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. 

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 - Be Patient With Yourself

    Patience is not something grief asks politely for, it demands it. Trauma and loss don’t move in straight lines, and neither does healing. Some days you wake up ready to try, ready to write, ready to think clearly. Other days, your mind feels foggy, your body feels heavy, and even the smallest task feels like too much. That isn’t failure. That’s grief doing what grief does.

    Grief will have you rethinking and reshaping your identity. As the clock was counting down to 2026, anxiety set in. I felt that my father's memory was slipping away along with 2025. I was leaving the year I lost him and entering a new era without him. That was hard. I've never known a year without my father. This is new territory for me. 

    Seeing Diana Ross perform on television reminded me of watching Mahogany and Lady Sings The Blues with my parents. Do you know where you're going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you? As of right now, I'm not so sure.

    I’ve had to learn that impatience with myself only adds another layer of pain. When you’ve been through illness, disruption, and loss back-to-back, your nervous system is still catching up. Yes, my nervous is still catching up, even nearly a year and a half later. Healing doesn’t follow a schedule, and creativity doesn’t respond well to pressure. Patience becomes an act of compassion—one that says, I’m allowed to move at the pace my life has set for me.

Check out my post Creative Block - Getting Back To Trying

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.