I Traveled to Escape Grief But Found Myself Instead

It wasn’t the first time I had thought about leaving. Grief, like a heavy fog, had settled over my life after the death of my mother. The days blurred together. I’d wake up in the morning feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, and then stumble through the motions of my life. Everything around me,my house, my job, my relationships felt like it was suffocating me. I needed to get away, to leave behind the world that reminded me of her absence.

I didn’t know where I was going or what I was searching for, but I knew that the act of moving would somehow ease the ache that gnawed at me constantly. So, I packed a bag, booked a flight, and set off on what I thought would be an escape from sorrow. What I didn’t realize was that my journey would not take me away from grief, but deeper into it—until, eventually, I would find a version of myself I didn’t recognize.

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The first few days were nothing more than a blur. I had arrived in a small coastal town in the far south, somewhere known for its quiet beauty. I had chosen it for its solitude; I had read online that it was the kind of place where you could lose yourself in the stillness of the sea and the wind. That was what I needed, I thought. I needed silence to drown out the voices in my head, the memories of her laughter, her voice, the way her hand felt in mine.

The town was sleepy, with cobblestone streets and a few scattered cafes serving freshly brewed coffee. I wandered through them, unsure of what I was supposed to be doing. There was no sense of urgency here. No deadlines. No expectations. Just the soft whisper of the ocean waves and the occasional greeting from a passing local.

At first, I couldn’t bring myself to look up. My eyes were cast downward, watching my feet as they moved along the uneven pavement, focusing on the rhythm of my steps. That was all I could manage at first. The weight of my grief was so heavy that I felt the need to keep it grounded in something, anything, so that it wouldn’t consume me entirely.

I found a quiet bench overlooking the sea one afternoon, and sat there in solitude for hours. The breeze lifted my hair and chilled my skin, but it was comforting. The wide open sky above seemed endless, and the gentle lap of the water against the shore felt like a balm to my soul. But the pain, no matter how hard I tried to outrun it, still clung to me, like the saltwater on my skin.

It was here, on that bench, that I learned the first lesson of my journey: **the importance of choosing quiet spaces**. When everything around you is loud and chaotic, your grief becomes even louder. It drowns out the small, quiet moments where healing can begin. I had come here because I thought I needed to run from grief, but what I really needed was space to feel it—to acknowledge it without distraction. And in this stillness, I realized that it was okay to sit with it. I didn’t need to push it away anymore.

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But I wasn’t sure how to sit with it. How do you mourn someone you loved so deeply? How do you give yourself permission to fall apart without losing yourself completely?

I found comfort in little things—small acts that reminded me I was still here. On one of my walks, I came across an old bookstore tucked into a corner of the town square. The smell of aged paper filled the air as I stepped inside. There was something incredibly grounding about it. I wandered through the aisles, not really looking for anything specific, but feeling the calm that came with the rows of books. And then, I stumbled upon a journal.

It wasn’t anything fancy. Just a simple leather-bound notebook with a faded clasp. Something about it called to me, and I decided to buy it. Maybe I could fill its pages with thoughts—thoughts I couldn’t voice to anyone else, or even to myself, aloud.

That night, as I sat by the window in the small rented apartment, the moonlight casting shadows on the walls, I opened the journal for the first time. My pen hovered over the blank page for a long while before I finally wrote the words: *I miss you, Mom*.

And then, the floodgates opened.

Tears came unexpectedly, staining the pages with ink smears. It wasn’t just the loss of her that I grieved—it was the loss of everything she represented: love, comfort, certainty. She had been the one constant in my life, the one who understood me in ways no one else could. Without her, I felt lost.

But with every word I wrote, I felt a little lighter. I realized that this trip wasn’t about escaping my grief—it was about learning how to carry it. Grief wasn’t something to run away from or fix; it was something I needed to honor. Writing became my therapy, my way of processing what had happened, and what I still didn’t understand.

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As the days passed, I found myself slowly opening up to the world around me, even though I was still in the midst of my sorrow. I would make small conversations with the locals, even though I didn’t feel like talking. I learned their names, and they learned mine. We spoke about trivial things—weather, food, and the town’s history—but there was something grounding in that. It was as though life, even in its simplest forms, was still going on around me, even if I wasn’t ready to join in fully.

One evening, as I sipped tea at a small café, I met an older woman named Clara who owned the place. She had a gentle smile and soft eyes, like she had seen enough of the world to understand its fragile nature. She noticed the journal in my hands and asked if I was a writer.

“I suppose I am,” I said, unsure of how to respond.

Clara’s eyes softened. “Writing is a good way to heal,” she said simply. “It’s not about what you write, but how you write. The act of putting your pain on the page is a way of acknowledging it. Of making peace with it.”

Her words lingered with me, and I thought about them as I walked back to my apartment that evening. I had been trying to escape my grief, but what I needed was to allow myself to experience it fully, without judgment or shame. To write it down, to give it a voice, and to let it flow through me without fear.

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Toward the end of my trip, something unexpected happened. I woke up one morning and didn’t feel quite as heavy as I had before. The sadness was still there, like a low hum in the background, but it wasn’t consuming me anymore. I had spent days reflecting, writing, and allowing myself to be still, and somewhere along the way, I had started to accept that grief wasn’t something to escape. It was something to be integrated into my life, as a part of me, but not the whole of me.

On my final day in the town, I took one last walk along the beach, the sand cool beneath my feet. The sky was painted with soft hues of orange and pink, the sun beginning its descent into the horizon. For the first time in a long while, I felt a sense of peace. Not happiness, but peace.

I had come to this place thinking I could outrun my grief. But what I had found instead was something even more profound: I had found myself. I had found a way to move through the pain, to embrace it, and to let it change me without destroying me.

As I left the small coastal town behind, I didn’t feel like I was leaving something unfinished. I felt like I was taking a part of it with me—a part that had healed, however imperfectly, in the quiet moments by the sea.

And though I still carry my grief with me, I no longer see it as a weight. It is simply a part of who I am now. And for the first time in months, I felt like I could breathe again.