Winter at the Door: creatively working through grief

Last winter, I was going through an emotional grieving process due to the recent ending of a long-term relationship and I worked on a creative project to help me through it. The finished project (a video) ultimately became too vulnerable-feeling for me to share publicly but here are some frames to give you a sense of it.
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In late fall and winter, I was in the height of my grief. My days and nights were filled with tears and a dizzying cycle through the five stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In addition to the assistance of my healers and loved ones, I knew I needed to create art in order to constructively work through all of these emotions and so I began by writing a poem to capture what this process and season was like for me. I had had this strong metaphoric imagery coming to me that I had closed the door to the past and was now just sitting at this door processing all of these big feelings. I titled the poem, Winter at the Door.

The imagery was so strong, I wanted to expand beyond the poem. I scouted out a good door to use and enlisted a friend and creative collaborator (huge thanks to Candace Roberts) to shoot photos of me acting out the poem in front of the door. With hundreds of photos to sort through, I set out to learn the intricacies of iMovie and then spent hours upon hours editing these photos into a stop-motion video set to an audio track of me reading the poem. This was a labor of love and grief. When waves of grief arose within me, I welcomed them and used them as fuel to keep going on this project.

Acting out the poem at the door and having this witnessed was a powerful, embodied experience and then watching it come to life on the screen gave me an important bird's eye perspective on all I had been working through emotionally. A part of the poem addressed my propensity for rumination and I chose to show this via a flashback montage of sweet and loving photos from this several-year-long relationship. This part was both difficult and beautiful to work on -- although it was painful to sift through these photos, it felt like a way to deeply honor this love while at the same time, call myself out on my patterns and the ways in which I still needed to grow and heal.

Every piece of this project was a salve for me: it kept me focused and moving forward through challenging days, it gave me a chance to express and be witnessed in all aspects of this grief, and it allowed me to honor this painful story of love, learning, and loss. I wanted to share the process of this project even though I'm not sharing the video itself because it is a perfect example of the power of creative expression as a tool for growth and healing. I am beyond grateful to have had this tool available to me during this time.