New Beginnings – Embracing the Journey of Starting Over
"The end is where we start from." – T.S. Eliot
It is no secret that endings can be painful. But hidden within each one—no matter how devastating—is the quiet seed of a beginning. Life, like nature, is cyclical: seasons turn, tides shift, and even the darkest night gives way to morning. Endings are not just closures; they are thresholds. But what happens when the doorway to a new beginning opens only after loss, grief, or pain has knocked us to our knees?
Often, our most powerful transformations rise from the ashes of what we thought we couldn’t live without. These are the crucible moments—the ones that demand we release the past and begin imagining what could be. I know this not just as a comforting truth, but as someone taking the first uncertain steps on my own path of healing. These life-altering experiences, as brutal as they are, also carry immense potential. They invite us to rebuild, rediscover, and redefine who we are—on our own terms.
Finding growth when it feels like everything we know and love is crumbling down around us is no easy task. Still, it is crucial to learn how to alchemize the energy of starting over and rise from the ashes of loss to create a new chapter in the book of our lives – a chapter that reflects who we are, what we love, and what we want out of life.
My Journey
When my mom was first diagnosed with Frontotemporal Lobe Dementia (FTD), I had no idea how much my world would change. While I knew what Alzheimer’s was, I had no real concept of what being a caregiver for a loved one with dementia truly meant or what FTD was. What I did know is that I wanted to care for my mom because she had always been my best friend and favorite person on the planet. From the moment she was diagnosed, the knowledge that I would lose her sooner rather than later cast a dark pall of sadness over me that would continue to grow as she declined.
Almost immediately, I knew that I couldn’t keep the 60-hour-a-week corporate job that I already hated and also care for her without burning out. As fate would have it, a few months after her diagnosis, I fell and broke my shoulder, which gave me a lot of time to think. Naive to how much of my life caregiving would ultimately consume, I started hatching a plan to go back to school to start a business that would allow me to stay home with her. The idea was to keep my job, which allowed me to work at home, then quit once I was ready to launch Martina, Inc.
Corporate America, however, had other plans. A few days after I returned from my extended sick leave, the struggling company I was working for introduced an extensive round of layoffs with a 40% reduction in staff, including me. And so, I started school earlier than expected and was given more time with my mom than I had anticipated.
During those initial months and years, we crisscrossed the state on mini-road trips. We visited nature, ate dessert first, and did all the things my mom loved. I loved these outings too because my mom was usually happy during them and didn’t suffer from the mood swings she would increasingly start to have at home. I could forget, even if just for a few hours, that she was sick and that I was going to lose her.
If you’ve never been on the dementia journey with a loved one, you have to know that it is a journey fraught with loss. Your loved one receives a death sentence the moment they are diagnosed. From that moment, your reality is that even if you are the perfect caregiver and do everything right (and who among us is perfect?), your loved one is going to die. The details may be different for each individual with progressive dementia, but the journey ends the same for everyone.
What no one tells you is that you will experience a score of small deaths along the way before your loved one physically dies. You’ll lose a piece of them the day they first forget your name. Another piece will fall away the first time you take them to adult daycare, change their diaper, or lovingly puree their food so they don’t choke.
More pieces will fall away every time you have to argue with them about taking a shower or when they pull your hair or unleash an angry torrent of words at you containing cruel, hurtful sentiments that your “real mom,” who is sweet and compassionate would never in a million years allow to escape from her lips.
The other thing no one tells you is that you will lose yourself too. Pieces of you will drift away because being a caregiver is arduous. It is physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and financially draining. No one told me that people I thought were my friends would slowly drift away.
No one told me I would spend my 401k on care for my mom or that I would almost lose my house because I couldn’t afford to pay my property taxes, even doing freelance work at night when my mom slept. No one mentioned when I said yes to the mission that I’d live in cheap t-shirts, hand-me-down leggings, flip-flops, and a pair of rat-gray, clearance sale Adidas with holes in the toes for years because I couldn’t afford to replace my shoes AND pay for our living expenses or the supplies my mom needed.
And no one told me how irreparably my heart would be broken when my mom died. I knew that I would miss her, but I didn’t know that I would be so depressed I could barely function by the end of her life or that for months after her passing I would often wish that I had died with her. I knew I would grieve, but I didn’t know that I would feel so utterly alone and foreign to myself because the journey had changed me into a different person than who I was before it began.
Starting Over
Starting over after my mom’s death felt like a call into the unknown. I had spent so many years focused on her care that when she was gone, I didn’t know who I was anymore. My identity had been inextricably intertwined with that of caregiver. Without that role, I felt lost. I didn’t know who I was or how to be in a world without her.
As I tried to rebuild my life, there were days when the grief was so overwhelming that I wasn’t sure if I could move forward. It took some time, but through the haze of loss, I began to understand that woven into the grief was also an opportunity to rediscover myself. The process has been slow and often painful, but little by little, I have begun to find my way. It doesn’t happen overnight.
We live in a world that wants to rush us through our grief. The truth no one tells you in their haste to make you feel better, so they can escape their own discomfort with thinking about death and loss, is that to rediscover the magic in our lives and within ourselves, we have to take the time to hold our grief, gently cradling it until we are ready to release it like a dark bird flying into the night. No one mentions either that even as we watch it soar away into the sky, grief will revisit us in moments from time to time.
We will feel the grief keenly on days like birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. But it will also rear its head in moments where we least expect it. Sometimes the trigger will be obvious, and other times, it will make no sense at all.
People like to say when someone dies that grief comes in waves, but it is my experience that peace comes in islands. With time, those islands become closer together. That doesn’t mean we don’t have moments where we still get swept away by the current that flows between them. And yet, it is on those islands of peace that we start to gather in the shards of ourselves that have drifted away. Those are the moments when we start to remember.
But how do we find those moments?
For me, it has been a combination of things. It is a process of trial and error and one that has taught me the importance of listening to my heart and intuition as they guide me into a new life that prizes self-care, freedom, sovereignty, spiritual alignment, and the ability to make a difference doing the things I love with the people and animals I love. In essence, this boils down to pursuing a life that makes me happy no matter what anyone else has to say about it.
An’ it harm none, do as ye will.
Now, you might think that living according to what makes you happy is a joy ride down wildflower-lined roads in eternal sunshine, but the truth is that it takes a lot of courage. It also takes a lot of introspection, honesty, and a willingness to say no to the things that aren’t meant for you, even when walking away challenges your ego or makes you feel insecure.
For me, this has meant walking away from friendships with people who supported me in beautiful ways that I am eternally grateful for, but who also had a way of making me feel inadequate and small once I started taking the first tentative steps back to myself.
It has sometimes meant finding the courage to pursue opportunities even in the midst of almost paralysing self-doubt. Other times, it has meant walking away from people, partnerships, and jobs I was sure I wanted until I realized that they were no longer aligned with the person I have become.
It’s also meant pushing my introverted, sometimes overly sensitive and insecure self into situations where I share my creative work and brace myself for what I have always feared most, which is that I would bare my soul and the world outside would find me lacking.
Is all of this easy?
No. But when you teach yourself to feel the fear and do it anyway, you create a kind of alchemy that invites magic into your life. Once you’ve watched the human you love most slowly wither away and die in such a cruel way, your perspective on what’s scary changes. I’ve already survived some of the worst losses imaginable to me. At this point, there is nothing that scary about approaching opportunities with a sense of curiosity and adventure and then moving on if it turns out they are not for me. I spent too long deferring my own dreams and happiness to let a little discomfort stand in my way now.
Without this philosophy (and let’s be real—therapy and a great support system), I would never have experienced the joy of participating in creative projects that have led me on incredible adventures and brought amazing new friends into my life.
More importantly, it helped me set the standard that I deserve to be happy. I deserve fulfilling work that makes a difference for both the humans and animals I share this planet with. I deserve joy…and so do you.
It’s a fact of life that we all experience pain and loss. Some of us, unfortunately, seem to experience what feels like more than our fair share. I’ve lost my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, two best friends, and countless animals I’ve shared my heart and home with. At times, it feels like there’s some cosmic finger pointing down, handing out pain in a personal, targeted way. But while our grief may be personal, pain and loss touch everyone.
I’m not the kind of person who will tell you that your traumas happened for a reason, but I will tell you that you can learn from them. If I could decide again whether to walk my mom through her dementia diagnosis to the end of her life, I would do it a thousand times over. I hated every minute of losing her, but I would do it again because that’s what you do when you love someone and because, without that experience, I wouldn’t be who I am today—and honestly, I like who I’ve become.
Living through dementia taught me so much. It taught me how to love fiercely in the midst of profound loss. It showed me that I am stronger and more powerful than I ever imagined. It taught me when to say yes and, just as importantly, when to say no. After putting my life on hold for nearly a decade, it also taught me that time is precious. I don’t have time to waste—none of us do.
Whether we like it or not, we’re all connected. Why not build on that to move forward in this world with the intention of walking through it with love, despite the losses we’ve endured?
This is my story of remembering. It’s a space to reflect on the journey back to myself after loss, and the lessons I’ve learned about healing, rediscovery, and renewal. For nearly ten years, I walked the path of a caregiver. It was a road filled with love, sacrifice, and moments that I wouldn’t trade for anything. But when that journey ended, I found myself standing in the rubble of what used to be my life, unsure of who I was or where I belonged. Caregiving had consumed so much of my identity that, in its absence, I emerged a stranger to myself.
Grief, I soon realized, wasn’t just about the loss of my mom. It was about the loss of how my mom saw me, the me she held for me, and unwaveringly loved. It was also about losing the version of me I had known for so long—the one who woke up every day with a purpose centered around someone else. Starting over felt daunting, and yet, there was a quiet voice within me, urging me to remember. Remember who I was before, who I could become, and who I was meant to be all along.
My hope is that through sharing these experiences with you, it might help you remember who you are, too. May you find, in these words, a reminder that no matter how much life changes or how lost you feel, there’s always a path forward No matter what you have endured, you are still here, and you are still whole. May you remember that too.