The hardest last 16 months of my life

The last 16 months started with my father dying, and that didn’t come with clean grief. It came with mess.
Ambivalence. Relief, anger, sadness, unfinished business, maybe all of it tangled together. When someone who hurt you dies, there’s no socially acceptable script. You don’t just lose a person, you lose the possibility of things ever being different. That’s heavy and isolating.

After that, my body became a battleground I didn’t choose.
Endometriosis symptoms, fertility questions, an abortion. Decisions that were necessary, not sentimental. Pain that was physical and emotional, and ongoing, not something I “processed” and moved on from. I had to stay functional while my nervous system was under strain, which is exhausting in a way people rarely see.

Work didn’t pause to make room for any of this.
I kept building, deciding, showing up, making things work. Not out of hustle culture heroics, but because stability matters when everything else feels uncertain. And because competence is one of the few places I've learnt I can stand on solid ground.

There were cracks, though. Moments of withdrawal.
Sharp clarity around what I won’t tolerate anymore, especially from people who drain, diminish, or blur my boundaries.
Some relationships fell into silence, others re-emerged in a quieter, more honest way. Less performance, less caretaking.

Emotionally, this wasn’t a “healing era”.
It was a survival-and-honesty era. I stopped pretending things were fine. I let myself accept that some wounds don’t get neat closure and that some people never become safe, even in memory.

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If I had to summarize it brutally:

The last 16 months forced me to grow up in a specific way, again, after I already had. I wasn’t becoming softer, I was becoming clearer. More embodied, more intolerant of bullshit, and more alone at times because of that clarity.

Not romantic. Not empowering in an Instagram way. But real.

And the thing that stands out most to me is this: I didn’t turn that clarity into bitterness. I let it sharpen my choices instead.

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But it's important to also name what  feels unresolved or still raw:

What’s unresolved isn’t grief for my father:
It’s the lack of repair. He didn’t suddenly become kind in death. There was no final recognition, no accountability, no moment where I was seen or protected. So what lingers is not “missing him”, it’s carrying the weight of having had a father who didn’t do the job. That kind of loss doesn’t end, it just goes quiet sometimes. And it can still bite when you don’t expect it to.

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There’s anger that didn’t get a clean outlet.
Not explosive rage, but a deep, contained anger that had to be managed rather than expressed. Because at some point I learnt that anger wasn’t safe, welcome, or useful. So it turned inward as tension, hyper-competence, control, endurance. That anger is still there, and it wants acknowledgement rather than release.

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My body is holding more than my mind admits.
Endometriosis, reproductive decisions, herniated lower back dics, hormonal shifts. This isn’t symbolic, it’s literal.
My nervous system has been living in “survival mode”. Even when I understand everything intellectually, my body is still tired, wary, and sometimes ahead of me in saying “no” before I've allowed myself to (if i do allow myself to).
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There’s grief for a version of myself that didn’t get to exist.
A hypothetical me, with a different father, a safer emotional landscape, maybe an easier relationship to my own body or to choice. This kind of grief is subtle and often dismissed, but it’s real. It’s about lost potential, not lost memory.
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And there’s loneliness that comes from clarity.
I've outgrown certain dynamics. I don’t confuse intensity with intimacy anymore. I don’t stretch myself to be as palatable as I used to be.
That makes life quieter. More honest, but quieter. And some days that quiet feels like peace, other days it feels like absence.
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If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s this:

I'm  no longer asking “why did this happen to me?”
I'm asking “what part of me had to adapt, and what is it costing me now?”

That question doesn’t demand answers right away. Sometimes naming it is the work.
Sometimes it just takes (a lot) of time.