🧩Finding the Pieces: A Journey I Didn’t Know I Was On. Sex'n'fries Podcast Episode 26

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Grief has a strange way of stripping life down to its essentials. It’s not tidy or poetic in the moment. It’s messy — full of awkward hugs, old memories, and that feeling of not knowing what to do with your hands at a wake.

But somewhere between the family stories, the faded photographs, and the quiet moments alone, I started to see reflections of myself in her — my grandmother — the woman who built her life from strength, sass, and survival.

She was soft and stubborn. Fierce and flawed. And as I stood staring towards the urn, I realized… so am I.

Pieces I Didn’t Know Were Missing

It’s wild how grief can reveal not just what we’ve lost, but what we’ve buried.

Standing there, surrounded by history, I found pieces of my own:

• The courage to speak up again.

• The permission to slow down.

• The reminder that being strong doesn’t mean being silent.

Sometimes the pieces of us don’t go missing — they just get quieter while we’re busy surviving.

The Beauty in Becoming Whole Again

Healing doesn’t always announce itself. It sneaks in quietly — through the smell of coffee in an old mug, through a story told by someone who knew you before life hardened your edges.

I came home from that trip with my suitcase full of more than clothes. I carried clarity. I carried calm. I carried my own family history — and parts of me I thought were long gone.

This wasn’t a planned journey. It was a becoming.

Final Fry Thought 🍟

Sometimes, we find ourselves in the most unexpected places — in grief, in goodbye, in memories that ache and heal all at once.

We don’t always need to go searching for meaning. Sometimes, it finds us — quietly, beautifully — when we’re standing in a street, a city, a neighborhood that smells like our past, realizing we’ve always been whole… we just forgot.