Coming Home to Winnipeg: Why I’m Moving Back After 19 Years in BC

Coming Home to Winnipeg: Why I’m Moving Back After 19 Years in BC

Nineteen years ago, I packed up my Alero and left Winnipeg, sure that home was somewhere out west. And for eighteen years, British Columbia gave me mountains, ocean, lakes, a life I’m endlessly grateful for. But somewhere along the way I started to notice that the word “home” kept drifting east, back across the prairies, back to the place I thought I’d outgrown. Turns out you don’t outgrow Winnipeg. It just waits for you. What Winnipeg Holds Onto It waited in the way the sky opens up so wide you can watch a storm roll in from an hour away. In the people who say hello to strangers and actually mean it. In winters that ask everything of you and somehow make you tougher and softer at the same time. It’s the smell of River Heights after the rain, the long summer evenings, the way this city loves you back without ever needing to say it out loud. I would have moved home after my mom died, over five years ago, but my marriage kept me living in B.C. Now that I am no longer married, I am ready for a homecoming. Coming Home to a New Chapter So, I’m coming home. Not the home I left, but a new one, with new chapters waiting to be written and built on the same ground that made me who I am. To everyone who’s still here, who never left, who kept the porch light on: I can’t wait to be your neighbour again. To the friends I made out west who became family: you didn’t lose me, you just gained a place to visit. Winnipeg, I’m coming back to you. Thank you for waiting. Saying Goodbye to BC: Where to Find Me Before I Go If you’re one of my BC friends, here’s where I’ll be before the big drive east. Let’s grab coffee, have a dance, or meet me for a farewell hug. * Kamloops: June 23 to 26, and July 4 to 9 * Basscoast: July 9 to 12 * Driving from Kamloops to Winnipeg: July 12 I’ll be back in BC for Regulated - Autumn Exhale [https://lljresort.com/regulated/] at Lac Le Jeune Resort on October 2, and maybe a few more times before then. XX Blair P.S. I am booking keynotes and workshops for fall and winter, into 2027. Interested in having me speak at your event or to your organization? Let’s talk: blair@blairkaplan.ca. Where’s Blair? * June 23-24, Unleash AI for Business Summit Learn the RIGHT Way to Use AI — And Get More Done in 1 Week Than Most People Will All Year For anyone ready to create more content, faster, without the burnout — whether you’re building a business, scaling a side gig, or looking to work smarter. SIGN UP HERE. [https://www.unleashaiforbusiness.com/link.php?id=864&h=9439bd982a] * June 24, online, Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss What happens when grief isn’t as heavy as it once was? This candid, multi-voice conversation explores what it means to live fully after loss. While much of the grief space centers on surviving, this roundtable makes space for what comes after the initial sorrow that follows loss and life-altering change, when life begins to expand again, often in unexpected ways. Together, grief and resilience leaders, podcasters, and grief-informed creators explore meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and the nuanced reality of carrying grief while also reclaiming joy, purpose, and possibility. This is the conversation for everyone who needed to know grief shifts, that joy and aliveness are possible, and for everyone who’s arrived at lighter and isn’t sure what to do with that. REGISTER HERE. [https://letsreimagine.org/76768/beyond-grief-a-roundtable-on-living-fully-after-loss] * June 25, Kamloops, BC I will be in Kamloops. BC, MCing a golf tournament for a private client. * June 28-July 2, Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, with Hazen Audel At the Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering [https://www.hazenaudel.com/primitive-skills-gathering-2026], we believe that there’s nothing quite like the bond formed around a campfire, learning to craft a shelter with your own hands, or trading knowledge with those who share your love for the outdoors. Our gathering brings together individuals of all skill levels who seek to deepen their understanding of traditional skills, self-sufficiency, and natural living. Over the course of several days, participants will immerse themselves in hands-on workshops, demonstrations, and meaningful discussions led by experienced instructors. All the while enjoying the beautiful Sawtooth Mountains, Payette River, and natural hot springs. Whether you’re here to hone your bushcraft skills, practice primitive fire-starting techniques, or simply take a step back from the hustle and bustle of modern life, you’ll find a welcoming community and a place to reconnect with the wild. * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Grievorcée: A New Word for Grieving Someone Who Is Still Alive

I am not a widow. My wasband is still alive yet, I feel the version of him I once loved is not. He breathes. His heart still beats. And yet I grieve him in a similar way that I’ve grieved the dead, in the good outfit, eating shiva loaf, being still, in the dark, in the small hours when the house is quiet, and my thoughts are loud. A stroke took him. Not all of him. Just the part I married. So if I am not a widow, what am I? I went looking for the word and found a hole where it should have been. So I poured something new into the shape of that absence and let it set. The word is grievorcée, and once you have it, you will wonder how you ever went without. What Is a Widow? Let us begin where the language is sturdy. A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and who has not remarried. The word is ancient, Old English widewe, with cousins in nearly every tongue, because grief of this kind is older than grammar. To be a widow is to be a survivor of a marriage ended by death. The vow was kept. Til death do us part, and death did. The widow has a great deal, and I do not say this lightly. She has casseroles and condolence cards. She has a date on a calendar. She has a body to bury and a name to put on a stone and a room full of people who all agree, out loud, that something has been lost. She has permission to mourn. That permission is the thing. That is the inheritance I was denied. What Is a Grievorcée? grievorcée /ˌɡriː·vɔːrˈsiː/ verb. To grieve a person who is still alive; to mourn the loss of someone not through their death but through estrangement, distance, illness, or profound change, while they yet draw breath. “After the dementia took the last of her mother’s memories, she found herself grievorcéeing the woman who still sat across the table.” noun, grievorcée: the living person who is so grieved. “She had become a grievorcée to her husband after their marriage ended.” Etymology: a blend of grieve and divorce, with the -ée suffix marking the one acted upon (compare divorcée), capturing the severing of a bond from someone who remains present in body but lost to the relationship. Read it again. Feel how it lands. A divorce ends a marriage by choice. A death ends it by force. The marriage does not fully end, at the beginning (or, ever?). It simply empties. He is still here. He is my wasband, the man who was, the man whose face I know better than my own, and whose mind has gone somewhere I am not allowed to follow. I am the grievorcée. Grieving a Living Spouse: The Loss Nobody Names There is a clinical term for the territory, and I will give it to you because precision is a kindness. The psychologist Pauline Boss called it ambiguous loss, the grief that comes when someone is physically present but psychologically gone, or psychologically present but physically gone. It is a loss without proof. Loss without the courtesy of a corpse. Ambiguous loss is the wife whose husband has dementia. The daughter of the addict who left and became no longer recognizable. The son of the man who survived the accident and never quite returned to the room. It is grief that cannot complete itself, because the thing you are grieving keeps walking through the kitchen asking where the remote is. My friend, Stephanie Sarazin, wrote a brilliant book about this type of loss called Soulbroken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief [https://stephaniesarazin.com/home/ambiguous-grief-book/], which expands on Pauline Boss’s seminal work on ambiguous loss. With touching personal stories of loss onset by divorce, addiction, betrayal, trauma, incarceration, Alzheimer’s, estrangement, and more, Soulbroken explores the complications and deviations from traditional grief when mourning a loss, but not physical death, and offers practical solutions for healing. The clinicians, like Boss, had the concept. What they lacked, what we all lacked, was a word you could wear. Ambiguous loss is accurate, and it is also a phrase you cannot say at a dinner party without explaining yourself for ten minutes. Grievorcée, you can say in two syllables and a sigh. It does the explaining for you. Why I Needed a New Word Because the old ones lied. When people asked after him, I had no honest reply. The forms have a box for married, a box for widowed, a box for divorced, and not one box for technically married to a man I miss with my whole body while he sits twelve feet away. Grief without a name is grief without a home. It wanders. It shows up in the wrong places, at the wrong volume, and everyone around you decides, quietly, that you are simply difficult now. That you have not “moved on.” Moved on from what, exactly? Nobody died. Try explaining that you are in mourning for a living man and watch how fast the room finds something else to look at. So I named it. I put on the metaphorical fur, I dripped myself in the cold fire of the right vocabulary, and I walked back into my own life with a word that finally matched the size of the thing. I am a grievorcée. My wasband is my grievorcée, present and gone, here and lost, mine and not. It is not a happy word. But it is true, and after long enough in the company of lies, truth is the most glamorous thing a woman can put on. If you are a fresh grievorcée or a seasoned one, you are not difficult, and you have not failed to move on. You are grieving a loss that the world forgot to give a name to. Now it has one. Wear it well. XX Blair P.S. If you have any advice for me, who is one month in, please comment below or send me a message. Where’s Blair? * June 23-24, Unleash AI for Business Summit Learn the RIGHT Way to Use AI — And Get More Done in 1 Week Than Most People Will All Year For anyone ready to create more content, faster, without the burnout — whether you’re building a business, scaling a side gig, or looking to work smarter. SIGN UP HERE. [https://www.unleashaiforbusiness.com/link.php?id=864&h=9439bd982a] * June 24, online, Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss What happens when grief isn’t as heavy as it once was? This candid, multi-voice conversation explores what it means to live fully after loss. While much of the grief space centers on surviving, this roundtable makes space for what comes after the initial sorrow that follows loss and life-altering change, when life begins to expand again, often in unexpected ways. Together, grief and resilience leaders, podcasters, and grief-informed creators explore meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and the nuanced reality of carrying grief while also reclaiming joy, purpose, and possibility. This is the conversation for everyone who needed to know grief shifts, that joy and aliveness are possible, and for everyone who’s arrived at lighter and isn’t sure what to do with that. REGISTER HERE. [https://letsreimagine.org/76768/beyond-grief-a-roundtable-on-living-fully-after-loss] * June 25, Kamloops, BC I will be in Kamloops. BC, MCing a golf tournament for a private client. * June 28-July 2, Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, with Hazen Audel At the Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering [https://www.hazenaudel.com/primitive-skills-gathering-2026], we believe that there’s nothing quite like the bond formed around a campfire, learning to craft a shelter with your own hands, or trading knowledge with those who share your love for the outdoors. Our gathering brings together individuals of all skill levels who seek to deepen their understanding of traditional skills, self-sufficiency, and natural living. Over the course of several days, participants will immerse themselves in hands-on workshops, demonstrations, and meaningful discussions led by experienced instructors. All the while enjoying the beautiful Sawtooth Mountains, Payette River, and natural hot springs. Whether you’re here to hone your bushcraft skills, practice primitive fire-starting techniques, or simply take a step back from the hustle and bustle of modern life, you’ll find a welcoming community and a place to reconnect with the wild. * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

A Year After I Opened for Sir Richard Branson, and the Resilience Lessons That Stayed

A year ago today, the mountains held me. I remember the thin, bright air of Deer Valley, Utah, and the way an unexpected invitation can rearrange a life. My travel season was winding down, or so I thought, when Shauna’s message landed in my inbox. Come to the mountains. Take the stage with Sir Richard Branson. When the universe hands you a door like that, you don’t knock politely. You walk through it. Loudly. With sparkles. The night I spoke to a room full of change-makers That evening, I stood before a room of dreamers and builders and delivered my signature keynote, “The Five Secrets to Strengthening Your Resilience Muscle.” I spoke about bouncing forward through grief and trauma, not back, never back, and about the heartbeat behind The Global Resilience Project: the radical idea that our hardest stories, told out loud, become medicine for someone else. The energy in that room was electric. I could feel it move through the rows like the weather. And when it was over, the feedback wrapped around me like a warm coat on a cold summer night. Thirty seconds with Richard Branson The next morning came soft and unhurried. An intimate breakfast, a small circle of us, no fanfare and no fluff. Just stories and hard-won wisdom from a man who built an empire out of big ideas and bold action. I had thirty seconds with him. Just enough for an awkward hug, a quick photo, and to press a copy of Resilient A.F.: Stories of Resilience Vol. 2 [https://blairkaplan.ca/books/] into his hands. Here is what Richard Branson said that morning, words I’ve turned over like river stones in the year since: * “If you don’t come up with an idea to make someone’s life better, you don’t have a business.” * “Kindness is so important.” * “You have to believe in what you’re doing.” * “If you make people smile, people will appreciate that.” Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs aren’t new at all. They’re reminders of what you already know and already practice, handed back to you by someone whose voice makes you finally listen. That was exactly what I needed that week. What I carried back down the mountain A year later, I’m still unpacking those thirty seconds. I don’t know if Richard Branson ever opened the book. But I know he held it. I know the stories inside it are still making waves across the world, in inboxes and book clubs and quiet bedside-table moments where someone realizes they are not alone in what they’ve survived. The four truths he offered in that Utah dining room turned out to be a compass. Make a life better. Be kind. Believe. Make people smile. I’ve returned to them again and again this year, every time I’ve taken a stage, written a page, or sat across from someone who didn’t think they’d make it through. The mountains gave me a moment. What I’ve done with the year is the real keynote. The takeaway, one year on If Richard Branson believes in making people smile, then I think we’re on the right track. Resilience was never about hardening into something that can’t be broken. It’s about staying soft enough to be moved, and strong enough to keep walking forward anyway. A year ago, the mountains held me. This year, I’m learning to be the steady ground for someone else. XX Blair P.S. I am booking keynotes and workshops for fall and winter, into 2027. Interested in having me speak at your event or to your organization? Let’s talk: blair@blairkaplan.ca. Where’s Blair? * June 23-24, Unleash AI for Business Summit Learn the RIGHT Way to Use AI — And Get More Done in 1 Week Than Most People Will All Year For anyone ready to create more content, faster, without the burnout — whether you’re building a business, scaling a side gig, or looking to work smarter. SIGN UP HERE. [https://www.unleashaiforbusiness.com/link.php?id=864&h=9439bd982a] * June 24, online, Beyond Grief: a Roundtable on Living Fully After Loss What happens when grief isn’t as heavy as it once was? This candid, multi-voice conversation explores what it means to live fully after loss. While much of the grief space centers on surviving, this roundtable makes space for what comes after the initial sorrow that follows loss and life-altering change, when life begins to expand again, often in unexpected ways. Together, grief and resilience leaders, podcasters, and grief-informed creators explore meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and the nuanced reality of carrying grief while also reclaiming joy, purpose, and possibility. This is the conversation for everyone who needed to know grief shifts, that joy and aliveness are possible, and for everyone who’s arrived at lighter and isn’t sure what to do with that. REGISTER HERE. [https://letsreimagine.org/76768/beyond-grief-a-roundtable-on-living-fully-after-loss] * June 25, Kamloops, BC I will be in Kamloops. BC, MCing a golf tournament for a private client. * June 28-July 2, Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering, Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, with Hazen Audel At the Sawtooth Survival Skills Gathering [https://www.hazenaudel.com/primitive-skills-gathering-2026], we believe that there’s nothing quite like the bond formed around a campfire, learning to craft a shelter with your own hands, or trading knowledge with those who share your love for the outdoors. Our gathering brings together individuals of all skill levels who seek to deepen their understanding of traditional skills, self-sufficiency, and natural living. Over the course of several days, participants will immerse themselves in hands-on workshops, demonstrations, and meaningful discussions led by experienced instructors. All the while enjoying the beautiful Sawtooth Mountains, Payette River, and natural hot springs. Whether you’re here to hone your bushcraft skills, practice primitive fire-starting techniques, or simply take a step back from the hustle and bustle of modern life, you’ll find a welcoming community and a place to reconnect with the wild. * August 3, Birmingham, Alabama Alana and I have been invited to be the keynote speakers at Integrating the Pieces: A Workshop on Resilience, Loss and Grief for the University of Montevallo. * August 23-29, Porto, Portugal I will be co-facilitating the Portugal Grief Trip alongside Rachel from Happy Grieving. There is still room for you. Learn more and book your spot! [https://grieftrips.com/portugal] October 2-4, La Le Jeune, BC Join me, Kayla and Simone this May at the Regulated Retreat [https://lljresort.com/regulated/]. I’m stoked to be speaking at Regulated - Autumn Exhale, a three-day nervous system reset retreat for people who are done surviving and ready to feel steady again, because most of us don’t need more motivation; we need regulation. And that’s what makes this experience different. This retreat blends nervous system science, movement, nature, and honest conversation to help your body downshift and reset. I’m honoured to create and be a part of this experience and would love to share it with you! How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

MAYhem: The Highest Highs, the Lowest Low, and the Mother’s Day That Ended My Marriage

Well, May. You had some high highs and very low lows. As I write this, I’m on my sister’s couch in Winnipeg, Manitoba. If I’m being honest, this is the post I almost didn’t write. It’s easier to show you the highlight reel. The stages, the microphones, the new friends, the good hair days. It’s harder to tell you that in the same thirty-one days, I had some of the proudest moments of my career and the single most devastating day of my personal life. May was mayhem. So here’s the whole story, the parts that made me glow and the parts that brought me to my knees. The short version: In one month, I hosted a retreat, spoke at events, recorded podcasts, co-MCed my Rotary club’s signature gala, and connected with brilliant people at one of the biggest tech conferences in North America. My marriage also ended on Mother’s Day. The Highs It started with Regulated The month opened with the work I’m proudest of in this world: Regulated, a retreat I got to host right in my own backyard. Twenty-one people. Eleven communities. One retreat. They came from Cloverdale, Burnaby, Prince George, Sooke, Vancouver, Terrace, Williams Lake, Lake Country, Surrey, Sun Peaks, and Kamloops. They drove. They flew. They showed up tired, brave, and ready for something to be different. Over one “weekend,” I watched people put down the weight they had been carrying for years. I watched walls come down quietly, without anyone having to say a word. I watched strangers become the kind of people who just get it. It was so special to plan a retreat in my backyard, to drive thirty minutes instead of flying thirty hours. Workshops, movement, nature, writing, colouring, a bonfire by the lake, stories, laughs, tears, free time, and lifelong friendships made. We did not fix anything that weekend. We did not have to. We just remembered what it feels like to be steady. To breathe. To exist in a body that is not in survival mode. That is the work, and it is the most important work I know how to do. To every single person who said yes to themselves that weekend: I will carry this with me. You changed the room just by walking into it. And, who would have thought that I needed this retreat just as much as each person there? Thank you to Lac Le Jeune Resort [https://www.instagram.com/laclejeuneresort/] for hosting us, to our incredible speakers Simone Lovell [https://www.instagram.com/simonenlovell/] and Stacey Owen [https://www.instagram.com/heystaceyowen/], and to everyone who trusted us with their hearts. Extra love to our sponsors who believe in what we are building: Castanet Kamloops [https://www.instagram.com/castanetkamloopsdigital/] and Tourism Kamloops [https://www.instagram.com/tourismkamloops/]. It was such an honour that we decided to do it again. Regulated returns October 2 to 4, so save the date. [https://lljresort.com/regulated/] If something in you just stirred reading this, pay attention to that, and come join us this fall. Web Summit Vancouver: AI, authenticity, and the right connections Then came Vancouver. I joined Web Summit Vancouver (May 11 to 14 at the Vancouver Convention Centre) alongside my friend Lou, and it was everything I hoped a conference like that would be. The conversation I kept coming back to was the tension between AI and authenticity. As the technology gets more capable, the human signal becomes more valuable, not less. The people who win in this next era won’t be the ones who automate their voice away. They’ll be the ones who get clearer about who they actually are and why anyone should listen. But the real win at Web Summit wasn’t a session. It was the people. The hallway conversations, the people we met networking, the “wait, you do that? I do that too” moments. I left Vancouver with a fuller phone, a fuller heart, and a few collaborations I’m genuinely excited about. I recorded some epic podcast interviews I also sat down for a run of podcast interviews this month, and I mean it when I say they were some of my favourite conversations to date. There’s something clarifying about being asked good questions. You hear yourself answer and realize what you actually believe. A few times this month, I surprised myself. Speaking locally, and remembering why I do this I spoke at events close to home, too. The big international stages get a lot of my attention, but the local rooms get my heart. These are the people in my own backyard, the ones I’ll see at the coffee shop next week. Showing up for them is its own kind of reward. Co-MCing A Bollywood Affair And then there was the night I got to co-MC A Bollywood Affair, my Rotary club’s signature event. Colours, music, a room full of people who give their time and money to make our community better, and me on the mic, helping hold it all together. Service has been my anchor for a long time. This month, more than I knew at the time, I was going to need that anchor. The Low On Mother’s Day, of all days And then there’s the part I choose to keep sharing, because leaving it out would make everything above a lie of omission. On Mother’s Day, of all the days on the calendar, my marriage ended. The Wasband (yes, that’s what I call him now) made it final. So, I packed up most of my life and put it in storage. I don’t have a tidy paragraph for this. There isn’t one. You spend years building a life, and then it fits into boxes, and the boxes go into a unit with a roll-up door and a padlock, and you stand in a quieter house, wondering how we got here? Mother’s Day will never be a neutral square on the calendar for me again. It was already hard because my mom and baby are both dead. Now, the day is even darker. I will be okay, and I can already feel myself healing. I’m making my peace with it slowly, the way you make peace with anything that rearranges you. What May taught me Here’s what I keep landing on, and it’s the reason I’m publishing this instead of deleting it. Two things can be true at once. You can be thriving professionally and grieving privately. You can stand in front of a crowd and feel whole, then drive home to an emptier house and feel like the floor is gone. Neither one cancels the other out. They just live side by side, the way real lives actually do. The highlight reel was real. So was the storage unit. And I think the bravest thing any of us can do is refuse to pretend otherwise. There’s a strange poetry in it, too. I spent the month teaching other people how to put down the weight, how to come out of survival mode and back into their bodies. And then life handed me my own version of that lesson. I’m doing the work I tell everyone else to do. Turns out it’s just as hard from the inside. May tried to take me out. It didn’t. I’m still here, a little more cracked open, a lot more honest, and strangely more myself than I’ve been in a long time. So here’s to June. I have no idea what you’re going to be. But after May? I’m ready for you. XX Blair P.S. I am in Winnipeg until June 23 and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is rad. Please connect. How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for reading How We Navigate Grief! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe [https://howwenavigategrief.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Fifteen Years Fits in a 5x10 Storage Locker

I stood in the doorway this weekend and looked at what’s left. Boxes stacked in a concrete room the size of a parking space, behind a roll-up door with a padlock I bought from the storage facility office. Fifteen years of a life together. And I’m not even done. Two more loads at least before I leave for Winnipeg in June. That’s the math nobody warns you about when a marriage ends. Not the lawyer fees. Not the custody calendar. The math of square footage. The brutal, quiet arithmetic of this is what’s left. The lie we tell ourselves about “stuff” I’ve said it out loud maybe forty times in the last month, to friends, to my online followers, to the woman at the storage facility who asked if I needed insurance: it’s just stuff. And I mean it. I do. I’m not the girl who confuses decorative pillows with a marriage. I know the difference between a thing and a life. I’ve read the books. I am doing the work. I can recite the line about how we don’t own our possessions, they own us, and I can say it with a straight face while I’m taping a box labelled CLOSET MISC and trying not to think about the memories made in these outfits. It’s just stuff is true, and it is also a lie, and both of those things can sit in the same sentence without breaking it. It’s just stuff. And also, that’s the shirt we bought on a date, at a show. That’s the cutting board that was given to us by our neighbour. That’s the box of Christmas ornaments we collected, one for each of us, per year, on purpose, like a project. Like we were building something. We were building something. What distillation actually feels like There’s a word for what happens when you reduce something to its essence: distillation. It sounds clean. Scientific. Like you end up with the pure stuff, the truth of the thing, and you throw the rest away. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like standing in a 5x10 concrete room and realizing that fifteen years of inside jokes, shared playlists, arguments about the thermostat, road trips, holidays, the specific way someone says your name when they love you, none of that fits in a box. None of that got packed. None of that is in here. What’s in here is the residue. The physical artifacts of a life that doesn’t exist anymore. And the cruel part is that the residue is what you have to deal with. The mortgage. The furniture. The padlock. The two more loads are still waiting at the home we built together. The intangible part, the part that actually mattered, just evaporates, and you don’t get to box that up and decide what to do with it later. It’s gone before you’ve finished the inventory. I will rebuild. I know I will. I know this part too. People keep telling me, and they’re right. You rebuild. You get a new home. You buy a new couch. You can start fresh. The boxes get unpacked, or they don’t, and either way, life moves. I believe that. I’m not writing this from despair. I’m writing this from the strange, flat clarity of the afternoon after a load, when the door is locked and there’s nothing left to do today except drive home to a place that isn’t home anymore either. Winnipeg is coming. June is coming. The next chapter is closer than it feels. My single mom, Sharon, always taught me to make sure that I would always be okay on my own. And, so I am and will be. I always land on my feet. A 5x10 storage locker is 50 square feet. Our last place was bigger. The footprint keeps changing. The math keeps changing. Fifteen years, a stack of boxes, fifty square feet, one padlock, and two more loads to go. It’s just stuff. It really is. But I sat in my car in the parking lot for a long time before I drove away, and I want to be honest about that, because I think someone reading this is sitting in their car too. Or about to. Or just got home from doing it. It’s sad. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a reminder of something that will never be what it once was. It’s grief. You’re allowed to grieve the boxes and stuff that is no longer yours. Even while you know better. Even while you’re already rebuilding in your head. Even while there are still two more loads waiting. The stuff isn’t the life. But the stuff is what’s left of the life that I no longer have. And those are two different sentences, and both of them are true. XX Blair P.S. I will be in Winnipeg for the month of June and am open for speaking, workshops, coffee dates and anything else that is fun and soul-nourishing. Please connect. P.P.S. I offer a complimentary call. If you want to see what it’s like to work with me as a Grief and Resilience Coach, book a time here. [https://calendly.com/blairkaplanvenables/bounce-forward-30-minutes] How We Navigate Grief is a reader-supported publication. 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