Not Numb, Not Normal - Father’s Day 2026

I feel at peace, not numb, not normal. 

Blah is the best word to describe it. 

I may not always feel it from the inside, but from the outside, the growth is there. Each day is a combination of moving forward and trying to not forget.

Tomorrow is Father's Day. I'm not gonna try to be strong. I may try to be happy, or I might just be just a daughter who loved her father, who misses her dad, and that'll be enough. 

And I'm sure that if the tears come, I'll let them.

 If laughter comes, I'll let it. 

And as I look at his records while smiling, I'll let that happen too, because the love for him is still here. His records are a reminder of both my father’s joy and his complexity.

Life has changed so much this past year.

It's just so different now. I'm not numb. It's just not normal.

Rediscovering Mahjong

 

For years, I thought that because I lost the instructions to my Mahjong game, I would never have any use for them.

Now I consider that maybe life removed them for a different reason. And that when the time was right I would seek the tiles when I was ready for them.

Because somewhere between surviving, grieving, healing, and becoming, Mahjong tiles became a quiet place of joy on my phone. The more I played, the more I thought my tiles that were tucked away in my family game cabinet.

Saturday, around one in the morning, I began to research individual activities that I can do with the tiles. Afterwards, I went to the game cabinet and pulled out a brown case, dusted if off and opened it.

It was if the game on my phone had come to life. My tiles are beautiful. They always were. The tiles never stopped being beautiful because I lost the instructions.

So if this season has taught me anything, it is this:

Open the box.

Try the thing.

Trust the timing.

Choose joy.

Bet on yourself.

Because healing has a way of returning us to what was always there. 

How long have I had these tiles? Well over 10 years, possibly 20 years. I’ve never tried to play the game or sort them out. At least not until now. 

Maybe I purchased this as a gift to my future self years ago and at the right time, I’d dust it off and explore my Mahjong game with an open heart. 

One Year Later - A Year Without My Father

 A year. 💛

It’s been a year

Since my world shifted.

A year since I last lived in a world
where my father was just a phone call away.

And somehow…
I’m still here.

Not unchanged.
Not untouched.
But still standing.

I’ve learned that grief doesn’t disappear.
It softens, it stretches, it settles into the quiet places.

I’ve learned that love doesn’t end
It just finds new ways to live inside of me.

There were days I didn’t think I’d get through.
Days I moved slowly.
Days I didn’t move at all.

But I made it.

And today, I honor him
not just in my tears,
but in my living.

The very last thing that I wanted to do today was leave the house but I did. I went and voted and I thought about my father. He would have voted earlier in the day and watched the news all day listening for the results.

That was one thing that I did today to honor him. I tried to be productive around the house. I spent today trying to do normal things. Realizing at the same time that things aren't normal anymore.

Nearly A Year Without My Father

   

    It's been nearly a year since my father passed and I'm beginning to think of the last time that I saw him and the last time that I spoke with him. Grief has a way of grabbing you and pulling you back into time. It was this time last year when Shadeur Sanders got drafted in the fifth round of the NFL draft. My father was not happy about him not going in the first round.

    That day I was out at lunch with my son at P.F Chang. We decided to take my father a meal and part of that meal was a key lime dessert. My father loved key lime pies. And so we went to the Brown House to take him him a meal. I got to see him and he looked good. He had recently gotten out of the hospital and seemed to be doing better. 

    I remember him calling me the weekend before he passed because there was a tragic incident on UC's campus. My father called me to tell me to make sure that my son's knew what had happened and that they were safe. It was important to him that they knew to be alert. 

    I try not to have regrets about not seeing him more. This time last year I was in a whole different space in my life, with healing from illness, going to physical therapy and returning to work on an elementary behavior unit. Plus I was trying to rest, heal and get back to normal. Whatever normal was.

    I think I'm finding comfort right now by remembering seeing my dad on the porch, which is one of our favorite places at the brown house, and us having that conversation. We had talked throughout the next week but I did not get a chance to go see him. 

    The last time I saw him... I had to come down from the porch that he loved to sit on to watch him leave the Brown House one last time.

Writing has helped to process things. At least a little bit. 

8 Months - Grief & New Beginnings

Grief & Gratitude At Christmas

Eleven Months — The Last First

 

Easter Sunday was the last of the firsts.
The last holiday without my father for the first time.

And somehow, I made it here.

Through the days that felt too heavy to move,
through the moments that caught me off guard,
through the quiet spaces where your absence echoed loudest.

Today, I felt something new,
not joy without you,
but strength with your memory.

A little more energy.
A little more breath.
A little more ability to sit in the moment
without being overtaken by it.

I still miss you.
That hasn’t changed.

But Sunday reminded me
that even in grief,
life is still gently unfolding.

And maybe…
that’s part of how I carry you forward.

Releasing the Pressure to Niche Down

    

    For a long time, I heard the same advice over and over again: niche down. Make it smaller. Make it clearer. Make it easier to explain. I thought my niche was simply self-publishing and writing. And while that's true, it was never the whole truth.

    What I didn't realize then was how much pressure that advice carried. It made me feel like I had to flatten my experience to fit inside a category. Like I had to choose one lane when my life had clearly taken many. Writing wasn't separate from healing. Publishing wasn't separate from grief. Coaching wasn't separate from lived experience. They were all informing each other at the same time.

    Now I see it differently. My niche isn't a single service or skill, it's the intersection of my story, my voice, and the season I'm willing to write from. It's creativity shaped by recovery. It's guidance rooted in lived experience. It's helping others give language to what they've survived and what they're still becoming.

    So no, I didn't niche down.

    I named the whole of who I am.

    And that's when everything began to make sense.

Creative Block - Epiphany - I Am The Niche

    I didn't sit down to create a series when I wrote Creative Block - Getting Back To Trying. I sat down to be honest. What started as one blog post became six, including this one. It's not because I planned it that way, but because something in me needed room to breathe. Somewhere between patience, honesty, trying, and tears, I had an epiphany: healing doesn't arrive all at once. It unfolds when we stay present with ourselves.

    Grief doesn't ask politely for space. It reshapes identity, disrupts rhythm, and forces you to move at a pace you didn't choose. Over the past couple of years, illness, recovery, and loss have all asked something different of me. Patience became an act of compassion. Honesty became a lifeline. Trying, on the days when motivation was gone, became enough. And crying stopped feeling like a setback and started feeling like release. These weren't separate lessons. They were connected. They were lived.

    For a long time, I believed creativity had to look a certain way, finished, polished, productive. But this season taught me something gentler and truer. Writing recently hasn't been for performance, but for peace. I didn't force clarity. I allowed truth. I stayed present with my grief and my creativity, without asking either one to disappear so the other could exist.

    Months ago, I saw a creator on TikTok say, "You are the niche." At the time, it sounded encouraging. Now it feels undeniable. This process magnified that truth for me. My lived experience, my pauses, my healing, my uncertainty, my persistence, is not something I need to package or overcome before it's valuable. It is the work. I am the niche.

    I draw where I am. I write where I am. I create from the place where my feet are planted, not from an imagined finish line. And in doing so, I've learned this: my voice didn't disappear during grief, it softened. My vision didn't blur, it widened. And my victory isn't loud or flashy. It's steady. It's real. It's choosing myself, again and again.

    I've also learned that while I have many things to cry about, I also have so much to look forward to.

In All Things Give Thanks,

Arlinda

Creative Block - Cry When You Need To

 

    This season of my life has definitely had its share of tears. There are days when the tears are uncontrollable. There are days when I don't cry at all and then days later I'm in tears all over again. Especially after all that I've been through with my illness and thinking, okay... things are getting better right? And then my father passed unexpectedly and the tears returned. It felt like I never really got a break from sadness and heartache. 

Crying is not a setback. It’s a release. Holding everything in doesn’t make you stronger, it makes the weight heavier. Grief needs somewhere to go, and tears are often the safest place for it to land. They don’t mean you’re undone; they mean you’re processing. You're processing what was. You're processing letting go. 

When I was in the hospital people would come to visit almost daily.  Every time someone would walk into my room I thought, "Oh my God!" & I would immediately begin to cry. Visitors came daily. Some were such a surprise. I would simply cry at the sight of them because it was overwhelming. Knowing that people had thought enough about me to come and visit me at the hospital or hang out with me in the hospital made me reel so vulnerable. Little did I know that by Spring my tears would increase.

I remember the night that my son called me and told me that my father had passed. I remember freezing in that moment. Hearing him and processing the information caused me to freeze in that moment. Once we got to the house, to wait for the coroner to come and to remove my father's body from our childhood home, the tears began to fall. I recall standing on the sidewalk in front of the house as we were saying our goodbyes and gathering around him as a family. Those tears were continuous on all of our faces.

I’ve learned that letting myself cry clears space inside me. It doesn’t solve everything, but it softens the pressure. Sometimes after the tears, I can breathe a little easier. Sometimes I can think more clearly. And sometimes all it does is acknowledge the truth of what I’ve been carrying and that alone is enough for that day.

Creative Block - Be Honest With Your Support System

The second point in Creative Block - Get Back To Trying is to be honest with your support system.

This has been hard for me to verbalize to others, friends and families included. There have been so many days that I just shutdown. It's not done on purpose. Some days are better than others and some days are just that, "a day". A day with no makeup and earrings, a litmus test for me is when I have them both on. A day when I may get dressed by sundown. Heck, it might even be a day where I have on what I had on the previous day because I slept in it. That's real talk.

One of the hardest things to do is admit that you’re not okay—especially when you’re used to being the strong one, the creative one, the dependable one. But pretending everything is fine takes energy you don’t have.  So, while I don't pretend, often I shut the world out. Grief already asks so much of you; masking your truth shouldn’t be one more burden.

Honesty creates room to breathe. It allows the people who love you to show up fully, instead of guessing or assuming. Saying, “Today is hard,” or “I don’t have words right now,” is not weakness. It’s clarity. And clarity invites connection, support, and sometimes relief—if only for a moment.

Between my sister and my three closest girlfriends, I can almost guarantee that one of them will pick up when I'm shutting the world out. In those moments I am grateful to have someone try to pull me out of that space of grief, depression and loneliness.

What's crazy to me is that I tend to be outgoing and pretty much happy go lucky. However, since Fall of 2024 my days have been so unpredictable. I honestly think that writing about it has been really helpful for me.

Creative Block - Getting Back To Trying

   

    One day this week my mom asked me if I had been writing recently. I didn't know how to answer that question. What I've been trying to do, especially since December is to journal my days. I've been trying to post more on this blog site and to my social media pages. Like I have really been trying.

    But some days it's hard. It's hard to gather my thoughts, to organize my thoughts and then to put my thoughts on paper or to type them out or use dictation. Some days it's just hard. Over the past year and a half my life has had so many moments of grief that I find difficult to complete writings or to continue posting on my blog. It really depends on the day.

    Grief has a way of taking hold of you. Even as I try to fight for things to be normal, grief seems to hold me back and sometimes I can't move forward or I move very slowly. I liken it to a runner being prevented from continuing a race because someone is physically holding them back,

    I have learned that grief has shown up in several areas of my life. It's the ending of a career, it's the time loss because of illness and the passing of a relative. When you combine all of that happening in less than 2 years, I have to be honest and say most days are difficult. Well maybe not most days, how about some days are difficult.

    I love to write. I'm very creative. I am a creative who has dealt with hard things over the past couple of years. I have therapy and I have my support system. I make sure I get enough sleep and I do need to drink more water. If I could give advice to anybody who's in a similar situation I would tell them;

1. Be patient with yourself because going through trauma and grief has a way of spiraling in a way that sometimes you can't really control. 
2. Be honest with your support system. Don't try to go through life and make it seem like you're okay and everything is just fine. Because everything isn't just fine. 
3. There is value in at least trying. Make an attempt each day to do something that you love. Make an attempt each day to talk to your family and talk to your friends. Get a good laughing. 
4. Cry when you need to. It does you no good to hold everything in.

    Since Fall of 2024 I have gone from having a serious illness, to rehabilitation, to trying to heal at home and to losing my father less than a year later. There are days where I just sit & wonder & pray & believe that I'll get back on the pathway of writing and creating. But right now honestly I do have a creative block that I working through.

    It might not seem like it with this long blog. lol This is really a heart spill for me just to get it all out. 

    For that I'm grateful.

    Arlinda

8 Months - Grief & New Beginnings

    It was a night like tonight when we loss our father, grandfather and my mother's husband of over 50 years. For me it's been 8 months of trying to balance many aspects of my life, including grief, and honoring my father. Somedays it's hard to get up and be productive. Somedays, I lay in the bed most of the day and scroll, sleep or let my mind wander.

    Sometimes, I think I'm getting better one minute and the next minute, I'm curled up in a ball. The hardest part was that it was totally unexpected and we didn't get to say goodbye in the way that we thought we would. It's been rough thinking about how he passed. My dad fought prostate cancer for 20 years and yet that wasn't his cause of death.  As we read the coroner's report, it felt like the wind was taken out of us. He went to doctor faithfully and followed instructions thoroughly. In that moment it felt unfair or was it just us being selfish? Maybe a mixture of both.

    Today makes the 8th month since he's been gone. 8 means new beginnings. I guess I'm finding that new beginning can be hard and depressing, yet also an opportunity to implement what my father taught us and to carry on legacy.

Eight Months Later

It’s been eight months,

and we’ve learned how to carry the silence.

Not because it got easier—

but because we’ve grown around the ache.

There are days we laugh now.

There are days we move freely.

But there are also days, like today,

where we feel it all again—

as if no time has passed at all.

Eight months ago, the world lost you.

But we never did.

You are still ours

Still loved.

Still remembered.

Still here—in every breath we take through the pain.

December Blog Post Challenge

    Prior to a post that I made on October 1, 2025, I had not posted on my blog since August 28, 2024. Once I realized that, it was at that point, in November, that I said I needed to do something. In December I decided that I was going to try to post on my blog everyday for the month of December, not only because I had not posted in a while but also to celebrate 17 years of blogging.

    Today is December 31 and I have only missed December 5th and December 6th. And I get it. The 5th and the 6th are hard days for me. Without me knowing it, my body and my mind shut down. I picked back up on December 7th and simply kept going.

    I've been sharing videos that I posted on YouTube several years ago, sharing content, that I've created in Canva, and writing about my experiences. One of my favorite pieces has been talking about my healing and navigating grief since my father passed in the Spring. That post was hard to write. After reading it several times, I really loved how it made me feel, serene and peaceful.

    The plan going forward is to make sure that I'm posting at least a couple of times a month about life experiences and reposting older blogs. 

    If you have read at least one blog this month, I'm grateful that you took out you time to do so.

    Check out where you can connect with me and purchase my books.

    Be Well

    Arlinda    

This Is What My Healing Looks Like

 

My hospital room view in October 2024

Healing doesn't arrive the way we expect it to.

When my doctor told me that I would feel more like myself a year from my first surgery. I thought I would feel like who I was prior to October 2024. That is not what's happening, nor have I been fully prepared for it not to go the way I envisioned it.

After coming home from the hospital it was a series of OT and PT visits and doctor's visits. Eventually I returned to work and as I reflect on that, I don't know how I got through it to be honest. I'm doing everything that I was told to do. I was getting plenty of rest and making sure I took my medication. I was looking forward to June and the beginning of Summer. Then May came. My father who had battle prostate cancer for nearly 20 years passed at our childhood home.

So now, I'm healing from an illness that took over my entire life last Fall and I'm mourning the passing of my father, all while supporting our family through the grief process. Preparing for my father's funeral, looking at the pictures filled with so many memories, writing the obituary and helping to plan the repast was a lot. Mind you I'm at a new school, it's near the end of the school year and I'm exhausted, I'm depressed and I'm tired.

Healing, for me has looked like waking up and realizing how different my life feels. Healing doesn't arrive the way we expect it to. It's not neatly packaged and it doesn't exist without other obstacles or adverse situations occurring. Healing is a process that happens in time.

Healing looks like waking up and realizing your body feels different than it used to—and learning how to listen instead of pushing through. It looks like grief showing up in ordinary moments, long after the world thinks you should be "better by now." It looks like wanting to move forward, but finding that your spirit needs more time than your plans allow.

More time to just lay in the bed. More time to look outside at the trees for hours. More time to miss your father's presence. More time to wonder, "What's next for me?" "Who am I now?"

We're often taught to measure healing by progress. By how quickly we return to normal. By how much we can do again. But healing doesn't ask for performance. It asks for presence. Healing doesn't erase what happened—it teaches you how to carry it differently.

One of the big things that's come out of healing is this sense of identity and discovering who Arlinda is now and sitting with that. Sitting with God, reading the Bible, watching Faith based programming and journaling because I'm at a point in my life where things are very different.

There is also a quiet grief in healing that rarely gets named: the grief of who you were before everything changed. The life you imagined. The energy you once had. The certainty you assumed would always be there. Healing includes mourning that version of yourself without trying to recreate it.

I remember watching Super Soul Sunday years ago and I heard Pastor Michael Beckwith say, "Pain pushes until vision pulls." I try not to recreate who I was because that version of me doesn't exist and maybe that's part of the process. Because healing looks like trust rebuilding in small ways. Trust in your body. Trust in your instincts. Trust that even though life didn't unfold the way you expected, it is still worthy of being lived fully—just differently.