Moving Through the Uncomfortable and Discovering That Everything is Okay

A story about grief, resilience, and learning to trust the body’s remarkable intelligence.

Grief, Dysregulation & The Search for Capacity

I didn’t know the language of nervous systems when my son Elijah died. All I knew was that my world collapsed, and my body went somewhere I couldn’t follow. For a long time, I thought grief was just about sadness and missing someone. But what I didn’t understand was that grief doesn’t just break your heart — it breaks your biology. It breaks your capacity. It breaks your ability to function in a world that hasn’t stopped.

Before Elijah died, I used to be active and strong. I taught yoga. I worked as a massage therapist. I worked out. I had a social life. I had forward energy. I had focus. I had motivation. I had joy. I had some kind of direction. And when he died, all of that fell through me like water. My body stopped. My focus collapsed. My nervous system went offline. I didn’t know that what I was experiencing had a biological explanation. I thought I was failing. I thought I was lazy. I thought I should “push through” and “get back out there.” But I couldn’t. And I didn’t understand why.

What I know now — years later — is that grief is a nervous system event. It is not just emotional pain; it is biological overload. It is the body collapsing under unbearable weight. It is shutdown. It is freeze. It is the loss of capacity.

I didn’t have these words at the beginning. I didn’t have the concept of “capacity.” I didn’t know that capacity is not a moral trait — it’s a biological one. I didn’t know that shutting down and feeling like I couldn’t move wasn’t weakness — it was my nervous system trying to protect me. I didn’t know any of that. I just felt like I couldn’t exist in the world anymore.

This is the story of how I slowly began to understand all of this — not from books or theory, but from lived experience: from the death of my son, from the suicide of someone I loved dearly, from my massage table, from my yoga mat, from years of watching bodies tell the truth when words could not. And from the long, slow journey of learning that the nervous system is not just a scientific concept — it is the bridge between overwhelm, safety, and danger. It is the thing that holds us or drops us long before our brain can make meaning of what’s happening.

The Limits of Talk Therapy & The Turn Toward the Body

Talk therapy held me, but it couldn’t carry me alone. After the sessions ended, I was still left with a body that wouldn’t move, a brain that couldn’t focus, and a heart that felt split open. I didn’t numb with alcohol or medication — not because I’m morally opposed to them (some people may need those supports), but because I needed to feel every inch of what was happening. It wasn’t noble or heroic. It was simply what was true for me — shaped by what life had taught me.

My therapist eventually suggested checking the physical layer — and thank God she did. I had bloodwork done, and when I took it to a naturopath, I learned my vitamin D was extremely low. Supporting that one layer increased my capacity just enough to get through the day. Not to run marathons, not to become productive — just to exist without collapsing.

Recently, someone I love died by suicide. I won’t name him out of respect, but his death opened up a different understanding for me — not about character, but about the nervous system. I had always understood that suicide comes from unbearable suffering, not selfishness or weakness. But what I hadn’t fully grasped until then was how a nervous system can lose capacity so completely that reaching out, asking for help, or imagining another option becomes impossible. That insight shifted the questions that so many survivors carry — the “Why didn’t he call?” and “Why didn’t I see it?” and “Why didn’t he ask?” It wasn’t that he didn’t care or that I missed something obvious; it was physiology in collapse.

It’s heartbreaking. And it’s hopeful — because it makes me wonder what might be possible if we learned how to help a nervous system find regulation before it disappears into collapse.

After that realization, so many things in my own life clicked into place. Years of yoga, years of body work, years of feeling energy without being able to name it — all of it suddenly belonged to one language: the nervous system. That realization didn’t fix my grief, but it gave me a map.

Embodiment, Exhaustion, and the Creative Bridge

Embodiment didn’t look like yoga poses and meditation cushions for me. In fact, I stopped practicing yoga and I didn’t return to the gym. I felt shame about that for a long time — the kind of shame that comes from internalized conditioning around “movement equals health.” But my exhaustion wasn’t laziness. It was biology. It was grief. It was dysregulation.

My nervous system quit long before my mind did.

I stepped away from massage work too — for over six months. With the kind of grief I was carrying, touching bodies and giving comfort was too much output. I didn’t have the capacity. And capacity is not a moral trait — it’s a nervous system reality.

What surprised me is where I ended up: in front of a blank nursery wall with a paintbrush. My daughter gave me permission to paint a mural in my grandson Baker’s room, and that became the bridge between collapse and creation. I was alone in that room for hours — I didn’t know it then, but that was somatic work. My hands moved while my thoughts settled. My right brain took over where my left brain had drowned. And somewhere in that process, old trauma surfaced, not to haunt me, but to finally be seen. I allowed the tears to flow as I worked through the mural.

The mural wasn’t just art. It was capacity returning — slowly, unevenly, and honestly. It was the nervous system whispering, “One step at a time is still a step.”

Regulation, Safety & the Slow Return of Joy

There were stretches of this grief when I didn’t want to be here anymore. Not with plans or dramatic gestures — just the quiet exhaustion of “I can’t do this” and “What’s the point?” I genuinely wanted to die — not because I didn’t love my life or my children, but because I couldn’t imagine surviving the pain. It wasn’t about ending my life; it was about ending the hurt.

And it didn’t happen all at once. It came in bursts — weeks, months, then years of being pulled under at random. I miss my son so much. I miss his physical presence — his voice, his face, his hugs, the way he moved through the world. I miss who he was to me, who he would have become, and the future he should have had. I miss the way he belongs in the lives of others — his brother and sister, his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his friends, his girlfriend, his nephews. They don’t get to have him, and he doesn’t get to have them. It’s all of it. And it sucks. It really sucks.

What made it even harder was the loneliness of it. I didn’t tell my family because I didn’t want to scare them or be treated like I was unstable. I just wanted someone to notice. I wanted to collapse in someone’s arms and be held without being told to be strong. But I didn’t know how to ask for that, so I stayed silent.

And another truth was that I often felt safest by myself. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, and I didn’t have the capacity to manage other people’s reactions to my pain. My body shut down around too much stimulation. I shut down around too many feelings. Sometimes everything just stopped. Solitude wasn’t withdrawal — it was survival.

And yet, there were tiny threads that kept me tethered. My dear cousin would randomly send texts at the exact moment I needed them — “I love you,” or messages that felt like they were from Elijah, or photos of feathers and hawks, or little things that showed up in the mail with no expectations attached. She still does. And those small, quiet gestures — landing right when everything felt unbearable — mattered more than she knows.

Looking back now, I can see that this was a kind of collapse — not moral failure or laziness, but my body conserving what little capacity it had left. When the load is too heavy, the nervous system turns off forward movement, motivation, and even the instinct to care. From the outside it looks like apathy; on the inside it feels like fog, numbness, or quiet resignation.

I had other children to live for, which brought its own heartbreak — the heart gets split. You don’t want to abandon the ones who are still here, but you also can’t fathom joy when one is missing.

Before Elijah died, I was active and strong — teaching yoga, working out, social, productive.

After he died, all of that collapsed and I didn’t understand why. I only knew I had no capacity for anything extra. I stopped going out. I avoided loud environments. I didn’t have it in me to meditate or move or do the things that used to help me. And I carried shame about that because I didn’t know my body was actually protecting me.

What I know now is that peace became the only thing that mattered. Not happiness, not productivity, not who I used to be — just peace. Joy felt like a betrayal. Happiness felt impossible. Peace felt like the only way to stay on this earth. So I stopped forcing myself to perform. I let myself rest. I didn’t have the language for regulation or capacity back then, but I was slowly learning to trust my body.

And then something shifted — very slowly — once I stopped chasing joy and started allowing peace. Tiny moments of safety began to appear. Safety is the soil regulation grows in, and regulation is the soil that joy grows in — not the other way around.

A small example of this happened at my niece — my godchild’s — baby shower. The car ride there with my daughter was peaceful and connected, and I actually felt excited to go. When we arrived, we were some of the first ones there, and I helped set up — not out of obligation, but because I genuinely wanted to.

That matters, because there’s a big difference between doing things because you have capacity and doing them because you’re masking.

Later, as I sat down at a table, I noticed a large gray and black feather on the ground. My first thought was, “I wish it was white,” because white feathers have always been my signs from Elijah. But immediately after came the automatic knowing: Elijah. I picked it up and quietly whispered, “Elijah is here.” My daughter might have heard me, but it wasn’t a dramatic moment or a collapse — it was a moment of joy. It was the sense that he was with me, seeing everything through my eyes, not physically here but not gone either. And instead of spiraling into that devastating loop grief used to pull me into, I stayed present. I interacted. I helped. I belonged. Not because I forced myself, but because I actually had the capacity to.

I did recognize what was happening because my body felt different that day. It had been a long time since I’d had a day that felt truly good, and I noticed it as it was happening. Later, when I talked to my sister about it, she didn’t explain it away or analyze it — she confirmed it. I told her what I felt and what I noticed, and she said, “I totally saw that. I noticed a difference in you.” She saw the same things I saw, which mattered because it didn’t overwrite my experience — it reflected it back to me.

And when I really let myself feel into it, there was no sense of betraying Elijah or leaving him behind. It felt like love finding a new pathway. It felt like my nervous system saying, “You’re safe enough right now.”

I don’t think I could have gotten there without peace. And I don’t think I could have found peace without honoring my body’s boundaries, my capacity, and my nervous system. For me, the path wasn’t “feel better first.” It was “feel first.” And then, eventually, there was room for better.

What I understand now is this: regulation doesn’t mean you’re happy. It means you’re safe enough inside your own body to experience what’s here without abandoning yourself. And from there, joy becomes possible again.

Giving Language to What Happened

For a long time, I didn’t have the language for any of this. I didn’t know what “capacity” meant, or why I couldn’t tolerate sound or stimulation, or why my body shut down after Elijah died. I didn’t know about “nervous system states,” or why some days I could function and other days I could barely get out of bed. I just thought something was wrong with me. I thought I was weak, or lazy, or broken.

What I understand now is that none of that was moral. It wasn’t about character. It wasn’t about willpower. It wasn’t even about mindset. It was biology. It was my nervous system trying to keep me alive under unbearable strain. And when I finally learned that the nervous system has limits — real limits — something clicked into place. Things that once felt like personal failures suddenly made sense.

A part of me actually knew this long before I had the language for it. People are quick to label grief as depression, but of course I was grieving — I had just lost my son. This wasn’t a chemical imbalance that showed up out of nowhere. This was my nervous system responding to loss. And knowing that changed everything. It stopped the looping in my head about “what’s wrong with me,” and shifted it toward “what do I need?” What I needed was safety — safety to be in my own experience without being talked out of it, judged for it, or told to feel something different. I needed to be heard. I needed space to hold the grief and still live my life, which is incredibly hard to do in a world that constantly tells us we shouldn’t feel what we feel. The nervous system piece made it okay. It gave me permission to trust my body’s wisdom and to take care of myself the way the flight attendant tells you to put your own oxygen mask on first — something I used to say in yoga, but only truly understood through grief. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t weak. My body was asking for something it wasn’t getting. And the more I listened, the more the little “aha” moments came, not because I wanted to stay in suffering, but because I desperately wanted to find a way out without abandoning myself.

There was another piece I didn’t have words for at the time: I have spent most of my life feeling misunderstood, which meant I spent most of my life over-explaining. After Elijah died, that pattern didn’t go away — it got louder. It wasn’t that I wanted a free pass or an “excuse” for my behavior. It was that my behavior made sense in context, and without that context, it looked like avoidance, disinterest, or inconsideration. And I couldn’t live with the idea of being misread like that.

So there was this part of me that wanted people to know I had lost my child, not to invite pity and not because I wanted attention, but because I didn’t want them to misunderstand what they were seeing. I was barely surviving. I was dysregulated. I was navigating a kind of biological collapse that no amount of positive thinking or willpower could undo. And yet, I carried shame about how I was showing up, fear about being misinterpreted, anger that people didn’t just know, and a deep grief that I had to explain it at all. It was all of those things at the same time.

What hurt most was when someone essentially said to me, “Well, you have an excuse not to show up.” She didn’t say it in those exact words, but that was the meaning. And it landed like a punch because it reduced the death of my son to a permission slip. Grief didn’t give me an “excuse.” It broke my nervous system. It shattered my capacity. It took me offline. And for once, I didn’t want to justify or defend that. I didn’t want to perform strength or create a story that made other people comfortable. I just wanted to be understood without having to argue for my own collapse.

This is where the concept of capacity helped me find compassion for myself. Capacity is the amount of stress, stimulation, emotion, connection, movement, or output a nervous system can handle before it starts to shut down. It’s not fixed, and it’s not earned through effort. It rises and falls based on what life is asking of us. Grief, trauma, illness, overwhelm, and chronic stress all shrink capacity — not because we’re doing something wrong, but because the system is prioritizing survival.(First chakra - safety/survival)

When capacity drops low, the nervous system shifts into dysregulation, and that can look like anxiety, hypervigilance, panic, rage, numbness, shutdown, or collapse. None of these responses are character flaws — they are survival strategies. My exhaustion wasn’t depression. My isolation wasn’t disinterest. My inability to go to the gym wasn’t laziness. Those were nervous system responses to a load that was too heavy to carry.

On the other hand, regulation isn’t about feeling good, or being cheerful, or being “high vibe.” Regulation means being able to stay with yourself — in your body, in the present moment — without abandoning your needs. It means having enough internal safety to feel without being overwhelmed by those feelings. It means you don’t have to numb, or override, or perform. And for me, regulation didn’t show up as joy. It showed up first as peace — quiet, slow, non-performative peace.

This is why safety comes before joy. The nervous system cannot access joy, connection, creativity, or curiosity when it’s fighting to survive. Peace came before joy because peace was my nervous system saying, “You’re safe enough to stay.” Capacity grew from that safety. And eventually — almost quietly — joy returned. Not forced joy, not spiritual-bypassing joy, not “be grateful” joy. Just tiny moments of real joy, rooted in biology and belonging.

Learning this language didn’t fix my grief. Nothing fixes grief. But it gave me a map. It allowed me to look back at the darkest stretch of my life with compassion instead of shame. It helped me understand that my body never betrayed me — it protected me.

And if there’s anything I want other grieving bodies to know, it’s this:

You’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re not weak. Your nervous system has been working overtime to keep you alive. And that matters more than anyone knows.

Learning to Live With It & Integration

I wish I could say this story ends with resolution, or that there was some defining moment where everything clicked back into place and I became who I used to be. But that isn’t how grief works, and it isn’t how the nervous system works either. I am still learning how to live with what happened. I am still learning how to hold grief in one hand and life in the other. Some days I do it with grace. Other days I do it with tears or silence or irritation or fear. Most days, it’s all of the above.

What’s different now is that I’m not fighting my biology anymore. I’m not trying to make myself enjoyable, productive, or inspiring for other people’s comfort. I’m not trying to justify why certain environments feel like too much, or why I leave early, or why I cancel plans, or why I disappear into my own world when I need to. I’m not abandoning myself to avoid being misunderstood. I still don’t like being misread — that part hasn’t magically gone away — but I’m learning that being misunderstood for protecting my nervous system is better than abandoning myself for acceptance.

There is a grief that belongs to losing a child, and there is a grief that belongs to living in a world that doesn’t know what to do with that kind of loss. Most people want grief to be linear and temporary. They want it to make sense and have a timeline. They want it to transform into gratitude or insight or resilience. They want it to be something they can cheer for. But grief is not a storyline. It’s a companion. It changes shape. It takes up space. It quiets down and then roars. And my nervous system responds to all of it — not as a problem to solve, but as a reality to honor.

I used to think healing meant feeling better. Now I think healing means being able to feel more — to tolerate the full reality of my life without going to war with myself. Healing means building enough capacity to be present with what is here: the love, the grief, the joy, the longing, the exhaustion, the anger, the beauty. Healing means I can have a conversation, or sit at a baby shower, or take a breath in the car with my daughter, and not abandon myself in the process.

There’s something I haven’t talked about yet, and maybe this is the place for it. The last conversation I ever had with my mother, she said to me, “Don’t worry, Marcia. Everything will be OK. I love you.” I didn’t understand the weight of those words at the time, but I hear them now in a way I couldn’t before. And I can feel them in my body in a way I couldn’t then. It brings tears to my eyes.

It’s strange, because years later I wrote a children’s book about a little bee learning that it’s amazing and fantastic and awesome, and the last line of that book is “Just bee you!” And I never made the connection until now — that “Just bee you!” and “Everything Will Be OK” are actually part of the same message.

Because when you strip away all the noise, all the performance, all the people-pleasing, all the over-explaining, all the ways we contort ourselves to be accepted or understood, what the nervous system wants more than anything is to feel safe enough to be itself. To just be you. And when you are safe enough to be you, everything actually is OK — not because life stops being painful, but because you are not abandoning yourself through the pain.

It’s taken me a long time to understand what my mother meant when she said those words. She wasn’t promising that life would be easy, or that heartbreak wouldn’t happen, or that I wouldn’t lose people I love. She was reminding me, in the simplest language she had, that I didn’t have to become someone else to survive my life. I just had to stay with myself. I just had to be me.

And maybe that’s what regulation really is — not the absence of grief or fear, but the presence of self. The ability to stay with who you are, as you are, without leaving yourself to make other people comfortable. And maybe that’s what “Everything will be OK” actually means. Not that everything will be fixed, or solved, or undone, but that I will not abandon myself in the process.

I am still learning how to live with my grief. I am still learning how to stay. And that’s enough for today.

If pieces of this resonated, I share smaller reflections through Drops of Nectar — tiny embodied reminders of presence, meaning, and okayness — mostly on Facebook and Instagram.