The Silence of the Stuck Place

The frost on the window of my office is currently forming a pattern that looks remarkably like a jagged ribcage, and I have been staring at it for exactly 11 minutes while my client, a man who lost his brother 231 days ago, stares at his own hands. There is a specific kind of silence that exists in a grief counselor’s office. It isn’t the peaceful quiet of a library or the expectant hush of a theater before the curtain rises. It is heavy, like wet wool. And today, that weight is amplified by the fact that my car keys are currently sitting on the passenger seat of my locked Subaru in the parking lot. I can see them from here. They are mocking me with their shiny, metallic indifference. I am supposed to be the one who helps people navigate the ‘stuck’ places of their lives, yet here I am, physically and metaphorically barred from my own vehicle.

Open-Ended Renovation

I’ve spent 21 years listening to people try to ‘close’ things. Closure is a term I’ve grown to loathe. It sounds so tidy, like shutting a book or clicking a pen. In reality, loss is an open-ended renovation that never quite reaches the final inspection. We are constantly trying to figure out how to live in a house where one of the main supports has been ripped out. Sometimes we try to hide the gap with a rug, and sometimes we try to rebuild the wall entirely, but the architecture is forever altered. We are different people after the collapse, and the frustration of trying to return to the ‘original floor plan’ is what drives most of the suffering I see.

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Yesterday, I spoke with a woman who felt guilty because she didn’t cry at her father’s funeral. She felt like she had failed the test of mourning. I told her that grief is less like a waterfall and more like the slow, grinding movement of a glacier.

It’s 41 degrees in my office right now because the heater is finicky, and I realized as she was talking that we treat emotions like they are on a timer. We expect them to perform. But loss doesn’t perform. It sits in the corner and waits. It waits until you’re at the grocery store trying to decide between two brands of olive oil, or it waits until you realize you’ve locked your keys in your car and you suddenly feel like the entire world is conspiring to keep you shivering on a sidewalk.

The Physical Grounding of Healing

There is a peculiar intersection between our physical surroundings and our internal landscapes. When everything inside feels like it’s crumbling, we often look to the outside to provide some sense of stability. We want the ground beneath us to be solid, even if the heart is not. I often think about the physical reality of our homes during these transitions. When you are rebuilding a life, the very surfaces you walk on matter. It’s about the tactile sensation of grounding yourself.

I remember a client who decided to redo her entire downstairs area because the old carpet held the scent of a life she no longer recognized. She reached out to LVP Floors to help her find something that felt like a new beginning, something hard and permanent and real. It wasn’t just about aesthetics; it was about changing the literal foundation so her feet could find a new way to move. We underestimate how much the ‘where’ of our lives dictates the ‘how’ of our healing.

The Freedom in Being Stuck

I am Bailey M.-C., and I am currently a hypocrite. I tell my clients that it’s okay to feel out of control, yet I spent 11 minutes this morning frantically pulling on a locked door handle as if my sheer willpower could pass through solid glass. I wanted to be in control of my schedule. I wanted to be the professional who is never late. But the universe has a way of reminding us that we are always one small mistake away from being a spectator in our own lives. This frustration-this localized, sharp annoyance-is often a proxy for the much larger, unnamable frustrations we carry. It is easier to be mad at a lockout service that says they’ll arrive in 31 minutes than it is to be mad at the entropy of the universe.

The Value of Pain

There is a contrarian angle to this that most of my colleagues find uncomfortable: I don’t think we should try to ‘feel better.’ Feeling better is a byproduct, not a goal. When you make feeling better the goal, you end up suppressing the very data your soul is trying to give you. If you are sad, there is a 100% chance it is because something you loved is gone. That sadness is the tribute you pay to the love. To try to get rid of the sadness is to try to get rid of the evidence of the love. I’d rather live in a house with a slanted floor and a leaky roof if it meant I got to keep the memories of who lived there with me.

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‘Because it hurts,’ she said. And I told her, ‘Of course it hurts. You’re being reshaped.’

The Seams of Strength

Now, as I watch the locksmith’s van pull into the lot-which took him exactly 41 minutes, by the way-I feel a strange sense of disappointment. Once he opens that door, I have to go back to being the version of myself that has it all figured out. I have to leave this liminal space of the ‘locked out’ and go back into the ‘locked in.’ There is a freedom in the mistake. There is a freedom in standing in the cold and admitting that you messed up, that you are vulnerable to the whims of a forgotten piece of metal.

We spend so much energy trying to avoid these moments of friction. We want seamless lives, seamless floors, seamless transitions. But the seams are where the strength is. The seams are where two different pieces of reality are stitched together. My client in the office finally looks up from his hands. He sees the frost on the window, the same ribcage pattern I was looking at. He says, ‘It looks like it’s breaking.’ I look at the frost, then at my car keys, then back at him. ‘No,’ I say. ‘It looks like it’s holding on.’

I’ll pay the locksmith his $51, I’ll drive home, and I’ll probably forget my keys again at some point. And when I do, I hope I have the sense to just stand there and breathe in the cold air, acknowledging that being stuck is just another way of being present.