Acceptance (barefoot through brambles)
For months I kept doing this stupid trick. I’d wake up and forget. For three seconds, the world was intact. Then my brain would load the file and slam it into my face.
Every. Frickin’. Morning.
People talk about acceptance like it arrives with grace. That was not my experience. Mine looked more like failure on repeat. The same collision, the same recoil, the same stunned little gap between waking up and realizing, again, that the life I knew was gone.
At first it felt like walking barefoot through brambles. Every step caught. Every movement hurt. I kept trying to move the way I used to move, be okay the way I used to be okay, and my body kept correcting me: No. That version is gone.
Later, the scratches still came, but the surprise started to wear off. That changed something. I still bled. I just stopped expecting a smooth path. I learned how and where to place my feet.
Before that, I spent months asking why. Maybe because why was the only word big enough for the noise inside my chest. It felt like motion. Like I was doing something. As if the right answer might open a side door back into the life I lost.
What makes it brutal is that some part of you knows exactly what’s happening. You know you’re bargaining in an empty room.
“If I change this…”
“If I become better…”
“If I promise to never make the same mistake…”
You know the walls aren’t listening. You keep talking anyway. Because empty hands are terrifying, and useless motion can still feel better than standing there with what already happened.
Then people start saying things like “accept the new normal.”
No.
There is nothing freshly packaged about it. The “new normal” is your old life with a hole blown through it. Same house, but emptier. Same routine, but altered around the missing. Same calendar, still trying to hold a life that no longer exists in the same way.
What changed for me was smaller than that phrase allows. Less arguing with what had already happened. Less waking up and acting shocked that the wound was still there. Less throwing my whole body against a locked door.
People love to call it “finding peace.” What I knew was that the fight was unsustainable. The mind can’t keep arguing with reality without paying for it in sleep, appetite, breath, skin, heartbeat. Eventually, the part of you that keeps insisting it should have been different starts to wear out.
That does not turn the loss into something acceptable.
I can accept what happened and still hate it. I can accept the reality and still wish it were different. I can keep going and still have part of me standing back there, staring at the place where everything split open.
Two truths living in the same body and scraping against each other all day long. That tension didn’t resolve nicely. It just became more livable.
And it never stayed settled for long. You could have a decent morning, and then get taken out by something ridiculous. A smell, a song, a name on a screen, a laugh that’s close enough to make your stomach drop, and you’re right back in it. Because loss has roots. You step on one and it pulls.
To me, acceptance felt more like exhausted surrender than wisdom. Like your grip finally giving out after holding something too heavy for too long. Not because you “chose to let go.” Because you couldn’t keep clenching.
Then one day you go an hour without thinking about it. Later, maybe half a day. Then a whole stretch of ordinary life slips in and it almost feels suspicious. But the mind cannot stare directly at pain every second and remain functional. It has keys to find, laundry to switch, food to make, traffic to survive. It has to keep you alive.
That, to me, is the most honest version of acceptance: knowing that some doors stay closed, some futures don’t come, certain repairs aren’t available, some pain is permanent. Knowing some part of you will always be the person who wakes up, forgets for three seconds, and then remembers.
And still, somehow, you keep going. Because your lungs keep breathing and your heart keeps beating, and time keeps passing, whether you accept it or not.
I didn’t walk this path because I was brave. I walked it because all the other paths were imaginary. The path where it didn’t happen. The path where I could bargain my way out, the path where acceptance arrives dressed as peace. Those paths were never real.
This is the path.
The one where the brambles still scratch and you keep walking. The one where you wake up, know again, and live the day anyway.
Just There
(2020, © Julia Delaney)
Be Alive 🌱
Love ❤️, Julia
Healing through Loss
We’re in this together—every step, every breath, every heartbeat.
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