I Carry My Grief to a Grave in Nepal

I gathered every bone of my past, kissed each wound goodbye, and crossed oceans to mourn the life I used to have.

In this quiet darkness my season for grieving has arrived, I don my finest black gown, standing on my grave with flowers to honor the death of my former life. Resting in pieces now are the disillusions of my aimless relationship, stable income, and phantom luxuries. Nice while it lasted, but eventually the truth reveals nothing more than a constrictive chain masquerading as love and a claustrophobic life that had left me hollow. 

After a 19‑hour flight from New York, I arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal—the day before the Holi festival, a celebration famous for its bright colors, parades of music, and playful spirit. I had forgotten about the annual celebration marking the start of new beginnings and unwittingly found myself stepping into an unknown path on this very same day, but as always in the cosmic game of life, coincidence is just a disguise. 

Despite the colorful ritual, Holi is not a festival of sweetness—it is a reckoning. It demands you drag your ego, your pride, your need to control by the hair and throw them into the flames. Holika is not some distant demoness; she is every snarling voice inside you that clings, manipulates, hungers, and possesses. Burn her. Watch her scream. Prahlad is what’s left—the part of you that kneels to nothing, that loves without chains. Holi is the fire that strips you bare, dares you to let everything false die, and asks: Who are you without your illusions?

I am no more afraid of this ritual darkness than I am of a passionate and wild lover. She lures me in with her siren song, and when the time comes for sacrifice, I adhere to her call without question, knowing the divine self waits for me just beyond the veil of my worldly depressions. 

I walk willingly into the fire, knowing ashes make fertile grounds. 

The purging has already taken hold, and my self‑righteous sense of monkhood is crumbling down around me in the foothills of Kathmandu. The pulling away of all things self‑satisfying and distractive causes an upheaval of dormant emotions and memories as they avalanche to the forefront of the maladaptive psyche. Like a feral cat that’s been captured against her will, I leave claw marks in everything I’ve been meant to let go of.

This vomiting up of all things rusted on my soul is only a catalyst to my true objective: to conduct my life with honor, to honor myself and to honor my past grievances. Without fear and distractions, I use my mind and my actions to honor the pain—and to use that pain to create something good within myself and within the world. Grief, when alchemized, becomes the most potent medicine in the world.

I’m free now, and there’s nobody in my space whose reflection I need to adapt myself to satisfy. Aloneness is not a grim waiting room, as those with weak character fear it to be; it’s an invitation to know thyself so that when one finally chooses to partner again, they are walking into a world of Holi color and not a void.

It’s easy to pity the lack of integrity within so many whose codependent needs result in them trenching through life, body to body, never knowing who they are or even the other but I have nothing but compassion for that fear, for I know it well from my past. Without someone to help shield us from confronting our own truths, desires, and especially darkness, we risk buckling under that weight of illusion, and prefer to stay blind. 

Eventually the loneliness becomes all consuming, partner or not, while the soul’s calling lays rotting and unrecognizable from these suppressions. A remorseful way to find oneself at the end of life.

Courage is understandably difficult to find for those who have never known their true self independent of all distractions, not because they can’t, but because they will never cease the opportunity to do so out of fear of what they might find. At its best, it’s ignorance. At its worst, a deep rooted insecurity and a shielded disdain for one’s inability to live a fulfilling life on one’s own. 

There is something pure in the spirit when it is emancipated from relationships and worldly responsibilities, that’s when the mask comes off and transformation takes place. A leveling up in life is nearly impossible with that false sense of comfort and love which, without its shiny cover, is just an empty space in the soul filled with temporary lust. Who are we with no one to answer to? Who are we without the labels society gives us? 

The long winded path some chose requires courage to face our inner storms, and while I have found purpose and strength in my own transformation, I understand the varied journeys and the limitations within each person and that not everyone is destined or desiring for a deep knowing of self. 

But for me, I must make good of every bad thing that has ever happened to me. Grief is an old mentor of mine, and I know deeply from my past the consequences of burying it in the ground with distractions and validations. Grief sharpens its teeth while you think you’ve moved on between another person’s legs, and when you least expect it, it comes back with a vengeance to tear you to shreds—maybe not for months, maybe not for years—but grief keeps its promise to every person on earth: ”honor my presence, or standby as I dissolve you into nothing” it whispers to those who know its name. 

Grief doesn’t die in someone else’s bed, or with a world of distractions, and without time to reflect on patterns and relearn, we become stuck in a cycle of fraudulent self‑satisfaction.

The easy option is to choose the path of ignorance and risk hurting those who will love me—the temptation to retreat into numbness, even if it harms those who care, is always there—but I choose a path of building strength, resilience, and finding peace within every atom of my being so that when the time comes, I will have a clear vision to choose a partner and path as poetic and passionate as me to join in on this divine dance of life.

In this process of peeling back the layers of my wounds to reveal the sweet nectar of bliss that was mine before those with none tried to take it from me, I have already found so much beauty.

If I think on the reality of this life I have risked so much to create, or the present moment of self‑actualization, how could I possibly be sad—how could I think that my life should be anything but this? Feelings of bliss, deep laughter, beauty, smiling and generous faces surround me on uncovered lands, as if God themselves is staring me down into my deepest wound and asking—do you believe me yet? Do you see how only those willing to take risks alone are rewarded divinity’s highest honors?

I have forgiven all that has led me here but now vow to reject those in their lack of depth for living who wound me with shallow love. Instead I celebrate my being and dance in the streets with joy, my passion for life as vibrant colors are thrown above and as smiles fill the abundant spaces around me.

The time to retreat into a cocoon of nourishment has now arrived to guide me to be birthed again with sound mind, body, soul. I’m in no rush, I’m exactly where I need to be. 

The present moment is all I want and is the only home I will ever need. I am welcomed back to myself again and again in the recognition and honoring of my now —even through the billowing depths of pain.

I am connected to and deeply in love with life; I have always been, despite it all. My trust in source and purpose is growing steady with every step I take back to the home inside my heart.

I am a living and breathing story of triumph and beauty. I am the book of love I have always longed to read, written with chapters of sadness and darkness, knowing every hero’s journey has its jester who will attempt to steal the crown.

It is not lost on me that it takes courage to be a woman in this way, to live and love without fear. I don’t have to ask God for anything because ultimately I am everything I have ever wanted and I know how to live a life of my own inspiration.  

I always have been and always will be that girl, even when the strength to say so is temporarily lost in the chaos of grief. Nothing can change me from being unapologetically myself—shaped by struggle and ever evolving.

I am raw, authentic, and adventurous, defined not by perfection but by the lessons learned through my flaws and an accumulation of all the beautiful things I have collected through my journeys around the world. 

I am all at once the divine comedy and the divine tragedy. I am a paradox: ever-changing and far from complete, yet always in pursuit of truth. I will claw my fresh skin out from under the dirt again.

I am on a mission to bring purpose to pain, life to the mundane; I am her alone, me myself and I.