Journal Entry • Ella O
For a while now, I’ve held my words quietly.
Not because there was nothing to say — but because what I’ve been living through hasn’t always been ready to be witnessed in the light.
This space — my Journal — was never about performance. It was always a place of pause, of processing, of presence. A place where I could meet myself in language, and in doing so, invite others to meet themselves too.
Today I’m returning to it.
Not just to write again — but to recommit.
To the practice of capturing what cannot always be completed.
To the process of telling the truth, even when it’s still unfolding.
To the art of sharing not just the light, but the ache that often brings it into sharper focus.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with the continuing integration of grief.
Not as a one-time loss.
Not as something linear.
But as a rhythm that keeps echoing through the days and years, sometimes so subtly I don’t notice until I suddenly do.
Grief is not an event I survived — it’s a presence I live with.
In the moments I forget, it taps me gently.
In the moments I remember, it floods through — not to drown me, but to remind me of just how deeply I have loved.
There are expressions from other languages that hold this truth with more elegance than English has ever managed.
In French, they don’t say I miss you.
They say: "Tu me manques" — You are missing from me.
In Xhosa, they say: "As'phelelanga" — We are incomplete when speaking of those who have crossed over.
These phrases don’t attempt to resolve grief. They don’t try to wrap it up with a neat bow.
They honour the ongoingness of it.
The shape of a person whose outline lives in us still.
The heartbeat that, though stilled, still echoes.
We say that death is a certainty.
And yet somehow, grieving still surprises us.
Its timing.
Its shape.
The way it creeps up or crashes in, months or years after the ceremony.
The way it morphs — from raw ache to subtle longing to quiet presence… then sometimes all three at once.
And here’s the truth I keep returning to:
✨ To honour our grief as continual is to honour our love as unending.
✨ To give ourselves grace in this process is to reclaim our full humanness.
There’s no expiration date on missing someone.
There’s no timeline to “being okay.”
There’s only the breath — the moment — the choice to stay tender even when the world asks for our quick return to productivity.
So this is my recommitment:
To writing.
To truth.
To the breath I hold, then let go.
To the losses that still live inside me — not as wounds to fix, but as evidence of love that never ends.
And to you — if you’re carrying something tender —
Let this be a reminder:
You are allowed to grieve on your own timeline.
You are allowed to be both healing and whole.
You are allowed to feel their absence as a presence still shaping who you are becoming.
Because love doesn’t die.
And neither does the need to speak about it.
I’m here.
Still breathing.
Still becoming.
Still committed to sharing what moves through me — so you might find your own reflection in the softness, too.
With breath and with love,
Ella xo