A week ago, I did something I had never done before.

I wrote out the day my brother died.

January 6th, 2002. I was 12. He was 16. We were in the car together.

I survived. He didn't.

For years, I was told that time would heal it. That I was lucky to be alive. That he would want me to move on.

But nobody taught a 12-year-old girl how to process guilt. Or anger. Or the kind of numbness that quietly becomes your whole personality. Or the thought that lives so deep inside you that you are ashamed to even let it form into words.

I would trade places with him.

So I buried it. All of it.

And every time I tried to talk about him, every single time, my throat would close. My chest would tighten. Like someone reaching inside my airway and gripping from the inside. I could not get the words out. I could not even get close to them without my whole body saying no. not this. not today. not ever. I would start crying uncontrollably.

That went on for over two decades.

Last Sunday, in my certification session, something shifted.

We titled the memories. We wrote them out. We read them out loud. We slowed them all the way down and breathed through them instead of running from them. And then we found a sentence. This sentence is buried inside a letter I wrote to him.

And when I sat with that sentence, I understood something I had never understood in 24 years.

I had been holding onto the pain because the pain was how I kept him close.

It was the only way I knew how to miss him. The guilt. The grief. The chest that tightened every time someone said his name. The throat that closed every time I tried to talk about him. That was my relationship with my brother. That was all I had left of him. And somewhere so deep I never even knew to question it, letting go of the hurt felt like letting go of him.

I did not know any other way to love him.

I did not know any other way to keep him.

So I carried it. For 24 years, I carried it. And I called it grief, but really it was the only relationship I knew how to have with my brother anymore.

We worked through more than just that one sentence on Sunday. We changed the language. We shifted what my nervous system had been bracing against for decades. And something in me that has been held so tight for so long finally… exhaled.

The grief is still there. He is still gone. I am not going to wrap this in something clean and tell you the work erases that because it does not.

But I am learning how to miss him in a new way now.

A way that does not cost me everything. A way that does not live in my chest like a fist. A way that lets me carry him with love instead of only carrying him with pain.

I did not know that was possible.

Now I do.

And that is everything.

This is the work I am doing. And this is the work I guide other people through. We do not skip the hard memories. We do not go around the moments that still live in your body after all this time. We go toward them. We find the belief underneath them. We change the language. And we change the hold it has on you.

If you have a memory like this, a loss, a moment your body still braces against, a sentence that has been quietly running your life for years without you even knowing it was there, this is exactly what we work through together inside my 1-on-1 coaching.

We go toward the hard thing. We find the belief buried underneath it. We change the language. And we change the hold it has on you.

I have three spots open this month for new clients.

Reply to this email with one word: BELIEF

I will send you the details, what the work looks like, how we meet, and what to expect, and we will figure out together if this is the right fit for where you are right now.

More soon on what happened in the days after, because there was still a hold on me.

PROUD OF YOU 💙

Walking with you,

Leasha

P.S. My CMS Daily Check-In

CORE: 1

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CONNECTION: 1

CREATION: 1

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