Category: Grief

The Positioning

If you’re an intuitive person at all, you know what a “gut feeling” means. It is a deep uneasiness. It is a gnawing knowing that something unpleasant is about to happen.


It’s what I was feeling back in September as I saw and heard signs that my employer was having serious issues related to their profitability and positioning. I knew because I was part of the executive team. Still, I was shocked to learn that my name was on the list of people whose positions would be eliminated as part of a RIF (reduction in force) layoff.


While I had only been with that team 2-1/2 years, it was still a gut punch. What I remember most was something I said the day the CEO told me my position was ending – much sooner than what had been described as a possibility at year-end. I said, “well, I guess now I get to experience a layoff!”


That response reflects the deepest mind and thoughts of someone who has faced and survived so. many. losses. And traumas.


This event adds to a long list of perils including: myriad abusive narcissist + empath relationships, divorce, death by suicide of my first-born … and now this. For the first time ever in my employment history, I would lose my main source of income – while my child is at university 3 states away.

In perspective and comparison to some of the more life-threatening things I’ve endured, this is a small thing. However, it stings and it hits all my triggers. My 23-year-old self who came back to NC with a suitcase full of ruined clothes and nothing else to her name, covered in bruises and pregnant was somehow resurrected in this moment. All her fears and feelings of being unsafe, unprotected, and unsupported were screaming in the background.

Meanwhile, my current self has plenty of resources and support. I have had to console the younger version of myself over and over and over again during this time, reminding her that everything is ok now. It is ok and it will be ok. We aren’t starting from nothing anymore.

I’m still sorting out my next steps and have begun to “position” myself and my career differently. Rather than applying for work as an employee, I am offering my services to clients who need administrative support on a fractional basis. This seems wise to me.

During the course of all this positioning and healing, and reassuring, I painted on top of a piece of art that hung on my wall. I recreated it into a textured, semi-3D scene I titled “Storm Watch.” It represents the feeling, the stinging, the blowing … and the beauty and the power and the hope that will now define this period of my life.

With gratitude, I will, once again, emerge from this injury as a reimagined and repositioned version of myself – more whole, more grateful, more tried and tested, and closer to the woman God created me to be.

Rodanthe Ruins

Having grown up in North Carolina’s Inner Banks, the Outer Banks are part of the fabric of my life. Like so many friends online, I feel deeply the sense of loss as we watch images of houses along the Rodanthe shoreline falling under tidal pressure, dropping knees first into the water, leaving no hope for recovery.

Even while I describe the connection, it strikes me as a curious reaction. Why do we feel these scenes so viscerally? It makes me wince in discomfort as I imagine someone else’s truer sense of loss: memories of family vacations, fishing endless hours from a now-displaced strand of beach, bonfires, and a house full of seashell collections gathered over decades.

For coastal folk, we carry a reverence for the Ocean and its Sounds. We solemnly accept the tides, storms, and inevitable movement of sandbars and shoreline erosion. Similar to the pain of a beloved pet’s short life, we grieve the effect of the shifting sands on the beaches we love so dearly. Our desire to own a piece of something so wild, to have the audacity to build a front row seat on the surf, appears futile and foolish on days like this. But it was lovely while it lasted. The risk added to its appeal.

I wish everyone might experience the joy of life – any portion of it – spent at such a wildly beautiful place. There’s freedom there; the kind that compels you to build a masterpiece in the sand, knowing it will disappear by morning.