It’s been over 8 months since my life changed in ways I didn’t know it could. Losing Teagan changed me. It challenged me to my very core. From the very, very beginning I promised myself I would do whatever I had to do to be “ok”. I wanted to know how to cope in healthy ways. I needed to know if I was ever going to not feel hopeless and helpless. If I was going to find a will and a want to LIVE again, not just survive. It felt completely impossible those first weeks and months.

I feel like I’ve kept my promise to myself. I’ve done everything I know to do to be “ok” again. I’ve been to therapy, I’ve read, prayed, journaled, meditated, walked, screamed, cried. I’ve been gentle with myself and I’ve pushed myself when I recognized I was spiraling. It’s a journey that I’m continuing to embark on, and from what I hear, it’s a lifelong journey. I’ll continue to be open to new things and ideas to help me along the way. So far there has been one particular thing that has been a huge, huge help and blessing to me, and now I’m pursuing it in a new way.

For about 18 months now, I’ve been a member of a program called Self Coaching Scholars, by the Life Coach School. Basically from the beginning, I was completely fascinated by Brooke Castillo and her methods. I knew fairly soon after joining her program that I might want to pursue a life coaching career. It was always in my mind, but things never seemed to align just right and I never chose to commit to becoming a certified coach.

After Teagan left, I put everything down for a while. It wasn’t even anything I could think about. I would try to listen or get back into a course or a workshop, but I just couldn’t. It was an interesting part of my grief journey. It took some time and I think it was about December that I jumped back into my Scholars program. I started receiving coaching again and I started to implement the principles and skills I had been taught. I began to feel things shifting. I was gaining deeper understanding of my own grief, of the way my brain was processing my grief and the way my thoughts were either helping or hindering me. I was able to answer a lot of my own questions through the skills I was being taught. Then, the interest I had previously had in pursuing a coaching certification and career really, really started to perk up. The little tug on my heart just wouldn’t go away. Each time I’d try to tell myself I couldn’t possibly make it work, I’d get something proving me wrong and pushing me forward. I truly believe this is part of God’s plan for my life and I have felt Teagan at work encouraging me and pushing me to follow through.

Finally, in January, I committed to the Life Coach School Coach Certification Program. My classes started in April and it’s been nothing short of amazing. You know how some times things just feel so right, so divinely orchestrated? That’s what this feels like. Learning to help others in the same way I’ve been helped and coached through my own grief, relationship struggles and other areas of my life is so fulfilling and exciting to me. There’s so much to be learned and explored and the thought of building a career in this lights my fire.

As I would lay awake in bed those first few weeks crying, talking to God and talking to Teagan, I would whisper promises of figuring out how to help, how to inspire and how to breath hope into other humans if I ever got to a place of being ok again. I feel like this is part of that promise and I am so excited for this next season on my life. I have come to believe that we can find purpose in our pain if we truly search for it and this next step in my life is FULL of purpose and love.