2/11/25
“It’s my birthday,
and I’m grieving.”
Like a mantra,
this sentence echoed in my head
over and over on Saturday.
I’d been doing my best to ignore these feelings.
I’m sad and lonely and grieving,
and I don’t want to acknowledge any of it.
“You’ve known it would be this way.”
“It doesn’t have to be such a big deal – you’re blowing it out of proportion.”
As per usual,
I comfort myself with knowledge.
Anticipatory grief, they call it.
The concept is part of my dissertation.
The loss looms –
hangs overhead, waiting.
Keeps you out of the present
and centers you on some future moment,
calls to attention all that you have now
and have yet to lose. Will lose, though.
I turned 29 on Saturday,
and as I sat in my living room eating dinner with many of my closest friends,
I couldn’t help but think about all that I have yet to lose.
Will lose, though.
I’ll move in a few months,
out of Nashville and onto an undetermined city.
It’s a part of my doctoral journey that I’ve known about since I enrolled,
a change that is simultaneously exciting and terrifying in a way that I’ve never felt before.
It feels like a first-love kind of heartbreak.
And it is – my first love.
A decade’s worth of friendship and schooling
and bad dates and drives home.
And just like in heartbreak,
there’s guilt and confusion that a voluntary choice
is the source of pain.
I’m trying my best to ignore these feelings.
Regardless, they’re creeping in –
as feelings do.
It’s for the best, it’s for the best.
It’s all for the best.
As always, I’m comforted by Gibran.
“When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
Thank God for love that leads to heartbreak.
For joy that is sorrow unmasked.
Lightly,
Leah
Leah Kepley, M.Ed. 