24/03/2026
I have a posture and expression that don’t always give away pain or suffering.
I learned that years ago in handstand school. The tasks would keep getting harder and harder, and even when I was well over my edge, my body straining so much I was about to drop, fall, or crash out, my coach would say, your face doesn’t even show that you’re trying. That’s why I keep making it harder.
This comment landed because it was true in more ways than one. This was not just how I moved in handstand school. This was how I had moved through life.
I became a mother young, in my teens - a single mother raising a disabled daughter. Somewhere inside those roles, I became exceptionally good at functioning past my own limits without looking like I was in pain.
From the outside, it often didn’t look like anything was wrong. I was doing my best to love deeply, care for the people who needed me, and be the person the world seemed to want or expect from me.
But something inside me was dying.
Not all at once. More like an etching away - my self-expression, creativity, joy, my desire to cook, to invite people in, and eventually to even to want to get out of bed.
Even in the times I was showing up, I was no longer there - not all grief comes with a funeral.
Sometimes it comes when the life you thought you would have is no longer possible. For me, grief came with the loss of the childhood I never really got to have. It came through all the needs, wants, and desires I learned not to have. It came when my tenderness and joy were reorganised into competence, rigidity, addiction and doing.
My life force was literally diminishing. There was no room left for it, or for me in the life I was trying to hold together for a world that said I was shameful and my daughter broken.
And this is part of the cruelty of it: so many people carry this grief without knowing or in silence because there is no clean storyline, no obvious ending, just the slow accumulation of everything that has gone unnamed. An identity shift. A life change. A role change. A relationship change. A health change.
Sometimes what we call numbness is not the absence of feeling. It is a protective barrier around feelings that have been exiled in the name of survival. And often, in that exile, there is grief.
Until grief is felt, surrendered into, expressed, and witnessed, it will block life force rather than become the portal through which meaning, vitality, and purpose are restored.
“Every transformation demands as its precondition ‘the ending of a world’ the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” ~ C.G. Jung
Links in bio or DM if you’d like more info on working with me 1:1 or in trauma informed workshop space 25-26 April banyula.zen.
