Your Healing Journey Starts With This One Unexpected Word
I was five minutes from the end of One Day when I felt it — that quiet dread of a story not going where you need it to go. 😬
My daughter had warned me. She’d literally texted me: “Mom. Don’t watch it.” I watched it anyway. (This is who I am.)
And then the ending came. And it wasn’t the one I wanted. I wanted them together. I wanted the baby in their arms. I wanted the whole messy, beautiful, worth-it-in-the-end Hollywood wrap-up. Instead I get real life dressed up in good lighting — and I’m sitting there on my couch, alone, just... sad. 😭
But here’s the thing I didn’t expect. I wasn’t just sad about a show.
I recognize something in that ending — the specific ache of wanting a story to go one way and watching it go another. Of sitting with your arms open, ready to receive something, and leaving empty. I’ve been in that place. With real loss. Miscarriages — more than one — and though I’ve done so much work on that grief, a Netflix finale cracks it back open at 9 pm on a Tuesday like it’s nothing.
Because that’s the thing about grief nobody warns you about. It doesn’t have a finish line. It doesn’t get done. It just changes shape. It gets quieter, softer, more manageable — and then one day a story ends that wasn’t even yours, and there it is again. Waving. 👋
✦ The Eye-Opening Truth: Where Your Healing Journey Really Begins
Recently, I sat with a patient’s mom — she had just experienced a loss in her third trimester. One of the most profound losses a person can carry.
I hold space for her the way you do when words feel too small for the room. And somewhere in that silence, my own grief shows up quietly and sits down beside me. Mine is twenty years old. Hers is two weeks old. And yet in that moment, there’s no distance between them — loss doesn’t really age the way we think it does. 🤍
What strikes me isn’t the sadness, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the connection. The way grief, when we stop hiding it, becomes the thing that reaches across a room and says me too. The way two women can hold something heavy together and somehow make it lighter just by not being alone in it.
And that’s what I want to pass straight to you: you are not uniquely cursed. You are not the only one sitting on the couch at the end of a story that didn’t go your way. There is an entire quiet sisterhood of women who know exactly what your arms feel like when they’re empty. And we are all, in our own way, still learning how to carry it.
So let’s talk about the word that gets thrown around a lot in moments like this.
Acceptance.
Ugh, I know. Bear with me. 🙏
Here’s the thing — and I say this as someone who has looked this word up more than once hoping it would reveal something new — acceptance and approval are actually two completely different things. The dictionary knows. I checked.
Acceptance means acknowledging what is. As in: I accept that the restaurant is out of chocolate cake. (Devastating. Valid.)
Approval means stamping your okay-ness onto it. As in: I approve of there being no chocolate cake. (Which — absolutely not. Hard no.)
You are never being asked to approve of your loss. You are never being asked to say this is fine, actually about something that broke your heart.
Acceptance is the quiet decision to stop arguing with what already is — so you have enough energy left to figure out what comes next.
And what comes next is a choice. A quiet fork in the road that appears somewhere in the middle of the grief.
Path One: Resistance 😤
Stay in the storm. Circle the loss. Replay the ending. Steam, sob, go numb. This path is real and often necessary — you don’t have to leave it before you’re ready.
Path Two: Acceptance 🙏
Stop arguing with what already is. Lift your eyes slightly toward the possibility that there’s a bigger picture — a meaning behind the moment, a story being written at a level you can’t quite see yet. Maybe the ending you didn’t get is making room for something you haven’t imagined yet. ✨
The bright side finds you — when you stop fighting the dark. ☀️
✦ What the Healing Journey Actually Looks Like
The clouds don’t part all at once. What happens is slower and quieter than that.
For me, it often starts in stillness — the kind where you show up with a journal and pour whatever’s in your heart onto the page. Even when what’s in your heart is anger. Even when the pen moves in circles, because that’s the only thing that makes sense. I call it journaling with Spirit, and sometimes I scribble. I cry on the paper. And slowly, in that mess of ink and honesty, something starts to shift. 🌤️
You stop yelling at God for not giving you what you want and start being present with love — feeling its wild ride of emotions — instead.
And what I find on the other side of all that sitting and surrendering — when I finally stop fighting the ending I didn’t get — is something I can only describe one way: it teaches me about love.
Not the love you receive. The love you become. 💗
Because sometimes the things that crack us open are the only teachers capable of teaching certain lessons. Happiness is a beautiful teacher — but it can’t teach you everything. Some things — the deep things, the marrow things — only come through grief. Through darkness. Through the long shadow of a story that didn’t end the way you needed it to.
Sadness and grief are a way we learn. A profound way. And what they teach us, we simply cannot learn through happy things alone. 🕊️
The losses make me softer where I’d been hard. More present where I’d been distracted. More willing to sit in the dark with another person — because I know what it feels like to need someone to sit there with me.
I would not be the physician and coach I am today without them. And honestly? I think that might have been the point all along. 🙏
If you’re in the middle of an unexpected ending right now — you don’t have to fix it today. You don’t have to find the meaning today. You don’t have to feel okay about any of it today.
You just have to stay. Keep showing up to the journal, the stillness, the quiet conversation with whatever you call Source. Let the grief teach you what only grief can teach. And trust — even when it’s hard — that the story knows where it’s going, even when you don’t. ✨
You are not alone in this. Not even close. 💛
xo,
Dr. Sue
P.S. Want to go deeper on this together? I'm going live for 20 minutes on exactly this — life's unexpected endings and how to reclaim your healing journey forward. Come as you are, bring your journal, and let's do this together. 🙏✨
