A Natalie Observed

Tag: Parts

  • Rivers and Roads

    Last night I went to see the band playing for free at The Barn, Sonic Gravity. Their renditions of Rock with You by Michael Jackson and Love on Top by Beyoncé were the vocalist’s strongest. I appreciated the energy of the bassist with aviator-adjacent sunglasses, a bandana on his head, and a grown-out beard mustache as the guitarist soloed. I would see them again. As they played, words finally found me for what happened last weekend, words I have not been able to find to explain what happened when the first person I dated after Jeffrey became a period and not an ellipsis.

    I kept trying to explain why it ended. I sat multiple times this week to write through the waterfall of tears what took place, but words continued to abandon me. The reality is I really do not know what happened because half the story is missing. Something unraveled and he needed to be alone. There are details to the narrative that feel unclear to me and I have to settle into the fact they might always be that way. I have guesses, but I do not want to fill in the blanks for someone who has to figure out their story. The ambiguity is familiar and triggering. I would love to not know how to so expertly repair my broken heart, but here we are. Once again, I am repairing it, excavating the wound to allow healing.

    Watching The People of Chico dance is a hobby for me. There is a freedom to the movement informed by excessive sunshine, bodies overwhelmed by the throttle of heat, music with lyrics everyone relates to and a Sierra Nevada Summerfest. A man wearing an oversized Hawaiian shirt and green baseball cap that says “Ireland” starts the crowd off first. He tends to be the first one up followed by the woman in sketchers that shape her butt, brown athletic leggings, a periwinkle blue top, a fanny pack, and a pastel pink sunhat with a floppy cylindrical brim she leaves at her table. A tiny child, not more than 3-years-old with three ponytails and red glasses twirls to the side of them.

    There is a couple who walked in past me and they are effortless. Despite carefully crafted tans and bodies who go to the gym, they look unforced and several people aside from me watch them as they find a table. The woman is wearing white jeans and kitten heels. He traces the seams of her denim crop top as she sits between his legs. Her long curly blonde hair snares his fingers. He is scruffy in the perfectly intentional way and wearing Ariat denim. Both of them worked hard to wake up looking like this. That is when I notice she has hands of a 45-year-old and the face of a 30-year-old. California is weird. They wrap into each other, the only two people in this room.

    Wasn’t I just them?

    What do I know about the unraveling? I found boundaries around alcohol use I was not sure how to make before because I did not know what they were. I cannot be around someone who is mismanaging their drinking. I did that before. I watched Jeffrey physically die while I emotionally rotted and died alongside him. I can support anyone on a journey who is doing the work, who does not make me feel alone in our relationship. But when my partner drinks to excess and I am not ready, I feel lonely which triggers anxiety. The anxiety leads me to hypervigilance and monitoring. I did not know that before this person sat next to me at The Barn and now I do. I would not trade knowing for anything. I am grateful to have language for the feelings in my body for whoever comes into my life in the future. I can work on the Parts of Me who are anxious around drinking. I can help them grow confident in what they know. They do know quite a lot.

    Billy Joel Just the Way You Are plays and the dance floor empties out. The woman with the pastel floppy hat is dancing alone. On the other side of the dance floor, a woman dances with an invisible partner, holding her right arm up as if resting on a shoulder with her left arm out to hold a hand. She moves with the grace of a robot, smiling without abandon. This same woman would later slap her own ass and move through Tai Chi movements when Sara Bareilles Love Song played. The freedom. Couples eventually filter onto the dance floor, taking advantage of a moment.

    Would we have ever danced together? We talked about it, dancing. There was not enough time to see.

    Parts of me learned I can trust myself more than I thought. I learned I am able to discern what I need while navigating getting to know someone. I am good at asking for help to make sure I am seeing what I am seeing. I have a solid support system. I am intuitive at observing my body and knowing something is wrong and I am patient, allowing myself time to understand what the “wrong” is. I am also a good advocate for what I need. I did not filter myself unless I was stuck and could not identify what I needed. I did get stuck the weekend things ended. Edges of the PTSD showed themselves and it took me time alone to see what they were. Once I knew, he did too.

    I learned to what degree I do not trust my intuition, to what degree Parts of me still do not trust me. They wonder what I did wrong to not see this coming. They questioned the signs that were there all along. They critiqued why I did not set a clearer and firmer boundary when I saw something that made me feel anxious. These Parts tell me I am an idiot for being at this intersection again, that I let myself be vulnerable to heart break and that is why my heart broke. These Parts and their method of protection are cruel and self-loathing. They meticulously document every single decision I make and find every single reason why I am the fool who made them. My conversation with these Parts does not reason and there is no logic. There is only the extraordinary discomfort of pain and the negative belief I see needs work in EMDR: if I am in pain, it is my fault, even when I objectively see I did nothing wrong. It is maddening to continue holding both.

    I know the counterarguments to the Parts of Me Who Do Not Trust Me: I did not want to judge someone I did not know too quickly. Especially someone with as many green flags as this person. I did not want Trauma to decide if connection is safe. It took six weeks for what happened to happen. It did not and was not happening all along. I did not ignore what I saw. I did not know what I know now and I could not know it before I did. I talked through every worry, every anxiety with my therapist, my grief therapist, Randy, Heather, my parents, with him. I got to know a complex person as a person who is also complex. I did the best I could and I think I did a good job.

    All firsts since Jeffrey have been overwhelming. First weekend away from home. First apartment. First time solo out of the house. Everything since Jeffrey died is something I steer my body through. Meeting this person introduced so many other new firsts: first meet-cute, first date, first second date, first kiss, first third date, first walk in the park, first person in my apartment, in my bed, in my phone, in my struggle with grief. First person who showed me their home, their bed, their life. He is the first person outside of my family to see me panic when a siren surprised me, to see me panic with alcohol, to see me get stuck inside the Panic Prison. I cannot even digest all of the firsts, there are so many others that elude me.

    He was the first person I was excited to tell people about, the first person I told parts of my heartbreak to. First person I introduced to friends while out and about. First person I decided to not question when it felt good, to allow myself just to feel worthy and trust that it was real. When we first met, I kept asking him if it was real. Was he feeling it also? He was. It was. We were. And now we are not.

    Get Up, Stand Up plays and my cousin texts me, reminding me he is willing to sort through Jeffrey’s video game systems still in my closet. My family is absolutely the kindest people. We are all so different, different educations, different careers, socioeconomics, religions. No two of us agree on much politically. Many of my family voted for our current president and I avoid discussions of politics when we gather. I do not need to focus on what is different to love them. They are the gentlest people, there for anyone in the space of a heartbeat and without question. As my mother pointed out, if civil war broke out, we would need all of them to hide us, and we would absolutely hide them. To come from this kind of value system, from this kind of loyalty, is a privilege. I want to show them to someone I love, to someone who also could appreciate what it means to show up for each other. This person I met does understand that, comes from a similar family value system. Sometimes I feel the fear of not knowing if anyone will get to see what I love about my family before more of them are not here. Then I remember I am a product of this family I love so much. To know me, is to know them. As I reflect on this, my sister texts pictures of the family with my grandmother from 2021 and tears well in my eyes. To see her then, more lucid and in her own home. A time before we knew the pain of losing her. I am here listening to Bob Marley and I am there in her living room. Once again, I am touching time.

    Something about my self-doubt shifted as I got to know this person. I do know what I need. I do know my body and I do entirely trust my body. I know it overreacts to things that are from the past. I see edges I did not see before and this person made the space for me to find them at my pace. It was safe, and warm, and kind. I told him all along if the only thing I got from knowing him is that I learned I can experience joy and happiness again, it was entirely worth it.

    I will not rewrite that version of our story, even though it hurts to know I deserve better. I deserve someone who is ready to pick me. Who will not get lost when picking me. Who can both anchor me and float alongside me. Who will know how to find themselves in this sparkly Prussian blue of unseeable, violent water. I live in a delicate gray area. The water is deep, but the color is so incredibly breathtaking. 

    I can do hard things, and I can do them alone. That does not mean I want to. While I am thrilled and proud to have accomplished the Survival of Solitude, I resent every fucking minute I do it. He understood a version of what I meant when I explained this resentment and so very few people ever have to know what I mean. It is a specific type of pain I struggle to articulate. It lives inside of my stomach, in my hips, and in my chest. It makes my heart beat faster and my breath harder to catch. For the first time since Jeffrey died, I was not an alien under observation and study. To find someone who understood loneliness so clearly is something I feel so devastated to lose. And having had it all is so stunningly beautiful. The gravity of the despair alongside the gratitude overwhelms me. I wish it on no one and lug it grimly alone. Their symbiosis is a compliment I will humbly carry the rest of my life. I hope I can find someone who understands it like he did. I deserve to feel witnessed.

    My sister’s childhood best friend texts she is in the neighborhood. I invite her to meet me and we watched the end of Sonic Gravity and then went to dinner. We talked about our adult views on growing up together, on being older siblings, on Catholic school and coming out and breakups. As we flowed effortlessly in conversation, I connected to the confidence of the life I am building and sustaining beyond my tragedies. As I keep saying: I am alive.

    The song Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart plays in the background as I write this and for the first time I wonder if the song is not about reaching someone who is no longer available, who life took away from me, but about reaching myself. Maybe I am finally here.

    Rivers and Roads by The Head and the Heart

    A year from now, we’ll all be gone
    All our friends will move away
    And they’re goin’ to better places
    But our friends will be gone away

    Nothin’ is as it has been
    And I miss your face like hell
    And I guess it’s just as well
    But I miss your face like hell

    Oh
    Oh
    Oh
    Oh

    Been talkin’ ’bout the way things change
    And my family lives in a different state
    And if you don’t know what to make of this
    Then we will not relate
    So if you don’t know what to make of this
    Then we will not relate

    Oh
    Oh
    Oh
    Oh

    Oh
    Oh
    Oh
    Oh

    Rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you
    Rivers and roads, oh, rivers and roads
    Oh, rivers ’til I reach you

    rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you
    (Oh) rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you

    rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you
    (Oh) rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you

    rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you
    (Oh) rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you

    rivers and roads, rivers and roads
    Rivers ’til I reach you

  • Unattractive Gray Box

    Last Friday, a friend posted about the time and date for a community member’s Hero Walk and I had a panic attack. I remembered what it felt like to be posting the same updates for people in my life about your Hero Walk and immediately without warning left my body. I watched myself at the Hero Walk. I watched myself in the room with you. I watched what it looked like to watch me post about the Hero Walk online, to be the people who learned you died. Just as quickly as I left my body, I came back, gasping for air, standing up from the sofa and trying to get to the kitchen sink so I could splash cold water on my face. I grabbed an ice cube. Earlier this month, I saw a doctor and received medication to help with panic attacks, but I have never taken medicine like this before. I was nervous in my panic to try it without someone being around. What if my body does not like it? What if the panic gets worse? I laid in bed at 7pm and turned on Law and Order SVU. I am rewatching old episodes because they do not require much focus. It is interesting to notice how much Stabler bothers me now. His macho, patriarchal ideas of how to be a man are grating. The panic subsided as I watched season five attempt to explain why conversion therapy is wrong.  I was asleep by 9pm and slept until 7am the following morning.

    On Saturday, I sorted all of my mementos into new boxes I purchased for whenever I was ready to sort them. I found a card written by my best friend in second grade thanking her for the Sky Dancer I gifted her. I looked at photos of people whose names I cannot remember, found evidence of my past relationships, of my sister’s past relationships. Of my father’s and my mother’s past relationships. I found birthday cards from my father’s mother who I only remember in images. I read all of the carefully dated and filled cards from Grammy and reminded of all the evidence of her past relationships. I sorted napkin drawings and love letters and poems and and took photos of the things to send people from my past. Here we are, I was telling them. Here is the evidence of who you are in my life. I kept these things to remember you, to remember how you made me feel, to remember the complexity and delicacy of loving and being loved by so many people.

    On Saturday, I also touched all of your shirts. In sorting the mementos, I pulled out the things that are you. You cannot mix into the other boxes. You require your own. A few months ago, I bought an unattractive gray storage container so I could consolidate all of you into one place. I was in the storage aisle at Target for a long time deciding on a container. How do you select the container that fits all of you in it? What color represents the things you no longer need because you died?

    Before Saturday, you were scattered all over where I live now. I would open my bedroom closet to grab a sweater and see the Panda bear with your heartbeat recorded on it be the ICU nurse. The panda sat atop the quilt the organ donation family coordinator stamped your hand onto. I had a container in the hall closet of random artifacts we found while mom and Phil packed to move me from Washington to California in January. Your shirts were in a moving box in the office closet. I needed to organize these things so i can choose when I look at the remnants of you. I also wanted to see what I had been avoiding looking at. What does all of you fitting into a box look like? I do not know what to do with everything I have left. Your wallet? You do not need those credit cards anymore, but I am not ready to let go of it all. What if I regret giving them away? So all of you lives in an unattractive gray box all together in my office.

    After consolidation, you are now in the photo of us on my dresser from when we sailed on your dad’s boat over 4th of July. We listened to fireworks echo across the islands and felt the power of the explosions in our bodies. You are in your deodorant I still cannot throw away in the bathroom cabinet above the toilet. You are in the urn your father made for me, the one with wood from your cane and remnants of the tree in front of the family home you grew up in. The urn has circular cuts on the sides. Your father explained them as portholes, as if you are looking out from inside a ship. We cried as he talked me through what your urn is, cried as I scooped your ashes into the jar that sits within the urn. Ashes got onto the kitchen counter and I wiped them up with a Clorox wipe. You are in the photo-booth pictures from your fortieth birthday celebration that sits next to the tiny pocket-sized penguin Jena gave me when you died on my desk. You are in the half of the neon MuirWood sign that I still have in the office closet. And you now you are in the unattractive gray box.

    It occurs to me that someday all of these things, these remnants of you, will all be and only be in the unattractive gray box. The shirts I am keeping might not ever become a quilt because I am stuck on finding someone who I can trust to help me make it. I am scared of your shirts getting ruined and not having them anymore. I smelled them as I refolded them and put them in the box. They smell like Downy and dust. Your smell is not there anymore. How many times will I move the shirts before I do not want to move them anymore? If I ever date, how do I explain your photo on the dresser? I suspect that eventually the photo on the dresser will not feel appropriate there anymore. I want to believe whoever is next will understand the remnants of you I have in my home, but it feels extraordinary to imagine such a person could exist.

    On the day I consolidated all of your things into the unattractive gray box, I also reorganized my entire office, removed the trash, worked out, and took a bath. I did not eat until 5pm. It was not until 8pm when I was surprised by a panic attack while walking Dottie that I realized I had not been in my body all day. I journeyed to another place in my mind to organize your things, to touch all the memories of my life. I am scared I will always flip between feeling everything and feeling nothing. I walked outside in the cold for thirty minutes, audibly crying. Your welcome, Meriam Park, I hope it was a good show.

    I gave up on New Years Resolutions a long time ago. I do not like the pressure of failing at something when my life has thrown so many curves that limited the execution of a goal. I do like settling into a Word if it appears to me, although, I do not put pressure on myself to find it. In 2025, my word was “surrender”. I knew I needed to surrender to the experience I am having of grieving you. I knew I did not need to resist my feelings of losing you, of having lost myself in my relationship with you. I sit here today trying to grapple with what it means to have made it through this year, but I do not have the words. I think I am still too in it to see what it all means. As I considered what my word should be for 2026, the only one that comes to mind is “acceptance”, but even that does not feel quite right. Maybe I am still in the hangover of surrender. Maybe I keep surrendering until a better idea appears.

    One of my new favorite podcasts is called Shameless, “the pop culture podcast for smart people who love dumb stuff.” In 2025, one of the hosts, Michelle, had her first child and also lost her mother to brain cancer. In Shameless’s New Years episode released today (recorded in the future of Melbourne time), Michelle reflected on her difficult year, on losing her mother, and on not trusting setting intention for the 2026 because loss had changed her view on predictable safety. Michelle’s 2025 word was Presence and two weeks later she learned her mother had brain cancer. I really, really related to Michelle’s fear. I am scared to set any intention that goes beyond meeting myself where I am because any other expectation feels wrought with potential heartbreak. If there is any lesson in 2025, it is that I can get myself through anything, I am a good advocate for my survival, and nothing will every hurt as much as losing someone you love. Sometimes meeting yourself where you are is all you can muster. And that’s okay.

  • A Wishing Flower

    In the past two weeks, I spent dozens of hours switching between old episodes of Housewives of Potomac and podcasts which analyze each episode. I would rather immerse myself in the carefully constructed drama of wealthy narcissists than examine whatever it is I feel whenever I remember the new layers of grief I felt this week. I am in a feeling that takes my breath away and the familiarity worries me because I know where it leads. I do not like this pathway. How was I just in a reality where this was not present? I had the giggles on Thanksgiving for the first time since I can remember and now I am here? It feels like it will always be this way, grief showing up like a nosy neighbor, a confrontation by all the weight of losing you.

    On Tuesday, a colleague brought a case involving a young widow client to our consultation group. As she processed, I could feel all Parts of me show up at once. The Widow. The Therapist. The Griever. The Colleague. The Trauma Survivor. The One who wants to feel anything but all of this. As The Widow began discussing what this client might be feeling based on my own experience, The Therapist saw looks on my colleagues faces, looks of people who got a peak into the enormous complexity of my grief. The Colleague realized parts of this last year people do not know, the parts The Griever has not written. The Widow spent a lot of time this year wondering if you tried to die, if you completed suicide. The Widow, The Griever, and the Therapist saw a look on one colleague’s face that made me question if my peers realized the hole The Griever keeps trying to crawl out of. The client is in month two of their new hell. In my January of this year. Without knowing them, The Widower knows where this client is and it is very dark there. It is unfeeling and numb. It is one hour at a time. It is surviving.

    While I can make space for the parts of the client story that were so different, for the unique ways different bodies process traumatic loss, The Young Widow knows a version of a story most people, including my colleagues, will hopefully never know. This complexity is alone. The Therapist, the Trauma Survivor, and the Widow know clinical intervention for this client is only to make space until the client’s body shows signs it needs more support. Their body will know because the body always knows. It will panic, become depressed, anxious, and show signs of distress. Until then, the therapist should create safe attachment, make space, and validate. There is no therapy in the first year of traumatic loss. There is only containment and, as needed, education on why the body is reacting the way it does with interventions to help support the reaction. The Colleague and Therapist felt deeply aware of how triggered I must have looked to my peers. I cannot do anything about what they saw. What they saw was raw and honest. This is who I am now, the amalgamation of all these fucked up Parts. They are wounded and they have knowledge. The One who wants to feel anything but all of this cannot process it all. It is too much. I am kaleidoscopic.

    When I close my eyes, I see trying to heal from this grief as attempting to reconstruct a wishing flower. I can feel the texture of the dandelion seed, that soft, delicate prickle. The breeze is Time taking each seed away from me. I will never have all the seeds back. If grief has a timeline, I feel like I am in the few seconds after opening my eyes having made the wish. I did not wish for this. The panic of the task at hand and how long it will take overwhelms me. It is a nightmare. It took me a year to get here and every seed I manage to capture is another painful piece. There is still so much work to do. I am surviving.

    After that consultation group where all my Parts came, I had seven client sessions. By the end of Tuesday, I was exhausted, inhuman. As I ate dinner on the couch, I let my mind wander and began to sink into the reality the consultation group even happened. I am a person with all these parts. I opened my phone and another clip from When Harry Met Sally came up, the infamous diner scene. We watched When Harry Met Sally on our New Years Eves together. You were shocked when I told you I had not seen it. My memory tells me you loved the movie because of your mother, because it was her favorite. I feel apprehensive about my remembering around this detail and worry I am dishonoring your mother and your loved ones by disclosing it. For me, the movie is you. It is surreal to have the tragic death of a Hollywood celebrity trigger the capturing of a new seed of my loss of you. I put my phone down. I watched more adult women fight with each other. I went to bed. Tomorrow we will start again.