My Story

I didn't know I was grieving until I started writing.

For two years, I lived through my mother's fight and loss to cancer — through COVID, through my first pregnancy and birth, while becoming a mother, moving between states, pursuing a MA degree, all while living half a world away from my mom and my entire family. So much was happening. I was juggling, trying to keep all the balls in the air, but the ground beneath my feet was shaking, crumbling.

Loss was coming. And I could not see it, could not comprehend its path, could not acknowledge that its impact was already rifting through my identity and body. I didn't have words for what was happening inside me because the words I needed were not part of anything I knew. I didn't know that there was such a thing as grief before the loss. To me, grief was something that came after. Not before. Not during. I was detached from my own experience.

Writing changed that.

I was a graduate student practicing autoethnography — personal narrative writing that uses personal experience as a lens into social phenomena — when my own writing started pulling me somewhere I hadn't planned to go. Story by story, I found myself portraying more moments from my past shared with my mom. My subconscious was doing what I couldn't. My writing: kept Mom present and unleashed my first expression of my anticipatory grief.

My writing invented space for my grief experience to be revealed and language to articulate it.

That experience became the foundation for my MA in Communication Studies thesis and, later, my published research. It turned personal narrative writing into a way to explore deeper layers of my journey, such as years spent building a life in a language I was not born with, relocating and leaving everything familiar behind, learning to be intentional about belonging, and many other curves and turns.

My personal story is what led me to Narrative-Work. I learned, from the inside, what writing can do for a person living through something they don't yet have words for, but who has the courage to be authentically vulnerable on the page to discover it.