Florida Memories and Grief: The Power of Healing, Writing, and Photography

Anyone who's dealt with the loss of a loved one knows there's a process to getting through the grief. For me, this includes reflecting on memories, looking at photos, and writing to heal (in addition to the other stages). The traditional stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, according to grief.com's website. We'll visit grief in more detail, the concept of it, perhaps down the road. 

For now, this post is more about my personal experience with just one aspect of it. Perhaps I'm in the acceptance phase, or close to it. Otherwise, I am not sure I'd be able to look back at this time in my life and share with you in word form. 

And I want to recount a particular experience with you because while we are all from different walks of life, backgrounds, societies, and cultures, at least we all have one thing in common: we all go through life losing someone that we love and we all need to come to peace with it at some point or another. Otherwise, our lives will not be worth living.  

Dolphins Swimming in Sarasota Bay:

Conversations With Stuffed Animals

When I was about four years old, I asked my mother to write our address down.

She wrote it on the back of a plain, white envelope. I then took that envelope into my bedroom, which I had converted into a classroom. I lined up all of my stuff animals around the room, assigned them names, and made name tags for them. I then proceeded to teach each of them how to write our address; copying my mother's handwriting over and over again, until each student had a small piece of paper in front of them with the info.

Of course, I'm sure things were misspelled and not even legible, but the point being, even at age four, I had created a knack for myself. Not only did I personify each stuffed animal, giving them names and voices, I had begun the early stages of learning how to write.

And I was teaching.

My powerful four year old mind had the capability to believe I was teaching something to someone else. It didn't matter that they were just, in essence, stuff animals; stuff animals who couldn't think, feel, or speak (let alone write). I believed that they were real and that they could do anything I taught them.

That was all that mattered.

Summer Rubble

Per my last blog post, back in March, I have been writing, just not blogging. Time to revisit and pound out some random thoughts.

Life is still tough, and will continue to be for a while, but right now it's more financially tough than emotionally, so perhaps things are shifting? Changing? We'll see. Last August I snagged an adjunct teaching job at a community college, and spent the last year teaching English. I love it. I've been looking for full time teaching jobs, but it appears that college English instructors might be a dime a dozen; competition for full time placement is fierce, and with just a year under my belt, that seems to be not yet enough experience I suppose.