I had a conversation with my mom the other day about grief and religion. It wasn’t a monumental conversation but ended up being just the kind of talk that settles in your bones and keeps you company for days after. What I kept circling back to, over and over, was this: I’m grieving the freedom I never really got to have. Not freedom in some abstract sense. I mean the actual, practical freedom to explore, to ask a real question out loud, and to see what happens. Exploration re

I sat in my personal therapy session once again, gobsmacked that this deep sadness had returned. I had worked on it, I felt it, I shed a few tears, and here it was again, staring me in the face as if it had just happened yesterday. Maybe it had never left. Healing isn’t linear, and healing looks different for every single person. There may be seasons of your life that the ache doesn’t show up; you may even forget you experienced it at times. And then there will be other seas