I’ve not blogged for a while, a long time in fact. 

It’s been an intense few months of finally starting to come to terms with this new life I’ve been landed with and it’s left me a bit too raw to write publicly – but after a brilliant weekend away with an excellent group of young people and some really helpful conversations with various people, I’m feeling in a much stronger place to share a bit about where things are at.

With the help of friends, family, a counsellor and my ever-amazing husband I’ve started to wade through the countless layers of loss and grief. It’s been messy and painful and not at all pleasant but it’s a bit like the story we used to love my Dad telling us as kids ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ – you can’t go round it, can’t go under it, got to go through it. So that’s what I’ve started to do. 

I’ve been angry and sad and numb and everything in between.

But the thing I’ve felt most is lost. 

I don’t know who I am any more. I don’t recognise this person I’ve become. I hate the limitations this body and this brain place upon me. I miss the things I used to be able to do, from the big and exciting to the small and  everyday.

And I miss feeling like my life has meaning, because for a long time I’ve been desperate to find some kind of meaning in all of this but there just isn’t any. It makes no sense, and it feels like my life makes no sense.

I’ve been feeling like I have no purpose, and that’s been really tough because we all need purpose. I can try and find purpose in the small things I’m able to do but it’s not enough, I’m just not satisfied with that. So I’ve been searching and trying and pushing myself harder than I should and then crashing harder and just getting more and more frustrated.

Then over the weekend away with the young people, my burnt-out life has been rekindled with fresh hope.

I’ve been encouraged to wait and to use this time in my life to learn and grow, because there’s always more going on than we can see and who knows what lies ahead.

We all have a purpose, even when things look bleak and we can’t even imagine what the future might hold.

My circumstances might mean that my path is going to look different to the conventional routes most people take in life, but I’m getting more ok with that. 

I still have a purpose and my life still has meaning, even if it isn’t turning out anything like how I expected it to.

I’m going to wait, even if I have to wait a really long time, and see what paths open up. Who knows, maybe they’ll go somewhere amazing…