I am a perfectionist, and I suspect there’s a little bit of perfectionism in all of us.
I mean, we’ve all got that nagging voice in our heads that fears failure. The nerve – it even bugs us in the midst of grief. Depression. Loneliness.

It judges us. It berates us. It tells us everything we are doing wrong. Everything we should be doing right. And everyone who has it all together.
Well, I’m here to say that you should give yourself credit. Even if you aren’t doing grief like your mother or your best friend or your neighbor. Even if you haven’t been out of bed in a week. Even if you still collapse in tears recalling how you missed your father’s last Christmas.
You still are breathing. You still are trying. And if you didn’t feel like trying today, or you didn’t achieve something you felt you should have achieved, well, tomorrow is another day.
The reality is you survived. You survived the meteoric strike to your life. The crater that punched a whole in your heart. I want you to walk under the moon tonight and look up and just take that in. You are a survivor. And because of that, anything is possible.
You’re alive to fight another day.
You don’t know what next month will look like, but you are alive. You are searching for answers. For solutions. For the sauce that will lend joy to your tomorrow.
And you will find it. It will take a lot of time. That’s something the Voice does not like to acknowledge. Journeys take time. And the most rewarding journeys take the most time.
Yes, I said rewarding. In the thick of it, at the beginning, it does not feel rewarding.
Gosh, I remember five years after my mother’s death, I reprimanded myself for a day of the same gut-wrenching grief I’d felt early on. Some days simply suck no matter how long it’s been.
Grief is an expert teacher, however, if you give it classroom time. Sometimes as perfectionists, we want to run from things we cannot subdue or possess as a trophy.
But other times, we stick with it. As we stick with grief, we follow an individual trail of bread crumbs, leading us to rest stops of healing. And before we know it, our grief has changed, and we have changed. We have exchanged “how can I survive this?” for “yes, I survived that.”

Remember on those days that you hear the Voice what you have survived so far – and that because “with God, all things are possible’ – you can survive everything grief throws at you.
I hope you smile today knowing that you have someone rooting for you and offering his help. Psalm 34:18 says: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”
Did you take a walk under the moon and acknowledge what an incredible warrior you are for having survived? If you did, I’d love to hear about it in the comments line.
Copyright © 2021 by Toni Lepeska. All rights reserved. www.tonilepeska.com
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