🎧 Track 01 — I Found ME by NeveahSoul

There You Are: Finding My Way Back to Me

By February, I was carrying more than I think people around me really understood.

My nephew had passed away in December, so I was already grieving. I was already trying to figure out how to keep moving while processing a loss that was still very fresh. I hadn't even had time to fully understand everything I was feeling before another kind of loss showed up in my life.

She left.

There was no warning. No real conversation. No opportunity for us to sit down and talk about what was happening or for me to understand how we had gotten there. One minute, I thought I was in something that we were going to work through, and then suddenly I was left trying to make sense of an ending I wasn't prepared for.

And if I'm being truthful, it wasn't just how she left that hurt.

It was also how I had been treated before she left.

That's something I had to be willing to admit to myself. Because when you love somebody, sometimes you spend so much time trying to understand their behavior that you stop asking yourself a much more important question: How is this making me feel?

I had overlooked things. Made excuses for things. Questioned myself about things that hurt me. I had given grace, understanding, patience, and chances while slowly becoming disconnected from myself.

Then she was gone.

So there I was in February, grieving my nephew while also grieving a relationship—and those were two completely different kinds of grief happening at the same time. One was the devastating reality of losing someone I loved to death. The other was losing someone who was still here but had made the decision to leave my life without giving me the conversation I felt I deserved.

That's the season when “I Found ME” found me.

At first, finding myself didn't look powerful. It wasn't some big I'm healed, I'm free, and I'm moving on moment.

It looked like trying to get through the day.

It looked like sitting with questions that didn't have answers.

It looked like replaying conversations in my head and wondering what I could have done differently.

It looked like grieving.

And eventually, it looked like realizing that I had spent so much energy trying to understand why she left that I hadn't stopped to think about the person who was still here.

Me.

That realization became important.

Because I couldn't control how she treated me. I couldn't make her give me the conversation I wanted. I couldn't rewrite how things ended. And I definitely couldn't change what happened to my nephew.

But somewhere underneath all that grief, disappointment, confusion, and hurt, I was still there.

Maybe bruised.

Maybe heartbroken.

Definitely grieving.

But still there.

So when I say “I Found ME,” I'm not saying I had everything figured out by February. I didn't.

I'm saying I started finding the woman underneath everything that had happened to her.

And that was enough to begin.

🌻 What Track 01 means to me:Before I could understand why people left, I had to stop leaving myself.