Lessons from a Suitcase

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Hi Friend

Last week I asked you this:

What has surprised you most about your own grief? Was the loss a death, or something else entirely? And were you surprised by how much it felt like grief when it arrived?

Your responses were heartfelt and inspiring.

Grief from not being in the right place yet. Grief from our deceased loved ones missing the moments of people they loved. Anger that arrived out of nowhere and caught them completely off guard. Grief from who they thought they would be by now.

Every single one of those responses told me the same thing. We are walking around carrying losses we never gave ourselves permission to call grief. And that unnamed grief is heavy.

Here is my answer.

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What surprised me most about grief

I used to think grief was death. A person leaves the world and you grieve them. Clean and defined and at least societally acknowledged.

What nobody told me was that grief shows up everywhere.

The grief of not becoming who you thought you would be by a certain age. The grief of a job ending. A friendship dissolving. A version of yourself you quietly let go of without ceremony.

But the grief that hit me hardest, the one that took me years to even name, was the closing of my company Earth's Berries.

For those of you who found me through that chapter, you already know. For those who didn't, Earth's Berries was built around eco-conscious living. I sourced soap berries from India, brought them here, taught people a different way to live and care for their homes and the planet. I put my whole heart and soul into that work. It was not just a company. It was a mission. An extension of who I was at every level.

And I couldn't make it work financially. Oddly enough people needing your product once a year is not a sustainable business model :)

The company closed. And it nearly bankrupted my family. I am still paying those debts today.

What did I do? What any exhausted entrepreneur who desperately needs security does. I walked 800km across Spain hoping the answer would find me somewhere on the road. And when I got home the answer was very clear. I wanted a paycheque. I wanted to feel safe. So I threw myself into a management job I hated and worked 70 hours a week doing it.

The next few years I spent floundering.

It wasn't until about a year ago that I finally let myself feel what closing that business had actually done to me. How much it hurt. How deeply it disappointed me. How much, as an entrepreneur by heart, it made me afraid to try again. That fear had quietly frozen me. Every time I thought about building something new I could feel the ghost of that loss sitting on my chest.

It took a 10 day silent retreat for me to finally stop moving long enough to grieve it properly. To sit with all of it. The debt, the disappointment, the fear, the grief of a mission that was my heart walking around in the world and not surviving.

And something cracked open.

The seeds of Unearth Your Yes and The Crone Stories started to develop after that retreat, and with some time alone on the road recently the idea came fully into vision. Not despite of the grief. Because of it.

Fully allowing myself to feel the loss of Earth's Berries was what finally made room for what I am building now. Grief, when we stop running from it, clears the ground for what comes next. What grief might you be running from?

That is what surprised me most about grief. It wasn't just for the dead. It was for everything I had loved and lost and never properly mourned.

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Grief taught me to let go of what I couldn't keep anyway. Six weeks living out of a suitcase taught me the same thing in a completely different way.

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The view from a suitcase

I have been away from home for six weeks.

When you live out of a suitcase for that long something starts to happen quietly. The noise of your regular life falls away and you begin to see things you couldn't see when you were standing in the middle of them.

Here is what six weeks taught me.

You need a third of what you think you need.

I left home with what felt like the bare minimum and discovered it was still too much. We accumulate things the same way we accumulate roles and obligations and identities. Gradually, without noticing, until one day you look around and wonder how it got so heavy.

Most of it is not serving you. Most of it is just familiar.

Fewer decisions is actually freedom.

When your wardrobe is a suitcase and your choices are limited, something unexpected happens. You stop spending energy on things that don't matter. You have more of yourself left for the things that do.

Women over 40 are making hundreds of small decisions every single day. What to wear, what to cook, what to keep, what to let go of, who to show up for and how. Every one of those decisions costs something. Simplifying the small ones quietly gives you back energy for the ones that actually change your life.

What you actually miss says everything.

I waited to feel the pull of home. The pull of my things, my routines, my familiar surroundings. And it didn't come.

What I missed was simple and it was only one thing. My people. My relationships. The specific feeling of being known by someone who has known you for a long time.

Not a single object. Not a routine. Not a role.

Just the people.

Sit with that for a moment. Because if you stripped your life back to what you would actually miss, what would be left? That list is probably shorter than you think. And it is probably the only list that matters.

Coming home you see your life as an outsider.

This is the one I want you to remember.

When you have been away long enough, coming home is like walking into someone else's life for a moment. You see the clutter you stopped seeing. You feel the weight of obligations you had normalised. You notice what lifts you and what quietly drains you in a way you couldn't when you were inside it every day.

That outsider view is extraordinarily valuable. And you don't have to travel for six weeks to find it.

Sometimes it comes from a long walk. A weekend away. A silent morning before anyone else wakes up. Getting above the noise of your own life long enough to see it clearly.

That is what I hold space for women to do. Not to blow up their lives. Not to make dramatic changes. Just to get high enough above the noise to finally see what's actually there.

And then decide, consciously this time, what stays.

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Your question for next week

Here is your question to carry this week:

If you came home tomorrow and saw your life as an outsider, what would you finally give yourself permission to let go of?

Sit with it. Reply if something moves in you. I read everything. Next week I will answer it myself.

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On Wednesday I am dropping a free guide specifically about decluttering your life after 40. Not just your closet. Watch for it.

In the meantime if you want to start getting above the noise before then, the five questions are waiting for you at karenamy.com/free-guide

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The life we don't examine stays the life we didn't choose.

In love, light and laughter — Karen