Before You Make It Mean Something
What grief, strangers, and saved essays reminded me: don’t perform the lesson, touch what’s true.
The furniture saleswoman asked what I did for work. Turns out her uncle had worked for my company many years ago - a salesperson who left after they changed the commission structure. She called him ornery, said it with affection.
One day, he was hiking and had an accident. Severe brain injury (triggering for me, right?). He was never the same after. Couldn’t hold down a job. Divorced and remarried multiple times. The injury changed everything.
But she kept coming back to the same thing: his ten golden years. The decade before the accident when he was himself, working, living, whole. Those years sustained him through everything that came after. She said it like it was the most important fact about him.
At the antique store, another woman told me about her husband’s death. How it changed her nine children. How it changed her relationship to control - taught her it was an illusion. That faith held a universal quality. The acceptance that you can’t orchestrate outcomes, that you’re participating in something larger than your ability to manage it.
She said only his death could have taught her that. Through grief. Through loss.
I came home and opened my laptop, re-reading essays I’d saved for another day. I read those lines with my jaw clenched, like I was bracing.
Lou Blaser writing about enoughness and ambition: “The test is, ‘Will you give more to the world than you take?’” The question landed like a hand on my shoulder.
Mel Moseley on the theoretical future, the one we can't control: "I find peace in the uncertainty because that's where the possibility lives." Something in me exhaled, permission to stop demanding a map.
Chloe Hope on what it means to witness death without flinching: “Living beings do not become organic matter at Death; they simply become undeniably so.” I read it three times. Each time it got quieter and truer.
Essay after essay, all published around the same time, and all saved by me for reading again for another day, all circling something I couldn’t name yet. Mortality. Brevity. Enoughness. The undeniable fact of being matter, being here, participating in something we can’t control.
My own near-misses surfaced. Being homeless. The car accident. The brain injury and the long healing after. How that accident taught me more about surrender than yoga ever could.
Aliveness kept arriving. From strangers’ voices. From essays on my screen. From my own body remembering what it learned when control collapsed.
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What Happens Next
When awareness lands like that - from six directions at once - and the reflex is immediate.
Make it mean something. 😂
Turn it into a gratitude practice. Polish the rupture into a lesson about living fully. Perform the integration before you’ve even sat with what broke through.
The performance of acceptable responses is taught early. We learn to temper our honest relationship with reality so it doesn’t make people uncomfortable. We learn to make our aliveness palatable.
But what if the first move isn’t to make it useful?
What if it’s just to touch it?
The furniture saleswoman’s uncle had ten golden years. Real years that sustained him through everything after.
The woman at the antique store didn’t get handed tidy wisdom. Grief taught her slowly, through pain, to stop reaching for control she never had.
The essays offered witness: we’re here, we’re matter, this is brief, we’re undeniably in it.
Unpolished is intentional. It’s raw contact with what’s actually true before you domesticate it into something shareable.
This Week’s Practice
One true sentence on paper each day.
About aliveness as you’re experiencing it right now. In your body. In your kitchen. In the gap between what you’re carrying and what you’re pretending to carry.
Before you make it inspirational, turn it into a takeaway, and especially before you perform having understood it.
Just what’s true.
A few writings prompts, if they are helpful:
“The truest thing about being alive today is…”
“What I am not admitting is…”
“What I need is…”
“I don’t know” is allowed. Contradictory is allowed. Tired is allowed.
You don’t have to make your aliveness presentable this week.
You get to touch it. Unpolished. As it is.
Because sometimes awareness doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives through strangers telling you about brain injuries and faith learned through loss. Through essays landing on the same day, all saying: you’re here, you’re matter, this is limited.
Through your own body remembering what surrender actually feels like. And the work isn’t to immediately integrate it.
The work is the first honest touch.
One sentence. Unpolished. True.
That’s the authorization.
If you felt seen by this, please share it with someone you love. We don’t get many chances to tell the truth out loud.
I am loving how "aliveness" brings everthing to our attention as it's needed. What we do with it then, is the question I'm sitting with. When the future looks to me like more of the same, and more and more, only more complex and painful, I seek that aliveness in the daily joys and gems that I notice and take to heart. More interactions in Nature, and turning my thoughts to how I can make this time count for something beautiful. And this time is precious, no doubt. Thank you, as always, Love, Virg
Thank you for sharing these micro-moments with us, Alex. They become an anchor for me. I can relate to the woman who said she came to let go of control by way of alchemizing her grief. That's descriptive of the long-term work I have been doing for almost thirteen years, since Sarah's birth. And my heart feels fragile, thin.
To answer your questions, I will stick with the last one: "What I need is...someone to check in on me, a stable and solid presence where there's mutuality in the relationship and I know I'm not the only one carrying the emotional labor. I need to know I matter to others the way they matter to me. I need my needs to be acknowledged and respected. I need to not feel so emotionally undernourished. I need to be revived, I guess. To feel the aliveness you write about again. I did once, and the light has dimmed significantly these past few months. I have never felt more alone than I do now, with the exception of after Auggie's birth 6 years ago when postpartum depression engulfed me in psychic darkness."
That's my honest answer. I'm not sure if I should publicize it. But it's where I am. Thanks for reading.