The mourning of a new dawn

on dancing with joy & the whispers of grief

The beloved tree | San Francisco, CA — October 2023

1,326 days. It’s been 3 years, 7 months, and 17 days since we first moved into this apartment.

We stumbled upon this apartment when we were in desperate need of a sanctuary as the world was sheltering in place in 2020. After months of staying indoors and distancing from friends, this apartment offered us a porch to breathe fresh air from and access Golden Gate Park on a moment’s desire to get outdoors.

A lot of life has happened here. It was in this apartment that my now husband, Ryan, and I decided we were ready to spend our lives together. We got engaged. I left jobs. I started new jobs. We drove across the country and back. I backpacked. We got married. We fell in love with the Bay Area all over again. We found and rooted into community. I started this newsletter. I trained and ran my third marathon.

I lost myself. I journeyed inwards. I found myself. I bet on myself. I became more myself.

Through all these seasons of life, this apartment has been the safe haven we’ve come home to over and over again.

And today, as we pack our final bags, I’m filled with joy, anticipation, and grief as I say farewell to a home that has allowed me to shed and step into more versions of myself than I can count.

guided by grief

About a year ago, Ryan and I had a sense that it would soon be time to move on. While this apartment had been the perfect home for us as we weathered COVID lockdowns and learned how to build a life together in San Francisco, the world was coming back to life. We were ready to invest in our community and begin hosting much more. We created a list of must haves with more space at the top of the page, not willing to trade this place for a home that didn’t check all the boxes.

Many places have come and gone on the market since — none of them feeling like our next home. Then, a month ago, Craigslist delivered me an email with an apartment listing. I felt a surge of excitement as I scrolled through the photos and immediately sent it to Ryan with a text that read: “👀 👀 👀” Was our new apartment finally on the market?

Several days later, we walked into the apartment, eager to see if this was, in fact, our new home. After opportunistically searching for a year, I expected to feel some sense of excitement and knowing as I walked through the unit. A feeling of coming home.

Instead, I felt…nothing. The apartment had everything we were looking for, but I couldn’t imagine our life there. I left the tour feeling waves of disappointment. A comedown after all the anticipation. Surely this wasn’t our place, my body would have known.

As we biked home, I felt an unsettling numbness. Ryan kept pointing out different features of the apartment that lined up with our list, but all I kept thinking was I thought I’d know. I thought I’d know. When we got home, I sat down for an evening meditation. As soon as I closed my eyes, I was hit with a surge of grief and sadness.

All at once, the weight of the situation hit me. If we had just walked the halls of our new home, we would soon be leaving this home. I hadn’t given myself a moment to process what finding a new apartment might feel like. What it meant to leave behind the apartment and the room I’d spent more time in than any other place in my life besides my childhood home — a place that I still have the luxury of going back to visit from time to time.

I had imagined feelings of aliveness and certainty, but instead, I was met with whispers of grief.

The next morning, I sat down for my morning meditation and was surprised to be met with vivid visions — this time, of the new apartment. As my body started processing and integrating the grief that had emerged the night before, it freed up space to welcome in what our life in the new apartment could look like. I saw visions of hosting friends and family for salons and dinners. I saw our people walking through the door and into the apartment. I saw us beginning to raise our family.

Slowly, then all at once, I felt a sense of peace wash over me. We had found our next home.

encounters with Grief

Growing up, I associated Grief with a capital G and as a heaviness that I could not bear. I reserved Grieving for honoring those who had moved on from this lifetime.

My first encounter with Grief happened in 2006 when my favorite English teacher unexpectedly passed. In response to the devastating news, our high school opened up the auditorium to give space for his former students and those effected by his passing to process their heartbreak. As I sat in the auditorium with friends that first day, I came face to face with the suffocating sadness that is the reality of losing someone.

I remember feeling a sense of emptiness and regret, wishing that I’d made the trip back to his classroom to tell him how much he inspired me. Did he know I felt indebted to him for all the confidence he’d instilled in me to continue pursuing my love for writing?

In many ways, I was fortunate that my first encounter with Grief was in community with others. I didn’t have to act like everything was fine when it felt like the world stopped spinning. I didn’t have to hide my sadness when happy memories of his class flooded me. I didn’t have to explain why I felt so compelled to write him a letter to say goodbye. I had the permission to grieve in public and witness my friends grieve alongside me. As time went on, I felt a sense of collective healing as our Grief integrated with our reality and we learned what it meant to carry on his legacy.

Several years later, during my senior year of high school, my grandfather unexpectedly passed. It’s hard to convey the impact that losing him had on me despite not knowing him as deeply as I wished. He lived in China and given the fact that it was Advanced Placement (AP) exam season, it was decided that it was best not to disrupt our day-to-day. My mom flew to join her family in Beijing as he was laid to rest. My brother, dad, and I stayed back in the US to mourn him.

It’s around this time I have distinct memories of isolating myself from the world. I feared uttering to anyone that my grandfather had passed and breathe life into my new reality. Instead, I wore black for a whole month and listened to my emo soundtracks on repeat. I eventually mustered up the courage to share with friends what had happened, but felt deeply disconnected from the world around me. Unlike my first encounter with Grief, it felt like this time, I had been pushed into a void of despair alone. At home, we each grappled with the pain in our own way, but we were worlds apart from our extended family.

Over the weeks, my relationship with Grief became untenable. The only way to the other side seemed to be to armor up and numb my way through it. Eventually, I did just that in an effort to move on with my life and wrap up my senior year.

numbing ourselves to the tune of glad, sad, and mad

And numb my way through it I did. Over the years, as people I love have passed, I’ve found myself unable to feel the heartbreak of it all. While I have felt deep sadness, there’s a part of me that will not allow myself to dive into the ocean of despair where I found myself following my grandfather’s passing.

As a result, I also learned to suppress the everyday grief that comes with being a human and moving through life. The grief that is the changing of seasons, the passing of time, the arrival of a birthday, the emerging of a new year, the moving of apartments, the acknowledgement of the lives that could have been.

Instead, I found myself avoiding the truth of our humanity and feeling nothing at all.

And I don’t think I’m alone. In Atlas of the Heart, a book dedicated to exploring 87 emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human, Brené Brown shares a study where her team surveyed 7500 people and asked them to “identify all of the emotions that they could recognize and name when they’re experiencing them.

The average was three: glad, sad, and mad — or, as they were more often written, happy, sad, and pissed off.”

As a society, when we distance ourselves from vast and complex emotions like grief, we end up minimizing our capacity to feel and come alive. When I don’t make space for little g grief, I certainly don’t know how to hug into big g Grief. Like a muscle that goes unused, my grief muscle atrophied over the years.

touching grief & embracing lightness

Most of my life, I’ve felt an indescribable feeling of sadness when my birthday comes around in April. Now, I know that it’s grief.

There’s something simultaneously haunting and beautiful about the death of the last year as we ring in a new birthday. The liminal space between the last 365 days and the next 365. It’s the lack of permission to sink into the duality of these feelings that has kept me out of connection with myself on past birthdays.

When my emotional vernacular was I’m mad, sad, or glad, I didn’t have the ability to process the emotional fluidity of my human experience.

For so long, I didn’t allow myself to touch grief because I’ve associated it with a heaviness that I can’t bear, depriving myself from embracing the everyday grief that can be as light as the dawn of a new day. Everyday grief is not just about saying goodbye, it’s also about saying hello and welcoming new flavors of possibility, wonder, and awe into our lives.

Tapping into the range of our emotional fluidity is about recognizing that “the night is darkest just before dawn,” but also that the day is often most beautiful just before dusk. To feel the full spectrum of our emotions is to allow ourselves to freely navigate to the other side and back.

the gravity of it all

As I’ve processed our move and packed up the apartment, I’m honoring the lightness that is the grief I’m feeling as we walk through the apartment one last time. It’s not too dissimilar from the grief I imagine I would’ve felt if I understood the gravity of what leaving home for college meant as an 18-year old.

It’s the grief of knowing how much I’ll miss this neighborhood and the excitement in knowing we can soon host to our heart’s content. It’s the grief of knowing that I’m going to miss the brief walk to Golden Gate Park and the anticipation of building a new routine around the park at the end of our new street. It’s the grief of knowing that I’ll miss Karl the Fog blowing in, making us cold and miserable some days, and the thrill of returning to a sunny neighborhood where we can once again watch Karl beautifully blanket this neighborhood from afar. It’s the grief of knowing just how much I’ll miss sitting on this porch writing under this redwood and the anticipation of finding a new giant tree to make memories under.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to embracing the lightness of everyday grief and giving ourselves the permission to flow freely between lightness and darkness. Let me know in the comments what everyday grief you’re honoring or say hi on Twitter :)

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like Dancing with our shadows.

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing drafts of this essay and for being by my side as I learned how to unthaw the numbness and touch grief again.