#10 The people who shape us
Honouring the impact of others in our lives
Hello angels,
If you’re up for it, I’d love to keep exploring grief with you. I know it’s not an easy feeling to sit with, but I’m starting to believe that facing it openly makes more space for love.
If this topic feels too much for you at the moment, I encourage you to return when it feels more manageable. I’d like to dedicate this essay to two very special people— Claire Connell and Michelle Walls.
The people who shape us
Late last year, I went to my beautiful friends’ wedding. The whole day—filled with speeches, sentimentality, and community—felt deeply intense. Not in a bad way, but as if we were all being collectively cracked open. During the speeches, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. The next day, one friend told me they’d experienced a big release. Like a sneeze. Another said it felt like it brought up a year’s worth of tears.
It made me think about why weddings feel so emotionally intense. Why they open our hearts in ways everyday life rarely does. I think it’s because we often reserve our deepest acknowledgments for milestone moments like weddings, birthdays, or funerals. As if we need an occasion to express the impact someone has had on us.
I have always loved speeches. For my 21st, I insisted that every person at my 20-girl lunch go around and share what they loved about me. Now, as I plan my upcoming 30th, I find myself most excited for that moment again. The one where people speak from the heart, where words bring us closer together.
Even the process of writing a speech feels cathartic. It asks you to sit with the reality of someone’s impact on you. To truly acknowledge their presence in your life.
A season of grief and love
Grief and love have been running themes for me this month. It started with the sudden, tragic death of a friend from work. It tipped my world sideways, forcing me to sit with loss. It’s been a while since someone in my life has died, but grief has been present in other ways. Last year, I went through a painful breakup. Knowing my usual pattern—moving on too quickly, only to repeat the same mistakes—I sought help from an embodied counsellor. I was ready to feel it, as they say, but I knew I needed support to learn how.
For many of us, feeling isn't something that feels safe or natural (thanks to the patriarchal, capitalist society we’ve grown up in). It's something we have to actively teach ourselves. Slowly, gently, and with practice. This counsellor helped me come into contact with the feeling of grief. For me, grief feels like a pulsing, gripping sensation in my heart, as tears press their way out. It’s a feeling I’m getting more comfortable with.
Unknowingly, by allowing myself to fully feel the grief of my breakup—and later, the loss of my work friend—I opened the gates for older, unprocessed grief to surface. Memories and emotions I hadn’t even realised I’d buried began to rise.
Remembering Michelle (or Shell)
I’m in a really exciting (and slightly wild) chapter of my life at the moment. Technically unemployed, but pouring myself into building a business that feels like a true extension of me. At the same time, I’ve started studying things that light me up. Regenerative entrepreneurship and Gestalt therapy—exploring the intersection of self-awareness, relational intelligence, and creating businesses that actually value people and the planet over profit. I’m able to do all of this because of an inheritance left to me by someone very special who died when I was 14. A gift that, in so many ways, is still shaping my path.
Lately, I keep looking at photos of Michelle with me, my siblings, my Mum and Dad. She wasn’t an official parent, but she was part of our family and helped raise me. My sister recently reminded me that she moved into our house when I was born to support my Mum and Dad. She never had children of her own, so we were her kids. She picked me up from preschool, came to my dance concerts, sat with me watching DVDs. Held my hand and gave me loving hugs, kisses and words.
She became very sick and died of cancer when I was 14. And it’s only now that I’m realising how much of me is shaped by her. My independence. My humor. My warmth.
Grief in the body
For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried tension in my chest. Sometimes it feels like tightness, like I can’t get a full breath. Sometimes like a constriction in my voice and throat, sometimes like asthma and coughing. It got so bad last year that I sought help from an acupuncturist. She was the first person to share that grief as an emotion is stored in our lungs. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how emotions live in the body. But deep down, I think I knew there was something lodged in my heart, in my body, waiting to be felt.
The recent death of my work friend brought that knowing back to the surface.
Learning to let grief move
I’ve been curious about Reiki for a while. A form of energy healing that helps clear emotional blockages in the body. My interest piqued over the past year after experiencing a powerful energetic awakening (see my Rewilding series). My friend Helly has been practicing for some time, and last month, with everything going on, I finally booked a session.
As she moved her hands over me, a familiar tightness rose in my chest. I told her, and she gently encouraged me to breathe through it. With each exhale, I softened. Slowly, without force, in the safety of her presence, the emotion surfaced—grief, deep and raw.
Michelle kept coming to mind, and I spoke her name out loud. I cried from the depths of my lungs, from a place in my body I hadn’t accessed in years.
And then, as Helly moved her hands down my torso, my legs, my feet—I felt relief. Like something had moved. In the days and weeks since, the grief has continued to rise and move through me.
Love as a living acknowledgment
Since this experience, I’ve started talking about Michelle more. In the opening class of my Gestalt course, when we were asked to share who had supported us to be there, I said her name. I’ve told friends about her—people who know my family so well, yet had never heard about her before.
It feels good to speak about Michelle’s brilliance and the impact she’s had on me. I just wish I had told her while she was still here.
It’s made me reflect on how often we hesitate, holding back words that could bring warmth and recognition in real time. The kind of acknowledgment that goes beyond a casual love you or you’re great!—the deeply personal kind, the this is who you are to me kind.
Being witnessed in our impact, and offering that to others, is one of the most profound ways we can connect and support each other. I’ve been thinking that maybe the weight of grief—the shock, the heaviness, the regrets—wouldn’t hit so hard if we practiced this more often. If we told people how much they matter before loss forces us to reckon with it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections in the comments, too.
Emma / Pooch x