What Healing Actually Looks Like
It’s sweat, dirt, building tangible things, and the slow crumbling of the walls around my heart.
Through a Glass, Darkly is the fiction publication of based speculative fiction author Jean Marie Bauhaus (that’s me!), where I’m publishing my new fiction for you to read free for a limited time before it makes it into book form (paid subscribers can access all the fiction I post here all the time and read at their leisure). If you’re new here, first, HI! Second, check out the About page and the Roadmap to learn more.
This is a post for Missives from a Dark Wood, the personal blog segment of TAGD where I get a little more personal and/or write about things that don’t have a category elsewhere. If it’s not your thing, that’s cool — go here to update your subscription preferences.
I’ve been in a funk lately, stretching on for weeks. I wasn’t really sure what to call it. It wasn’t exactly depression, and I didn’t feel completely burned out. Ennui has been part of it — no motivation, none of my usual interests or current projects having any appeal, feeling aimless and not knowing what to do with myself. And also being very tired. It’s been weird, because this month, the month of my birth, is normally a time when I feel renewed and re-energized and extremely motivated. But there’s been none of that this time around.
It didn’t start to get better until I named it for what it truly was: grief.
We lost our pet bunny about a month ago, just a few days after my last update where I mentioned that he had been ill and/or injured. Despite the illness, it was sudden and unexpected, and just really friggin’ sad how it happened, but I’ll spare you the details. We had really become attached the little guy, and he and I had formed a special bond, especially after I became his full time nurse.
While we were still reeling from that, we had the door slammed shut on an endeavor we’d been working toward for over a year. This was something that would have been truly life changing. Everything seemed to finally be coming together and it looked like we had a green light to move forward, only to learn that we had missed the boat. On the bright side, it looks like that boat might turn out to be a sinking ship. But even so, it was a huge disappointment and it felt like the rug was pulled out from under us.
So of course it makes sense that I would be dealing with grief. But it was more than that. Those blows seemed to have stirred up some older grief that had never been fully resolved. Probably because I tend to be impatient with the grieving process. I tend to get in a hurry to feel better and get back to work and get on with things. It’s hard for me to sit with grief and allow it time and space to fully heal.
But I’ve been trying to do that — allowing myself to feel sad, and angry, and all the things. I’ve been naming the things that are making me sad and angry, all the hurts and losses and broken things and relationships that I’ve never fully processed, and giving them to God. I’ve been spending a lot of time in His presence and allowing Him to put my heart back together, piece by piece. I’ve been doing my best to be patient with the process and resisting the urge to try to rush it or try to force things to happen or to force myself to be productive.
In the meantime, I’ve been getting on with life as best I can. Creative work and writing has been right out, for the most part — it felt like that part of my brain was walled off and inaccessible, though I’ve done a lot of journaling to help me process things. But there’s still much work to be done on our little 5-acre wood, and still the big move hanging over us.
We’ve made good progress. We had rain gutters installed on the RV port, which was the first major step toward building our water system. The neighbor mentioned in that there post with whom we have so much grace and favor also generously blessed us by wiring up our shed for electricity. While my husband was supervising and helping with all of that, I built a hugelkultur mound for our garden, and we got that planted last week.
We’ve also been plagued with internet problems over the last week, which prompted us to get a Starlink system, which my husband is now in the process of figuring out how to install. He’s also researching how to hook the shed up to our power pole and electric meter, and we’re both in the process of researching all the necessary steps and parts involved in building the rain harvesting system that will be our main water source on our property.
Also, spring has aggressively sprung, so now we’re into property maintenance season, with mowing and weedeating and pushing back the thorny vines from taking over the areas that we’ve already cleared added to our weekly chores.
All this physical work has been therapeutic. Getting my hands in the dirt, getting all the negative stuff out of my body through sweat and hard labor, building tangible things, watching actual life sprout where I sowed seeds, seeing our homestead finally come together after years of road block after road block, has all been healing for me.
And, in the last several days, that wall around the creative part of my brain has started to crack and crumble. I’ve dabbled in writing poetry and song lyrics over the years, and the other day I finished a song that I’ve been writing on and off for a few years. I submitted it to my husband, who will add music and produce it when he gets time, with a friend of ours who sings better than I do providing the vocals.
I also added about 500 new words to a short story I started last year, although I feel like that one is crying out to be a long-form serial. I started a new article series for my ministry Substack, and I’m putting together a PDF for a Bible study guide that I wrote back in January. And this morning, after feeling blocked for a long time and like I’d painted myself into a corner with no way out, I started outlining the remaining episodes of Daughters of Men, which I hope to have written and ready to post by the time Kindred Spirits wraps up.
I’m also regaining a sense of direction and purpose. I have lots of things planned for my ministry Substack and podcast, which I’m getting excited about. And I’ve been promoted to COO of 7% Solution Music, for which I’ve been working on a business plan to expand into freelance music production. Those, plus the homestead, are the main things I’m focusing on for this season, but I’ve also got some publishing projects in the works and now not one, but two serials planned for this publication, which I’ll elaborate on in my next Update newsletter.
I feel like I’ve been submerged under dark and murky waters for weeks, but I’m finally coming up for air and seeing that things are much brighter than they appeared from beneath the surface.
I guess this is what healing looks like.
Love and blessings, y’all.
I love this, Jean, not that you're suffering through grief, but that once again, you captured what was honestly going on in a heartfelt letter to your readers. Grieving is hard. It's tiring and uncomfortable and I think many of us plow through it in hopes it will dissipate faster. Taking the time with grief and God to process things is a very healthy way to go about it--kudos to you for doing the hard work, both internally and externally, to get to a new place.