There are seasons in life that don’t announce themselves while they are happening. They just quietly shift everything, until one day you look up and realize you are no longer the same person you were before. This past year has been one of those seasons for me.
After my mom got sick and then passed away, something in me changed in ways I am still learning to understand. On the surface, life kept moving, as it always does, but internally everything felt different. The way I experienced time, joy, routine, even the smallest decisions about how I spent my days, all of it became filtered through grief in a way I never expected. And for a long time, I struggled with two things in particular that felt surprisingly difficult to come back to: self-care and seeing friends.
This video is a reflection of that process, not of having figured it all out, but of slowly learning how to exist within it again.
This is a quiet collection of reflections and moments from the past months — not because everything is resolved, but because I am learning how to exist within the in-between.
When I think about this period, I don’t think in milestones. I think in layers. In the way grief doesn’t replace life, but sits underneath it. In the way some days feel functional and others feel heavy in ways that are hard to explain. In the way you can be both present in your life and slightly removed from it at the same time.
This video holds some of that. The conversations I’ve been having with myself. The things I’ve been unlearning. The slow return to softness, to routine, to connection.
When self-care stopped feeling allowed
One of the biggest shifts I experienced after my mom got sick and passed away was how I related to self-care. Things that once felt normal — getting my hair done, booking a facial, sitting in a nail salon for an hour just existing — started to feel almost inaccessible emotionally.
Not because I didn’t have time, but because I couldn’t reconcile the idea of taking care of myself while someone I loved so deeply was suffering. And later, after she passed, there was another layer added to it: a quiet sense that I didn’t deserve those moments anymore, or that they somehow belonged to a version of life that no longer existed.
Grief has a way of distorting logic. It makes you believe that joy needs permission. That care needs justification. That softness should wait until some undefined point in the future when everything feels “appropriate” again.
And so, without fully realizing it at first, I stopped.
Relearning joy through small, ordinary rituals
What I’ve started to notice recently is that healing doesn’t arrive as a sudden shift. It shows up in small reintroductions. Quiet decisions that feel almost insignificant in the moment, but slowly begin to rebuild something inside you.
Going back to the salon after months of not going. Sitting in a chair and realizing how unfamiliar it felt to let someone take care of me again. Getting my nails done and noticing how something so simple could still reflect how I’m doing internally. Booking a facial and laughing later when my body was so relaxed my sleep tracker thought I had fallen asleep.
None of these things “fixed” anything. That’s not what they’re meant to do. But they reminded me that care doesn’t compete with grief. It exists alongside it.
And more importantly, that I am still allowed to feel good things, even now.
Friendship, distance, and returning to people
The same slow re-entry has been happening with people.
After my mom passed, I went very inward. I didn’t want to explain anything. I didn’t want to be perceived or asked how I was doing or expected to show up socially in ways I couldn’t access yet. I stayed very close to my immediate family and a very small circle, and even that felt like a stretch most days.
But life, eventually, begins to expand again whether you plan for it or not.
There was a moment, a few months later, when I found myself sitting at a book club meeting in New York, listening to conversations that had nothing to do with grief. Just women talking about books, life, relationships, work, things that exist outside of loss.
And I remember noticing something strange: I was okay being there. Not fully okay in the way I used to be, but present enough to laugh, to listen, to contribute.
It felt like a small return to the world.
Learning to hold grief and life at the same time
One of the hardest things I’ve had to accept is that grief doesn’t disappear for me to live again. It doesn’t resolve itself in a clean way that allows me to “move on” and return to who I was before.
Instead, it has become part of the structure of my life. Always there in the background, sometimes closer, sometimes quieter, but never fully gone.
And what I am slowly learning is that life doesn’t wait for grief to finish. It keeps unfolding anyway. Friendships continue. Work continues. Ordinary moments continue. And somehow, you learn to exist in both realities at once.
There are still days when the weight of missing her feels unbearable. And there are also days when I can laugh without guilt, or sit with friends without feeling like I am stepping outside of myself.
Both are real. Both are mine now.
Slowly returning to myself
If there is something I keep coming back to, it’s this idea that healing is not about becoming someone new. It’s about slowly reconnecting with the parts of yourself that grief made you distance from.
Not all at once. Not in a straight line. Not without resistance.
But in small permissions. One appointment. One conversation. One moment of joy that doesn’t feel entirely comfortable yet, but feels possible enough to stay with.
I don’t think I am the same person I was before all of this. And I don’t think I will be again. But I am starting to understand that this version of me is still allowed to live fully, even if it looks different now.
Even if it carries everything that came before it.
And maybe that is what this is really about.
Not going back. Not moving on.
But learning how to stay.
See you on the next one.
xx, Flor.
