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Self-Compassion and Self-Confidence

Coming to Grips with Ourselves

WHEN CATHERINE HOKE WAS twenty-five years old, she and her husband went on a church trip to Romania to help care for orphans living with HIV. She returned home to New York committed to doing more for those in need. Then a friend invited her to join a Christian outreach visit to a Texas prison. At the time, Catherine was working in venture capital and noticed that many of the inmates had the same skills and drive as great entrepreneurs. She started flying to Texas on weekends to teach business classes at the prison. She learned that nearly one in four Americans has a criminal history and one in twenty will serve time. While most are eager to work after release, their criminal records make it difficult to get jobs. Catherine felt strongly that these men deserved a second chance.

Catherine quit her job and invested all of her savings to create the nonprofit Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which prepares formerly incarcerated men to find employment and start their own businesses. Within five years, the program expanded into a statewide organization that graduated six hundred students and launched sixty start-ups. The governor of Texas honored Catherine’s work with a public service award.

Then Catherine’s personal life fell apart. After nine years of marriage, her husband asked for a divorce unexpectedly and left without saying good-bye. “This was the darkest period of my life,” Catherine told us. “In my community, divorce was often seen as a sin. People said, ‘God hates divorce.’ ” She was afraid to talk about her situation. But there was one group she knew wouldn’t judge her: the graduates of her program. Knowing they had felt the sharp sting of prejudice, she turned to them for support. They helped her move out of her house and became her closest confidants. During this emotional time, she lost sight of boundaries and ended up having intimate relationships with more than one of the graduates. The men had been released from prison, so Catherine hadn’t broken any laws, but the Texas Department of Criminal Justice determined that her behavior was inappropriate. Catherine was banned from Texas prisons and informed that her program would be banned too if she stayed involved. She resigned and her departure made national headlines as a “prison sex scandal.”

Catherine had spent years urging employers and donors to be open-minded, asking them to imagine how they’d feel if they were defined by their biggest mistake. Suddenly that was her own life. “I violated my spiritual values. I felt like I was covered in the thickest wall of shame,” she told us. “I lost my identity as a leader. I was dead broke financially. I didn’t want to live anymore because I felt like I had ruined God’s calling for my life.” She attempted suicide.

Catherine had dedicated herself to helping people get a second chance. She had fostered compassion for ex-offenders. Now she needed to find compassion for someone else—herself.

Self-compassion isn’t talked about as much as it should be, maybe because it’s often confused with its troublesome cousins, self-pity and self-indulgence. Psychologist Kristin Neff describes self-compassion as offering the same kindness to ourselves that we would give to a friend. It allows us to respond to our own errors with concern and understanding rather than criticism and shame.

Everyone makes mistakes. Some are small but can have serious consequences. We turn our heads for a split second on the playground at just the moment our child falls. We change lanes and hit the car in our blind spot. We make big mistakes too—errors of judgment, failures to follow through on commitments, lapses of integrity. None of us can change what we have already done.

Self-compassion comes from recognizing that our imperfections are part of being human. Those who can tap into it recover from hardship faster. In a study of people whose marriages fell apart, resilience was not related to their self-esteem, optimism, or depression before divorce, or to how long their relationships or separations had lasted. What helped people cope with distress and move on was self-compassion. For soldiers returning from war in Afghanistan and Iraq, those who were kind to themselves showed significant declines in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Self-compassion is associated with greater happiness and satisfaction, fewer emotional difficulties, and less anxiety. Both women and men can benefit from self-compassion, but since women tend to be harder on themselves, they often benefit more. As psychologist Mark Leary observes, self-compassion “can be an antidote to the cruelty we sometimes inflict on ourselves.”

Self-compassion often coexists with remorse. It does not mean shirking responsibility for our past. It’s about making sure that we don’t beat ourselves up so badly that we damage our future. It helps us realize that doing a bad thing does not necessarily make us a bad person. Instead of thinking “if only I weren’t,” we can think “if only I hadn’t.” This is why confession in the Catholic religion begins with “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” not “Forgive me, Father, for I am a sinner.”

Blaming our actions rather than our character allows us to feel guilt instead of shame. Humorist Erma Bombeck joked that guilt was “the gift that keeps giving.” Although it can be hard to shake, guilt keeps us striving to improve. People become motivated to repair the wrongs of their past and make better choices in the future.

Shame has the opposite effect: it makes people feel small and worthless, leading them to attack in anger or shrink away in self-pity. Among college students, the shame-prone were more likely than the guilt-prone to have drug and alcohol problems. Prisoners who felt ashamed were 30 percent more likely to commit repeat offenses than those who felt guilty. Elementary and middle school kids who felt shame were more hostile and aggressive, while guilt-prone kids were more likely to defuse conflicts.

Bryan Stevenson, a legal activist who leads the Equal Justice Initiative, makes the point that “we are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone.” He deeply believes that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” This is what Catherine Hoke came to understand. The first person she sought out was her pastor, who encouraged her to forgive herself and make amends. “The way for me to have compassion for myself was to own my mistakes,” she told us. She wrote a frank and remorseful letter to all 7,500 volunteers and supporters of her program admitting what she’d done. More than a thousand responses poured in from people who thanked Catherine for her honesty and said they believed in her. Many asked what she was doing next. Even though she couldn’t see a future for herself, others could. “It was those people who loved me back to life,” she recalls. She started to feel self-compassion.

Writing to others—and to herself—turned out to be key to Catherine’s ability to rebound. For as long as she can remember, Catherine has kept a journal. “Journaling isn’t exactly meditating,” she told us. “But it helped me quiet myself and reflect. I was able to put words to my feelings and unpack them.”

Writing can be a powerful tool for learning self-compassion. In one experiment, people were asked to recall a failure or humiliation that had made them feel bad about themselves, ranging from flunking a big test to flopping in an athletic competition to forgetting lines in a play. They drafted a letter to themselves expressing the understanding they would offer to a friend in the same situation. Compared to a control group who wrote just about their positive attributes, those who were kind to themselves were 40 percent happier and 24 percent less angry.

Turning feelings into words can help us process and overcome adversity. Decades ago, health psychologist Jamie Pennebaker had two groups of college students journal for fifteen minutes a day for just four days—some about nonemotional topics and others about the most traumatic experiences of their lives, which included rape, attempted suicide, and child abuse. After the first day of writing, the second group was less happy and had higher blood pressure. This made sense, since confronting trauma is painful. But when Pennebaker followed up six months later, the effects reversed and those who wrote about their traumas were significantly better off emotionally and physically.

Since then, more than a hundred experiments have documented the therapeutic effect of journaling. It has helped medical students, patients with chronic pain, crime victims, maximum-security prisoners, and women after childbirth. It has crossed cultures and countries from Belgium to Mexico to New Zealand. Writing about traumatic events can decrease anxiety and anger, boost grades, reduce absences from work, and lessen the emotional impact of job loss. Health benefits include higher T-cell counts, better liver function, and stronger antibody responses. Even journaling for a few minutes a few times can make a difference. “You don’t have to write for the rest of your life,” Pennebaker told us. “You can start and stop when you feel you need to.”

Labeling negative emotions makes them easier to deal with. The more specific the label, the better. “I’m feeling lonely” helps us process more than the vague “I’m feeling awful.” By putting feelings into words, we give ourselves more power over them. In one study, people with a phobia of spiders learned they were going to interact with one. But first the participants were instructed to distract themselves, think of the spider as nonthreatening, do nothing, or label their feelings about the spider. When the spider showed up, those who labeled their fear exhibited significantly less physiological arousal and were more willing to approach it.

There are some caveats. Immediately after a tragedy or crisis, journaling can backfire: the event is too raw for some to process. After loss, it appears that writing can reduce loneliness and improve mood but does not necessarily help with grief or depression symptoms. Still, for many, constructing a story can lead to insight. For those who don’t enjoy writing, talking into a voice recorder works just as well. There seems to be less benefit to expressing trauma without language through art, music, or dance (but at least there’ll be no hurt feelings if your angry abstract painting falls into the wrong hands).

Journaling helped Catherine identify thoughts that were holding her back, like “People will only love me when I have something to offer them” and “Relying on other people makes me weak and needy.” Psychologists call these “self-limiting beliefs,” and Catherine decided to replace them with what she calls “self-freeing” beliefs. She wrote, “My worth isn’t tied to my actions” and “I can allow other people to care for me—and I need to take care of myself.”

After a year of therapy, Catherine was ready to renew her commitment to helping people defy the odds and defy their pasts. Starting fresh in New York, she launched Defy Ventures, a program that provides current and former inmates with mentoring and training to start businesses. In one of the courses she created, students learn how to pinpoint their own self-limiting beliefs and rewrite them as self-freeing beliefs. This year, I had a chance to visit a prison with Catherine. I saw her help the inmates, Entrepreneurs-in-Training as she calls them, define themselves by their future goals instead of their past traumas and mistakes. Six years in, Catherine reports that Defy Ventures has aided more than 1,700 graduates and incubated and funded 160 start-ups, achieving a 95 percent employment rate with just 3 percent recidivism.

Catherine regained her self-confidence not only professionally but in her personal life too. In 2013, she married Charles Hoke, who believed so strongly in the Defy mission that a year after their wedding he left his job in finance to work with her. “I have my second chance as a wife. I have my second chance at life,” Catherine said. “I have my second chance to extend second chances to others.”

Self-confidence is critical to happiness and success. When we lack it, we dwell on our flaws. We fail to embrace new challenges and learn new skills. We hesitate to take even a small risk that can lead to a big opportunity. We decide not to apply for a new job, and the promotion we miss becomes the moment our career stalled. We don’t muster the courage to ask for a first date, and the future love of our life becomes the one who got away.

Like many, I’ve struggled with self-doubt throughout my life. In college, every time I took an exam, I feared that I’d failed. And every time I didn’t embarrass myself or even did well, I believed that I’d fooled my professors. I later learned that this phenomenon is called the impostor syndrome, and while both women and men feel it, women tend to experience it more intensely. Nearly two decades later, after seeing this same self-doubt hold back so many women at work, I gave a TED talk that encouraged women to “sit at the table.” This talk became the basis for my book Lean In. Researching and being open about how I’d grappled with insecurity helped me understand ways to build my self-confidence. As I urged other women to believe in themselves and act on what they would do if they weren’t afraid, I learned these lessons myself.

Then I lost Dave. When a loved one dies, we expect to be sad. We expect to be angry. What we don’t see coming—or at least I didn’t—is that trauma can also lead to self-doubt in all aspects of our lives. This loss of confidence is another symptom of pervasiveness: we are struggling in one area and suddenly we stop believing in our capabilities in other areas. Primary loss triggers secondary losses. For me, my confidence crumbled overnight. It reminded me of watching a house in my neighborhood that had taken years to build get torn down in a matter of minutes. Boom. Flattened.

My first day back in the office after Dave’s death, Mark and I were in a meeting with the Facebook ads team. To illustrate a point, I turned to Boz, our head of product and engineering, and said, “You remember this from when we worked on it together at Google.” It would have been a fine thing to say…except that Boz never worked with me at Google. He started his career at Google’s then rival Microsoft.

In the next meeting, I wanted to make sure I contributed something. Anything. Someone directed a question at a colleague but I jumped in to answer…and went on and on. Somewhere in the middle, I realized I was rambling, but I kept going, unable to stop. Later that night, I called Mark to say that I knew I’d made a total fool of myself. Twice. That I remembered. “Don’t worry,” Mark said. “Thinking Boz worked at Google is the kind of mistake you would’ve made before.” Very comforting.

Actually, it was comforting. But even if I had made those kinds of mistakes before, now it was all I could focus on. Then Mark pointed out a few things I’d said in the meetings that he thought were on target—none of which I remembered. He went on to say that neither he nor anyone else expected me to be able to hold it together all the time. This comment helped me set more reasonable expectations and stop being so hard on myself. Mark’s compassion started me down the path of learning to have compassion for myself. I felt deep gratitude for having such a supportive boss, and I know not everyone does. Many jobs don’t even allow employees time off to grieve or care for their families. Compassion at work shouldn’t be a luxury; it’s important to develop policies that give people the time off and support they need so we don’t have to rely on the kindness of our bosses.

Bolstered by Mark and a pep talk from my father that night, I returned to work the next day. And the next day. And the days after that. But on so many of those days, my grief prevented me from thinking clearly. In the middle of a meeting, an image of Dave’s body on that gym floor would flash before my eyes. It was like augmented reality—I knew that I was in a Facebook conference room, but it felt like his body was there too. Even when I was not seeing his image, I was crying constantly. Lean in? I could barely stand up.

Journaling became a key part of my recovery. I began on the morning of Dave’s funeral, four days after he died. “Today I will bury my husband” was the first line I wrote. “This is the unthinkable. I have no idea why I want to write all of this down—as if I could forget any detail.”

I had been trying to keep a journal since childhood. Every couple of years I would start a new one, only to give up just a few days later. But over the five months following Dave’s funeral, 106,338 words poured out of me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe until I wrote everything down—from the smallest detail of my morning to the unanswerable questions of existence. If I went even a few days without journaling, the emotions would build up inside me until I felt like a dam about to burst. At the time, I didn’t understand why writing on an inanimate computer was so important. Shouldn’t I be talking to my family and friends, who could actually respond? Wouldn’t it be better to try to distance myself from the anger and grief rather than use the limited time I had alone each day to dredge it all up?

Now it’s clear that my compulsion to write was guiding me in the right direction. Journaling helped me process my overwhelming feelings and my all-too-many regrets. I thought constantly about how if I’d known that Dave and I had only eleven years, I would’ve made sure we spent more time together. I wished that in the hard moments in our marriage, we had fought less and understood each other more. I wished that on what turned out to be our last anniversary, I had stayed home rather than flying with my kids to attend a bar mitzvah. And I wished that when we went for a hike that final morning in Mexico, I’d walked by Dave’s side and held his hand, instead of walking with Marne while he walked with Phil. As I wrote out these moments, my anger and regret began to lessen.

Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward. Journaling helped me make sense of the past and rebuild my self-confidence to navigate the present and future. Then Adam suggested that I should also write down three things that I’d done well each day. At first, I was skeptical. I was barely functioning; what moments of success could I find? Got dressed today. Trophy please! But there is evidence that these lists help by focusing us on what psychologists call “small wins.” In one experiment, people wrote down three things that went well and why every day for a week. Over the next six months, they became happier than a group writing about early memories. In a more recent study, people spent five to ten minutes a day writing about things that went “really well” and why; within three weeks, their stress levels dropped, as did their mental and physical health complaints.

For six months, almost every night before I went to bed, I made my list. Since even the most basic tasks were hard, I started with those. Made tea. Got through all of my emails. Went to work and focused for most of one meeting. None of these were heroic accomplishments, but that little notebook by my bed served an important purpose. It made me realize that for my entire life I’d gone to bed thinking about what I’d done wrong that day, how I’d messed up, what wasn’t working. Just the act of reminding myself of anything that had gone well was a welcome shift.

Making gratitude lists has helped me in the past, but this list served a different purpose. Adam and his colleague Jane Dutton found that counting our blessings doesn’t boost our confidence or our effort, but counting our contributions can. Adam and Jane believe that this is because gratitude is passive: it makes us feel thankful for what we receive. Contributions are active: they build our confidence by reminding us that we can make a difference. I now encourage my friends and colleagues to write about what they have done well. The people who try it all come back with the same response: they wish they’d started doing this sooner.

Slowly, I began to regain my self-confidence at work. I told myself the things I’ve told others who doubted themselves: I didn’t have to aim for perfection. I didn’t have to believe in myself all the time. I just had to believe I could contribute a little bit and then a little bit more. I’d experienced this phenomenon of incremental progress when I went skiing for the first time at age sixteen. To say that I am not a natural athlete is a serious understatement. On my fourth day on skis, my mother and I took a wrong turn and wound up on a difficult run. I looked down the mountain, panicked, and fell into the snow, knowing it would be impossible for me to get down alive. My mom told me not to look at the bottom but instead just take ten turns. She coaxed me to get up and then helped me count ten turns out loud. After those ten turns, I did another ten. Then another. Eventually, I found my way to the bottom. Over the years, this lesson has stuck with me whenever I feel overwhelmed. What would you do if you weren’t afraid? I’d take one turn. Then another.

As people saw me stumble at work, some of them tried to help by reducing pressure. When I messed up or was unable to contribute, they waved it off, saying, “How could you keep anything straight with all you’re going through?” In the past, I had said similar things to colleagues who were struggling, but when people said it to me, I discovered that this expression of sympathy actually diminished my self-confidence even more. What helped was hearing, “Really? I thought you made a good point in that meeting and helped us make a better decision.” Bless you. Empathy was nice but encouragement was better.

Self-doubt sneaks up even on those who see it coming. Adam’s friend and fellow psychologist Jenessa Shapiro was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in her thirties. Her primary fear was dying, but her secondary fear was losing her job. While working on a paper, Jenessa had trouble writing and immediately started wondering, “Are chemo and cancer destroying my ability to think?” As her productivity fell, she worried that she would be denied tenure and end up unemployed. She was also concerned about how others would view her. As an expert on stigma, she suspected that her cancer would make people doubt her capabilities. Jenessa joined several colleagues to test this hypothesis, and sure enough, cancer survivors were less likely to get called back for job interviews. When she wasn’t invited to give a presentation, she wondered, “Do people know I’m sick and don’t want to bother me? Or do they think I’m not up to the challenge?”

Jenessa’s husband helped her look at her situation with more self-compassion, reminding her, “When you didn’t have cancer, you couldn’t write a paper in a day.” Her coworkers helped as well. As Jenessa told us, “On the whole people treat me like I am capable—someone who can still make valuable contributions. Of course, it is also stressful if people expect me to do everything that I did before, so I imagine it must be a difficult balancing act for my colleagues to hit the sweet spot between expecting too little and too much of me.” Jenessa’s story and my experience have changed the way I interact with coworkers going through difficult personal situations. I still always start by offering them time off. But now I understand the importance of treating them as regular members of the team and praising their work as well.

Jenessa was thankful when she received tenure, but the fear of joblessness is widespread—roughly 21 million Americans were fired or laid off from a job in 2015, down from nearly 27 million in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession. Anyone who’s ever been fired, downsized, or forced to leave a job knows how devastating it can be. Not only does loss of income put people under tremendous financial pressure, it can also bring about secondary losses by triggering depression, anxiety, and other health problems. Losing a job is a blow to self-esteem and self-worth and can rip away identities. By robbing people of a sense of control, losing income can actually lower their ability to tolerate physical pain. And the stress can spill over into personal relationships, resulting in increased conflict and tensions at home.

To help people suffering from depression after job loss, psychologists at the University of Michigan held weeklong workshops at churches, schools, libraries, and city halls. For four hours each morning, hundreds of unemployed people attended a program designed to build their job search confidence. They identified marketable skills and sources of job leads. They rehearsed interviews. They made a list of setbacks they might face and strategies for maintaining motivation. They found small wins. In the next two months, people who had participated in this program had a 20 percent greater chance of landing a new job. And for the next two years, they were more confident and more likely to stay employed. To be clear, no one is suggesting that self-confidence is a cure for unemployment; we need to provide education and support so people can find jobs and social insurance benefits to help them when they can’t. But programs like this can make a difference.

Self-confidence at work is important and often discussed, but self-confidence at home is just as crucial and often overlooked. Being a single parent was uncharted territory for me. Dave and I had always discussed even the smallest decisions concerning our children; I thought many times about how the night Dave died I had not even wanted to make a decision on my own about my son’s ripped sneakers. Suddenly, our decade-long conversation about parenting came to an abrupt stop.

When I wrote Lean In, some people argued that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don’t have a partner. They were right. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home. I wrote a chapter titled “Make Your Partner a Real Partner” about the importance of couples splitting child care and housework 50/50. Now I see how insensitive and unhelpful this was to so many single moms who live with 100/0. My understanding and expectation of what a family looks like has shifted closer to reality. Since the early 1970s, the number of single mothers in the United States has nearly doubled. Today almost 30 percent of families with children are headed by a single parent—84 percent of whom are women.

I will never experience or fully understand the challenges many single moms face. Although the odds are stacked against them, they do everything they can to raise incredible children. To try to make ends meet, many have more than one job—not including the job of being a mother. And high-quality child care is often prohibitively expensive. The costs of placing a four-year-old and an infant in child care exceed annual median rent payments in every state.

Despite their hard work, single mothers have the highest rates of poverty in America and are almost twice as likely to be poor as single fathers. Families headed by black and Latina single mothers face even more challenges, with poverty rates approaching 40 percent. Almost a third of single mothers and their children experience food insecurity. While we advocate for policy changes to support these families, we also need to do all we can to offer more immediate help. Shockingly, one in three families in the San Francisco Bay Area needs food assistance. I started volunteering years ago at my local food bank, Second Harvest, then helped launch the Stand Up for Kids campaign, which now provides meals to almost 90,000 kids every month. After the campaign began distributing food at a local charter school, student disciplinary problems decreased. “People thought we had bad kids,” the principal told us, “but we had hungry kids.” Another school reported that the program reduced student absenteeism and health complaints and increased academic performance.

Working moms, especially those who are single, are put at a disadvantage from the start. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not provide paid maternity leave. And many women and men don’t have access to the sick and bereavement leave they need to get through difficult times—which makes it more likely that personal struggles will lead to work struggles. Adam’s research has shown that this is shortsighted: offering support through personal hardships helps employees become more committed to their companies. We need to rethink our public and corporate policies to make sure that women and men get the time off they need to care for themselves and their families.

We also need to banish the outdated assumption that children live with two married heterosexual parents. Once Dave died, the world kept reminding me and my children of what we no longer had. From father-daughter dances to Portfolio Night at school, father-child events were everywhere. My brother David said that he too realized for the first time how many father events there were at their public school in Houston and how hard that must be for the many children without dads.

Judgment calls loomed before me, making me feel increasingly incapable. What would Dave have done? Day after day I wished I knew and wished even more that he were here to answer the questions himself. But just like at work, when I focused on small steps, it was easier. I saw that I didn’t have to know how to help my kids with every situation they would encounter. I didn’t have to help them cope with a lifetime’s worth of sadness every time they cried. I just had to help them with what they were facing right then. I did not have to take even ten turns. I just had to help them take one turn at a time.

I started by making a few decisions…then immediately questioned those decisions. Anything that seemed to violate Dave’s preferences, no matter how small, rattled me. Dave believed that sleep was critically important for our children and adamantly opposed sleepovers. But after he passed away, I found that sleepovers comforted and distracted my kids. I knew this change was inconsequential, but it seemed symbolic to me of how hard it was to live without Dave and still honor his wishes. My sister-in-law Amy pointed out that Dave never got to tell me how his views would have evolved in the face of devastating loss. I could then picture him saying, “Yes, of course, if it makes them happier, they can have sleepovers.” And while I’ll never know what Dave would think about small decisions like whether preteens can watch Pretty Little Liars or if it’s okay for them to play Pokémon GO, I do know what he wanted for our kids more than a good night’s sleep. Integrity. Curiosity. Kindness. Love.

Without Dave as a rudder, I found myself relying heavily on feedback from friends and family. Like when colleagues pointed to something positive at work, it helped when friends let me know they thought I’d handled something well at home. It also helped when they were honest about how I could do things better, like suggesting I be more flexible with previous rules and more patient with both my children and myself.

As I got farther from the trauma and the newness of life without Dave, I found myself journaling less. I no longer felt like I was going to burst without this outlet. The day after what would have been Dave’s forty-eighth birthday, I decided I had to try to move on from this phase of my mourning. I sat down and wrote this:

October 3, 2015
This is the last entry of this journal. The longest 22½ weeks—156 days—I have ever lived. I am pushing myself to move onward and upward—and part of that is to stop writing this journal. I think I am ready.
I dreaded yesterday since the day Dave died. I knew it would be a marker—the birthday that did not happen. Anytime anyone said it would be Dave’s birthday, I corrected them in my mind and sometimes out loud. No, it will not be his birthday. You have to be alive to have a birthday. He is not. October 2, 2015, was the day he would have turned 48. 48 years old. Half a life.
Went to his grave with Paula, Rob, Mom, Dad, David, and Michelle. It looked so much smaller than it loomed in my memory from the day we buried him.
Towards the end of our time there, I sat down in front of the grave by myself. I spoke to him out loud. I told him that I loved him and that I missed him every minute of every day. I told him how empty the world seemed without him in it. And then I just cried, as it was so painfully clear that he could not hear me.
David and Michelle gave me a few minutes alone and then came over and sat down next to me, one on each side. Something so comforting about this—I realized that my siblings were in my life long before Dave was. We talked about how if we were lucky, the three of us would live long enough to bury our parents—and we would do it there—together. And so life continues with them. Not with Dave but with them. I can grow old with David and Michelle by my side as they always have been.
Looking at Dave’s grave, I realized that there is nothing left to do or say. I don’t get to tell him I love him ever again. I don’t get to hold him or kiss him ever again. I have learned how to make sure I talk about him constantly so our children remember him but I will never again have another conversation with him about them. I can cry all day every day—but it will not bring him back. Nothing will.
We are all headed for where Dave is. Without a doubt. Looking at the row upon row of headstones, it is so clear that we all end up in the ground. So each day has to count. I don’t know how many I have left and I want to start living again.
I am not happy yet. But I know how much I have done these past five months. I know I can survive. I know I can raise my kids. I know I need a ton of help—and have learned to ask for it—and I believe more and more that the core people are in this with me for the long haul. It is still scary but less so. As all of them tell me over and over, I am not alone. We all need other people—and I do more than ever. But at the end of the day the only person who can move my life ahead, make me happy, and build a new life for my kids is me.
156 days in. Hopefully many more to go. So today I end this journal. And try to restart the rest of my life…