A Natalie Observed

Tag: therapist

  • Time Does Not Really Exist

    Last night I felt the familiar vibration in my body and I knew I need to sit with Grief. I doodled freely in my art journal. As I mindlessly scribbled whatever I felt like, I listened to music in my headphones. I made circles that eventually looked like balloons whose strings became a tree whose roots became a brain. After an hour, I looked at it and reflected on how the chaos of the page felt like my life: no clear picture, no clear color scheme. Just energy. Then lightning struck and I felt my body slip away from me, nothing underneath me and nothing attached to my neck. Weightlessness settled in as I floated above myself and saw me think. “We could have made this place beautiful”, followed by “I’ll keep trying.” The room fluttered out of view. I started sobbing, convulsive auditory wails exorcising themselves out of my body. I wanted to stay in the feeling forever. I felt catharsis as I touched a new layer of something I have not permitted to exist within my consciousness.

    As tears leaked out of my face, Kate Havnevik’s “Unlike Me” started playing.

    There are no guarantees in life
    Not for the present, nor for the future

    I told Jeffrey I was sorry for not being able to do more to keep him here. “I know I do not need to feel sorry”, I told him, “but I am”.


    All I know is that I’m here
    Don’t know for how long

    Part of me will always wonder if we were almost to the turning point where things got easier. What if there was another side to where we were? What if we got to have happily ever after?

    I love the way you live so intensely
    Enjoy every minute of life
    With space to swing your arms around
    Laughing loudly

    I always knew in my core things would not stay the way they were. What was happening was untenable for both of us. I tell clients something I know is infuriating but is true: We are always stuck until we are ready not to be. I just never knew it would turn out like this, that what would unstick me would be Jeffrey dying. A lump forms in my throat as I edit this post now thinking about it. Part of my feels guilt for not being stronger, for not knowing how to help him, for not realizing what was happening sooner to get us help. What if I could have saved him? What if I could be in a world where he did not die and we got to have everything we ever wanted?

    Unlike me, unlike me
    Do you think I’m strange?
    Unlike you, unlike you
    I am not pretending

    There is no time

    I need to be very, very clear: I do not need reassurance on this Part of me in any way. I do not want to hear “there’s nothing more you could have done” or whatever version is coming up for those reading this. I in no way believe there was more I could do. I do not feel responsible. In Self, I know everything unfolded as it needed to and my Soul will learn whatever she needs to from it. There are many things for me to carry in this life and responsibility for Jeffrey dying is not going to be one of them. I cannot change what happened.

    But Part of me resorts to wondering when she is so overwhelmed by new feelings. I do not want to pretend like this Part is not in the experience I have of losing Jeffrey. She’s difficult to ignore and sits on my chest, throws cannon balls at my throat, pours tears down my face, slows my heart rate, and steals my body from the room. This Part loved Jeffrey so much and wonders all the time what he thinks about the things happening in my life. Like, what would he think the odds are “Unlike Me” would come on the shuffled playlist while processing all of this?

    I waffle between these two stark differences in my experience of the grief. There is Part of me trying to heal the wounds formed when I lost myself with Jeffrey. This Part wants me to put away the photos, wants to remove any traces of him. Then there is the Part of me who misses him every day, wishes she could play Wolf Parade I’ll Believe in Anything to see if it brought as much joy to him when he found it as it did me. This Part wants to show Jeffrey my art journal and ask what he thinks about it, wants to know what memorial tattoo he would get of himself and what he thinks of this apartment I am in now.

    For both of these Parts to exist in my one body is disorienting. My panic attacks used to happen when either Part showed themselves to me at all. The magnitude of the love or the shame would disappear my body. Both feelings are so massive my body split how I feel about Jeffrey dying from the reality that he died. My healing journey requires my body to reach a capacity to hold both experiences at the same time. Last night, it felt like both of them met and shook hands. I floated above myself for only a moment before telling Jeffrey I missed him. I felt him sitting with me, a tunnel between where I am and wherever he is. Then I started writing this post to relieve the distress in my body, to navigate my way through the panic attack.

    I feel like I see the pathway of my healing even if I have no idea where it is going. I feel patient as I continue to make space to notice where I am, what my body needs, and what my capacity is to care for it. It is a surrender like nothing I experienced in my life before now and I am so grateful for it. The freedom to let go and have no idea where I am going is anomalous. I still feel like I am touching time, grounded in a present awareness and I never want to let go. I feel awed by this experience, as devastating as it is. Part of me will always wonder if we could have made it, while Part of me will always know we never could have. Or else we would have. Right?

    Kate Havnevik “Unlike Me”

    There are no guarantees in life
    Not for the present, nor for the future
    All I know is that I’m here
    Don’t know for how long

    I love the way you live so intensely
    Enjoy every minute of life
    With space to swing your arms around
    Laughing loudly

    Unlike me, unlike me
    Do you think I’m strange?
    Unlike you, unlike you
    I am not pretending


    There is no time
    There is no time
    Time doesn’t really exist

    The past, the present and the future
    Are all side by side, hand in hand
    You move and change, yet you go nowhere
    Everything stays the same (same)

    You stare at me and ask me questions
    Makes me nervous, mm
    This room, it keeps a constant tone
    While I’m on a rollercoaster

    Unlike me, unlike me
    Do you think I’m strange?
    Unlike you, unlike you
    I am not pretending

    There is no time
    There is no time
    There is no time
    Time doesn’t really exist

    There is no time
    There is no time
    There is no time
    Time doesn’t really exist

    Patching more life
    Patching more
    Patching more life
    Patching more

    Time

  • 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.