I DIDN’T CRY AT MY DAD’S FUNERAL.

I’M NOT SORRY.

I was a stranger there. Surrounded by weeping people, I couldn’t muster a single tear.

Me, a deep feeler who cries at beautiful sunrises and sad commercials and friends’ weddings, who cries at least three times in every weekly therapy session, who cries remembering Taylor Swift song lyrics; me, stone-faced and dry-eyed at the funeral of my father.

Since my dad died, I’ve been on a journey of radical healing, self-love, and acceptance. My primary focus has been working through the trauma I experienced in my childhood and teenage years. I’ve done intensive counselling and therapy, taken time away from my job when I was overcome with grief, consulted with numerous specialists and experts, and have given everything I have to this work. I have cried enough tears to fill my own personal ocean. The work has been excruciating and necessary, debilitating, empowering, . It is the work of my life.

Writing has always been a tool I’ve used to process the work. But NEVER BETTER was something different altogether. It was all I could do to write the words down once I started this project. For months, memories flooded me and words poured out. I wrote the first poem in January 2023 and published the collection in August, just seven months later.

The collection is somehow both intimately personal and widely relatable at once. It visits the despair, the loneliness, the confusion, the pain, and the guilt that blooms where love should be but isn’t. It makes room for anger, shame, and blame. It represents every time I cried for my dad before he died. It reflects my complicated grief journey for a dad who I’d already been dead to for a decade.

I wrote NEVER BETTER for me. But if it resonates with you, then I wrote it for you, too. Please know that you’re not alone. Please know that healing is not linear, grief is complex, and your journey to acceptance is your own.

Thank you for being here.

Love,