The list that will not stop growing
I am eleven months past the fire, and two months ago I declared the hardest part of the grief over. I was wrong. My insurance list sits at 3,144 items, and it keeps growing because every week I find another thing that used to sit on a shelf or hang on a wall that is simply gone. I did not choose this pace. I do not get to choose this pace. And that is the actual subject of this newsletter: our need to rush things that cannot be rushed. The discomfort of being in a place we do not want to be in. The agony of having to admit you are still there. And the way our own judgment gets cloudy, because we want the pain to be over so badly that we will believe almost anything that promises it is.
What cracked me open
The moment that broke something loose was a photo from Christmas. The kids were piled on top of each other in the living room, laughing, and my husband Gary was standing there watching them, probably thinking about adding himself to the pile. A magical moment. So much laughter. Good food was involved.
That house does not exist anymore. I found myself asking whether we would ever have a moment like that again.
We went to Big Bear for Gary’s birthday, with the same kids, though calling them kids is not quite accurate. They are all adults. And the goofiness came back. The silliness and familiarity were back. I realize we have not lost it. It was well preserved in all of us the entire time, just waiting for room to come back out.
Gary’s daughter walked in for the birthday dinner I had put together and stopped. This is just like it was in the Palisades, she said, looking at the table. I had brought over new wine glasses from Germany. My mother downsized and is living in an assisted facility now. She gave them to me. I set out new dishes, simpler than what we used to have, but arranged with the same care.
The story I wanted to tell you
I have to be honest about something. I really, truly, deeply, one hundred percent did not want to record this episode. I am so over this grief and the endless delays in waiting for this to move forward. I want to give you the comeback story, the one where I stand on the other side of the fire and tell you it made me stronger, that I see the gift in it now, that I would not trade the lesson for anything. That story is not true yet, and I am not willing to hand you a version of my life that is not true just because it would be easier to hear. And maybe it will resonate with someone who is going through a massive loss or prolonged period of grieving. It is what it is. It takes time and we are best served to not fight the time it takes.
A memory that keeps coming back to me
I remember vividly the birth of my baby girl. I chose to have her naturally, in the bathtub. She is a water baby. That meant no drugs, no painkillers, just me and the midwife and pain I can only describe as excruciating. There is a moment forever burned into my memory. The midwife asked me if it hurt. Beneath two deep breaths and a muffled cry, I told her I had no idea it would hurt this much, that it was the worst pain I had ever experienced; yes, it hurts. And she said, good. Work with it.
I have thought about that moment constantly this year. The process worked exactly as it was supposed to, with or without drugs. That baby was coming regardless of what I chose to feel. I just chose to feel every second of that journey instead of numbing my way through it. That is the instruction I have to hear again now. Work with it. Not around it. Not past it as fast as possible. With it. It is THROUGH the pain. Not around it that we come out on the other side.
Going through the list
At this stage, most weeks the work of rebuilding is just paperwork. I sit with every photo I scanned, or that someone else has and go through it with a magnifying glass, identifying what we lost. Family photo of the Turkey and the family, and on the table the hand-carved wooden bowl from Spain. The giraffes from Africa. The ceramic bowl from New Mexico. The blanket from Mexico. The necklace with the panther and the diamond that my father gave me thirty years ago. My communion cross from the Catholic Church, from when I was a child. Naming each object is its own small grief, and there is no way to speed through it. You either do the inventory or you do not, and the inventory does not care how tired you are of doing it. Every photo screaming at you: you don’t have that anymore; this is also gone. Remember this? Burned.
Why we want to rush the pain and make it go away
You already know if what you are doing is working or not. You already got that call, or heard that voice, telling you whether you are on the right path. I am hearing that voice nonstop since the fire, in my dreams and in meditation, telling me I am being rewired, head to toe. I would like to rush through this. Can someone save me from this?
If our own stuff was so solid, it would not have fallen apart in the first place. The reason it fell apart is because it did not work. Something better is coming. But because the pain of not knowing what that something is happens to be unbearable, we get tempted to take shortcuts. We reach for the comeback story because the real story is too slow and too undignified to sit inside.
This shows up in business exactly the way it shows up in grief. If you want a different result in your business, you must undergo a real transition, and that transition follows a predictable pattern. The breakdown, where the old way falls apart and everything stops, whether you are ready or not. The breakthrough: the learning and letting go that happens once you finally stop defending what already failed. And the breakout, which is almost always the slowest part, the part where the new thing is born like my baby girl was and comes out into the world. So small and vulnerable at first.
In my most personal episode yet, I talked about spending over $400,000 chasing funnels and lead pages that other people swore worked, because building my own systems from scratch felt too slow. It never worked, because I was still trying to skip the breakdown instead of letting it finish.
The most painful place is that these truths are in contradiction of my desire. I want to have already mastered it. I have spent years watching this exact pattern in my consulting work, and I have given people this advice with total confidence from the outside of it. Now I am the one inside it, and I must give myself the same advice I have handed out so easily to everyone else. Perhaps that is exactly why this was given to me to share with you, in all its painful, long, bone-crushing, snail-speed reality.
Closing Reflection
In my latest podcast episode, I talk about the difference between rushing pain and working with it. Where in your own business are you doing the first when the moment is actually asking for the second? What decision have you been forcing before it was ready, hoping speed could stand in for clarity?
Let’s grow,
Beate
