I’m choosing me. I’m choosing to be different. I can be of service in a whole different way when I am willing to be rigorously honest with myself.”

What happens when your home starts falling apart at the exact moment your life is being reconstructed from the inside out? In this deeply personal episode, I share how renovating my home became an unexpected metaphor for my journey through grief and back to authentic living.

The timing couldn’t have been more profound. Shortly after placing my husband in memory care due to advancing dementia, contractors arrived to replace leaky bedroom windows we’d waited nine months to fix. What they discovered beneath the surface was extensive dry rot – years of hidden damage that perfectly mirrored what was happening in my husband’s brain. Someone mentioned this parallel to me, and while interesting at the time, I was too deep in fresh grief to fully process the symbolism.

Fast forward to this year, as I continued the home renovation process. The discovery of black mold in my husband’s old office – soaking wet insulation, moldy drywall, ants everywhere – triggered something unexpected in my body. For three and a half days, I was overcome by the most profound loneliness I’d ever experienced. Not just sadness about my current situation, but a recognition that echoed through my entire life: “I have felt lonely even in a room full of people, feeling like I didn’t fit in, feeling like I was different.”

This wasn’t just grief about dementia – it was grief that had been accumulating for decades. As a nation, we’re grief illiterate, never fully processing the accumulated losses that shape us. Working from home during construction, unable to take calls or maintain my usual busy schedule, I had no choice but to sit with these feelings. The universe, as it often does, created exactly the circumstances I needed to face what I’d been avoiding.

What emerged from those three and a half days was profound: the realization that busyness had been my primary coping mechanism for lifelong feelings of differentness and disconnection. Food, relationships, twenty years of drinking, people-pleasing, external validation seeking – all attempts to run from, distract from, or hide from these core feelings of not belonging.

The metaphor deepened as I researched the symbolism of home renovation. Windows as the soul’s connection to the world, the exterior facade representing our public persona, the interior reflecting our inner life. As workers replaced my windows and siding – literally changing how I see the world and how the world sees me – I was simultaneously undergoing my own reconstruction.

“Now I get to be unscripted. Now I get to practice all these things that I really help other people with on a deeper layer,” I reflect, recognizing this as the world’s call for authentic living. The personas we develop in youth – the hard worker, the achiever, the people-pleaser – served their purpose but now feel exhausting and limiting.

This episode explores the deeper layers of authenticity that emerge through profound loss. The dementia diagnosis, while devastating, created space for me to finally feel what had been buried: the grief of not being truly seen, heard, or understood – often because I didn’t know how to reveal these deeper parts of myself.

I share how this process connects to my work with women who struggle with similar patterns of external validation and people-pleasing. The exhaustion of maintaining facades, the courage required to choose authenticity over performance, and the ripple effects of one person’s commitment to living unscripted.

This isn’t an episode with steps or strategies – it’s an invitation into raw honesty about the reconstruction process we all face at various life transitions. Whether you’re navigating grief, feeling stuck in old patterns, or sensing a call toward more authentic living, this conversation offers permission to examine what might be hidden behind your own beautiful exterior.

The episode concludes with my commitment to showing up unscripted and an invitation for listeners to consider their own journey toward authentic self-expression. Sometimes our greatest breakdowns become our most profound breakthroughs, and our willingness to face what’s been hidden creates space for the people we’re meant to become.

Resources:

Your FREE Forgive Yourself resources: https://brendareisscoaching.com/podcast-resource-optin/

Are you struggling with a situation or a person in your life? Wondering if you are ready to work on forgiving yourself? Take our quiz to find out your emotional IQ and how this impacts your ability to forgive: https://archetype.brendareisscoaching.com/sf/357cdc60