. He exercised. He kept his mind active. He had a loving partner, meaningful community connections, legal affairs neatly organised, and assistive supports in place for the areas where his brain occasionally faltered. Everything that we could have possibly worked on through the limitations of my role, he was already a pro.

Yet despite all of this, he continued to struggle.

I remember sitting there trying to work out what I had missed. Running through every intervention, every possibility, every piece of the puzzle. Nothing made sense.

A young occupational therapist was shadowing me that day. She looked just as puzzled. As the appointment unfolded, the conversation drifted away from symptoms and strategies and into his life. That’s when he told us about his wife. She had died from cancer ten years earlier. She was the love of his life.

He cared deeply for his current partner whom he had met in a grief group, but some loves leave fingerprints on your soul that never fade. They become part of your architecture.

As he spoke, the room changed.

The sorrow wasn’t just emotional; it felt physical. Tangible. It had weight and texture. The pain etched across his face radiated through every hesitant sentence. Ten years had passed, yet his grief sat beside him as though it had arrived that morning. And suddenly I realised there was an entire dimension of human experience I wasn’t accounting for.

What does trauma do to the brain?

How does unresolved grief shape our nervous system?

What happens to our bodies when loss is too big, too sudden, too overwhelming to metabolise?

I started remembering referrals I’d received from a consultant who routinely documented childhood trauma histories alongside medical concerns. At the time, most of us thought he was simply being unusually thorough. Turns out he was seeing something the rest of us weren’t. He was connecting dots. The rest of us were still looking at the pieces.

Fast forward a year and there I was—deep in the research, deep in my own losses, and very much out of my depth.

Learning. Unlearning. Pulling apart old stories. Trying to understand grief not as a problem to solve, but as an experience to witness.

It’s been messy, bumpy and at times it’s been completely feral.

But I’ve come to suspect that within grief lives something far bigger than sorrow.

Grief changes us.

It dismantles identities.

It asks impossible questions.

It strips away what no longer fits and leaves us standing in the space between who we were and who we are becoming.

That’s the territory I’m interested in exploring here.

Not just loss, but transformation.

Not just endings, but beginnings.

Not just grief, but the strange, sacred, often untidy process of becoming.

Because while grief can feel profoundly isolating, I don’t believe we’re meant to carry it alone.

We don’t survive in isolation. We certainly don’t thrive in it either.

Yet somehow we’ve learned to grieve as though solitude is the only acceptable path.

Maybe it’s time we talked differently.

Welcome.