Since I shared with you about the loss I’m currently navigating, so so so many of you have reached out to me and told me what you’re facing. Impossible situations. The kinds of things you can’t see beyond, you cannot even imagine what your life will look like on the other side of. You wonder if your best years are behind you. You wonder how in the world you can begin again when every day is an ending.

I so entirely understand.

Thank you for entrusting me with your stories, your heartache, and your questions. I want to share a few important lines from Emily Dickinson with you that have been incredibly helpful to me in this last year:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

The Feet, mechanical, go round –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

After great pain, a formal feeling comes. It’s called Shock, and some of you are staring out the window, shaking your head, wondering how you got to this precise location. You cannot believe this is happening to you. You say words like, “surreal” and “numb” and “really?” You get in bed. Everything is impossible.

The feet, mechanical, go round. You move, but it’s not really you. You are dis-integrated, a walking head. You are in a Stupor. You are fumbling around in the dark. You’re trying to think your way out of the loss: Could I have changed this? Could I have done something to avoid this? Is there another way? How can I fix this? How will it all resolve? What will it all look like in a year? How will I survive?

This is the hour of lead. We need voices who remind us that loss feels like lead. Because it’s true, isn’t it. It feels like you are supposed to get up off the couch or out of bed or off the floor and put gas in your car and send emails and grocery shop all while you’re trying to lug around lead. It’s an hour, a week, a year, a season . . . of extreme weight.

Remembered, if outlived. IF we live through it (and Dickinson allows a big IF here). I love the reality of this. Sometimes what you’re going through feels like it will never end, it will consume you, it will define you. I believe you will make it, I believe you will survive, but I know that some days it doesn’t feel that way. And it’s OK.

As freezing persons, recollect the snow. 

First chill.

Then stupor.

Then the letting go.

One hundred years before Kubler-Ross popularized the 5 stages of grief, Dickinson was telling us that dealing with loss is a process, it’s nuanced, and it affects every part of us, including our bodies. Let me inject here that this is why we need our poets and our artists and those who are paying attention to our human experiences. They often know things before everyone else. They can put words to things we can’t articulate. They can find the pulse.

Loss involves chill, then stupor, then the letting go. We experience shock, then this wandering, wondering stupor, and then we are able — only because of a presence deep within us — to surrender.

Sometimes things fall apart. And it’s almost impossible. And the only way things come back together again is through this process. Allowing the destitution of the chill. Tolerating our obsessiveness in the stupor. And, finally, when we’re ready and God invites, choosing to surrender.

Remember that surrender not only means giving up, but it also means giving back. And so, every time we’re able, we say to God, “Here, I’m giving this back to you. I’m opening my hands. It’s an ugly tangle, a hopeless heartbreak, a disaster. I can do absolutely nothing with any of it. I’m counting on you.” And he reminds us, often very very gently, that he has given us what we need to breathe and begin again.

Many of you have asked me about the timing of Begin Again, which released in April of this year. Did I write it in response to the loss of my marriage? Did it come out of those events? And the answer is no.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I decided with my agent and my editor that I would write a book about beginning again. I had written a chapter on the idea in Breathing Room and then another one in Brazen, but I had more to say on the subject. So in early 2016, I emailed my editor to see what she thought of an entire book on beginning again. And she said, “how fast can I say yes to this idea.” I began working on the manuscript while we released Brazen in 2016, and I finished the manuscript in early 2017, while Steve was deployed. Before I had any idea of his intentions.

I submitted the manuscript before he returned, before I had any idea what we would be going through. And then after he came home and told me that he was pursuing divorce, I did one more edit on the manuscript. I changed a few things here and there, but for the most part, what is in that book was written before I knew how personal and how relevant the book would be to my own story.

I share this with you to tell you that in the very early weeks after Steve told me his plans to pursue a divorce, God whispered in my ear, “You already have everything you need to go through this.” And I knew he was talking about the book.

In the dark, chilly winter and spring mornings of 2017, God gave me concepts, words, stories, memories . . . all of which I believed I would be giving away to you. But not only were they for you, they were for me too. They were to be my companion throughout the hardest and heaviest year of my life. And you know what? That book has saved me. What are the chances?

It reminded me that God knew, before I did, what I would need to survive heartbreak. He knows my name. He knows my story. He sees me. In Scripture it says God is close to the brokenhearted, comforts those who mourn, blesses those who are poor in Spirit. These words have come alive to me this year as I see how personally God has prepared me and provided for me. I mean, really. What are the chances?!?

We pray, “Let this cup pass.” But for some reason, it doesn’t. It can’t. It needs to stop with us. We need to drink from the cup of suffering. It is our turn. Finally, after the chill and the stupor, we let go. We say, “Not my will, but yours.” We totally and completely let go.

This is not a linear process. No way. Some days we will go through every stage, six times each. Totally fine. To be expected.

But over time, we will see that we are getting more and more current with our reality, and we are allowing the thing to fall apart because somewhere inside we trust that it’s the only way for something new to come together.

If you want to hear me talk about more of my story, you can listen to a conversation with my dear friend Elaine Hamilton in this podcast that released yesterday. It’s one big giant vulnerability hangover to send these things out to you. I feel so exposed, so stupor-y. And yet I believe it matters. For you and your process. And for me and my healing.

I have a candle lit on my desk right now . . . for all of us. Remembrance of what has been. Hope for what will be. Vigil for the miles that stretch between. All my love to you.

Beginning again,

Leeana

***

P.S. If you are looking for some support during this season, especially if you are going through loss and needing to begin again, you can download the free 6 week discussion guide for Begin Again, here on my site. Whether you go through it by yourself or with a group of warrior sisters, I believe the book and the reflection will be a companion to you on your journey.

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