Releasing, Resting, and Trusting the Soil of Change

Grief lives in my body, whispering that I can’t keep carrying what harms me. This season is asking me to release what no longer serves so I can begin again. My body and my madness are calling me to tend to them before they tend to me, and I am listening.

We don’t often talk openly about the grief that lives inside our work. Not just the personal losses we carry, but the quieter grief of watching our movements change. The ache of seeing what once felt radical lose its sharp edges. The sorrow of watching what was communal become professionalized and controlled.

For me, this grief is not abstract. It shows up in the recognition that I stayed too long in places, roles, and relationships that harmed me. I told myself I owed them more of me, that if I kept giving, they might finally give back. But people and systems have shown me, again and again, that they only cared when it was convenient. I cannot keep abandoning myself to stay where I am not truly held.

We are taught to keep going, to stay busy, to keep fixing what is broken. To measure our worth by how much we can hold and endure. Burnout becomes proof of commitment. Exhaustion becomes the evidence of care.

But some things must end. We need to name that. And sometimes the ending is not something that happens to us, it is a choice. A boundary drawn from grief and from clarity. This is my season to focus on me. To loosen my grip on what no longer nourishes me, and to let it fall away.

And I grieve the parts of myself I gave away in the process. I grieve the years I tried to hold systems and people together who were never holding me. Letting go is not failure. It is survival. It is choosing life over depletion.

Naming what is ending is a form of truth-telling. It is refusing the story that if I just worked harder or cared more, I could keep everything alive. It is admitting that no amount of effort can transform a system that was never built to hold me in my fullness.

The systems promise safety if we play by their rules. If we get the credential, secure the funding, sit at the right table, then change will come. But these systems have never kept us safe. They never will.

What keeps us safe is us. Our messy, imperfect, beautiful webs of care and relationship. And for me, right now, part of that safety means honoring my limits and choosing myself, even when grief rises with that choice.

Grief is not weakness. It is how we honor what mattered. It is how we say something was worth loving, worth dreaming about, worth fighting for. And grief is what helps me stop clinging to what no longer holds me.

This isn’t easy work. Our culture rewards constant productivity, praises endurance, and punishes tenderness. But if we want something different, we must slow down. We must make room for mourning.

Grief creates space. It clears the ground and asks what might be possible instead. It invites new questions, new ways of being together, new ways of loving ourselves and one another.

We don’t have to fix it all or tie it up neatly. We can sit in the truth of what is ending, and we can wonder together about what might take root if we make room for it.

Grief and imagination are not opposites. They are companions. Grief clears the soil. Imagination plants the seeds. Together, they help us choose care over control, relationship over hierarchy, enoughness over scarcity.

I want us to have spaces where grief is welcome. Where it isn’t hidden, rushed, or smoothed over. Where grief can be spoken, honored, and witnessed.

I am choosing to welcome my grief. To let it guide me toward something more honest, more spacious, more alive.

And I hope you give yourself permission to do the same. To release what no longer serves you, to name what is ending, and to trust that your grief is sacred. Because when we honor what has ended, we open ourselves to what is waiting to be born.