Becoming Human: A Collection of Vignettes on Grief, Connection, and Longing

By Natalie Kathryn Sanchez and Edita Birschbach

Becoming Human explores the essence of grief and its evolutionary nature. Through cherished childhood memories, deep reflections, and current life experiences, Natalie Sanchez provides an introspective commentary on loss. This collection of vignettes features cor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889267737

Book preview

Introduction

When I finished writing The Language of Loss, I found myself face-to-face with an unexpected uneasiness toward writing.

I had just unearthed my trauma in 286 pages before the long, dark years had even set in. My grief was still wrapped in fresh wounds. Writing about my loss was cathartic, honest, and liberating in its own way, but with passing years, I’d stare at my untouched book on the shelf, the woman in the mirror evolving into different, unfamiliar shades of grief. There were new people in my life. New ink on my skin. Places and changes that transformed me from the girl who wrote The Language of Loss to the woman in these pages.

As I returned to my life post-publishing, the new challenge was learning to support myself beyond writing. I had to face my grief beyond the page. Pouring myself into organized chapters gave me a sense of control and purpose; accepting that the final chapter had quite literally closed came with a new dimension of grief. I felt as though I was shedding a part of myself. Letting go. Mourning the days my complex emotions had somewhere tangible to live.

At first, I took a break from writing altogether. In many ways I didn’t even understand how I had described my experience in the throes of my heartache. I was writing to survive. Unlike the shock and post-traumatic adrenaline that drove me to cope with words, I suddenly felt apathetic. Empty. Strange. The hopeful narrative of The Language of Loss seemed like it had been written by a different person entirely. Finding spiritual connections and synchronicities became more enigmatic as I tried to make sense of this reality: Published words are permanent, and I am not. Everything about me is rapidly evolving.

For years, I lived in survival mode, unable to escape the protective mechanisms I developed after sudden, traumatic loss. Everything was shrouded in urgency and fragility—a feeling that death was imminent and at any moment, my life would fall apart all over again. Oftentimes, my nervous system completely took over, falling into the horrors of what my body could never forget: losing my father and growing up in the shadows of his absence.

While the stories in The Language of Loss will always reflect the depths of my grief, they only encapsulated the first year of my experience. Upon its release, I was just breaking the surface of my identity, navigating what healing would mean going forward. During this writing hiatus, I gave myself permission to not create anything at all. I needed to rest my brain, heart, and soul on trust that inspiration would find me again when it was time. I was twenty years old. My grief was just beginning.

Talking about losing my dad suddenly became difficult and uncomfortable—vocalizing my emotions out loud rather than on paper was an entirely different language. When suppressed memories arrived through everyday triggers, the openness that once came so naturally to me seemed like a distant outline of a past self. I took refuge in my instruments, often hovering somewhere between loneliness and solitude. As we all do, I craved intimacy and deep understanding. I wanted to be truly known, not by my grief, but as a person being changed by it.

Only recently have I emerged from the numbness that kept me intact for many years. Now, I’m falling apart in different ways, mostly by giving myself space to feel, with and without words.

Healing oscillates through cycles of both doubt and certainty, but the greatest comfort I’ve experienced has always been within myself. Through yoga, biking, meditation, and music, I began coming to the surface. I rediscovered I had a breath, a body, a way of moving beyond my mind. As feeling returned behind my eyes, I started to experience the magic of inhales, sweating, sobbing, laughing, and the type of visceral listening that pulls your stomach to another person. I began to notice things again.

Although not a memoir, Becoming Human is a story. A recollection of memories and dreams. Purposely structured in vignettes rather than chapters, fragmented in the way we experience life. Grief remains the common thread between these pages, but among them are layers of other themes: longing, connection, growth, and love. I needed to leave space for the paradox: Grief is greater than me, intertwined with emotions beyond our language, and I am so much more than my grief. I am a walking vessel of experiences, thoughts, feelings, and memories. We all are.

Becoming Human does not imply we were ever in another state—everything we do and feel is innately human.