Blossoms,

I started off this post to you just to share about a work thing I did lately which I’m delighted with.

But I need to be honest with you, as that’s the kind of friendship we have always had. I write and I tell you about all of this: the good stuff. The hard stuff. The life stuff. The business stuff.

And the truth of it is, I am going through an excruciatingly painful personal experience.

There’s SO MUCH that is glorious and good in my world – my marriage, my kids, my health, my business… and then there is a part that feels like it has had a bomb explode in it. I can’t share the details because it involves other family members and is not my story to tell. But it’s been a devastating crisis to navigate and manage and I wonder at my capacity to still be standing.

Yesterday I found myself on the bathroom floor, on a critically important phone call, bent over in a panic attack. It’s been a long time since I’ve lost my ability to breathe like that. My husband came to find me, took the phone to calmly tell them that I was having a panic attack and would be ok in a few minutes, rubbed my back, then handed me back the phone when I could breathe and speak again. So I could carry on, doing what needed to be done.

He said later:

It was hard to know what to do. At one end of the house, there is Beth asking me to help her build a cubby fort. And then there is you, and you are going through something so painful, and 
there isn’t anything I can do to stop that experience.

Throughout this searing experience though… I am cognisant of just how much good there is.

Even though this fire will be life-changing for myself and other family members, I dearly hope it will result in something even better. That the Phoenix will rise from the ashes and bestow us with her blessings of new adventures and deepening connections.

I’ve been afforded some extraordinary grace, compassion and kindness. My husband, my brother and my friends have been a saving grace.

And perhaps, most of all, I told my husband this:

I feel like I am going to come out the other side of this as a different person. I feel like I am being sculpted into something more. That I am being ushered along the path that crafts me into someone with more stoicism, more resilience, more compassion. And that the pressure will turn my coal into diamonds, will bolster my spirit towards strength. I won’t be the same person as I was coming into this experience.

I will be more human. More touched by life.

My heart will be broken. The cracks will be filled up with even more of life. By god, it will be lovelier. It will be more tender and more courageous all at once.

Here I am. Broken hearted, and lovelier for it.