As I was scrolling through social media, which I do far too often and for far too long, I came upon the image that accompanied this post that defined the word “lifequakes”. I had never heard the term lifequake before, but it immediately resonated with me as it feels like the last 3 years have been a series of lifequakes accompanied by continued Aftershocks. One would think 3 years in the Aftershocks would have stopped, but it still feels most days like the foundation of my life is always rolling, shifting, and moving sometimes in big ways and sometimes just very so slightly.

August 7, 2022 is when the big lifequake hit. It didn’t register on the Richter scale of the world, but in the Richter scale of my life the quake was off the charts. The very foundation of my life was violently shaken and nothing was spared from the impact and the damage. Life after the quake looked nothing like life before the quake did. As time went on, I learned to live with the continued aftershocks. I learned how to navigate a life that felt very fragile and felt like fault lines were continuing to be created, crack, shift, and move. I did my best to tiptoe around these fault lines to avoid falling into them.

March 28, 2023: Another big lifequake occurred when I found I had been living in toxic mold and was advised to not only move out of my apartment, but get rid of everything I owned. In a matter of weeks, the contents of 36 years of a life were thrown into a dumpster. It’s shocking how easily and quickly one’s life can be thrown away and it can leave you wondering did that life ever really exist? This lifequake violently shook my already fragile foundation for months. Each day it felt like I was bracing myself in the doorways of my life and body just waiting for the next quake to happen. This quake dropped me into a life that didn’t feel like, look like, sound like, etc my life at all.

In the almost 3 years since the first big lifequake I am still in the rebuilding phase. I am still going through the remnants of what was left behind and deciding if those are pieces I want to put back together and carry with me. There are days I am still standing the doorways of life bracing myself for the impact of the next lifequake and/or the Aftershocks. There are many days I still feel like I am wandering around in a life that isn’t mine, but slowly I am beginning to rebuild with the hopes that another lifequake won’t violently shake my life again anytime soon. Dear Universe that’s a subtle hint to you that I would appreciate a break from the lifequakes. We’ve done enough shaking over here for awhile.

I have also found beauty in the life quakes. Yes, it may be crazy to read that sentence because you may be thinking to yourself what beauty could there be from having your life violently shaken and ripped from its very foundation, but there is. I am a kinder person because I know how much simple acts of kindness mean because they carried me through some of the hardest days of my own journey. I am less judgmental of people and their choices/journeys because I know we are all doing our best walking the roads life brings us to. Some of these roads we’ve chosen and some of these roads we have been forced to walk through no fault of our own. I no longer sweat the small stuff. Waiting 15 mins for a friend to arrive no longer feels like a big deal. This is not true when it comes to driving.. I still have road rage at times. The life quakes didn’t transform that. I have people in my life now that would not be in my life had my life not quaked. They have held me through after shocks, walked alongside me in the field of damage the quakes left behind, helped me pick through the damaged pieces of my life and find myself again, and have loved me through it all.

I am not yet in a place where I can say I am grateful and/or thankful for the lifequakes I’ve experienced as I would have rather learned all the lessons I’ve learned and met the people I have any other way than going through what I have gone through. I realize my journey could have been much worse, but it also could have been a hell of a lot easier and better. What I can say though, without any hesitation, is that I wouldn’t be the person I am today had I not had these lifequakes happen. I have been transformed, molded, shaped, and created out of the broken remnants of a life that was.

As you are reading this maybe you are currently experiencing your own lifequake or maybe reading this has reminded you of a time in your life when it felt like the very foundations of who you were and all you had known were violently shaken and left broken and cracked. Maybe you are still in the phase of standing in the doorways of your life bracing yourself for the Aftershocks. This sounds cliche to say, but I promise you that it does get better. The shaking lessens, the rolling after shocks become this slight roll to life that you learn to surf, and you begin to find beauty in the broken. It’s not easy. It’s not fun. It’s exhausting. It will challenge your strength and resolve.It will make you the type of person that cries in random aisles of stores. It will make you angry.

But you will find beauty in the shaking. You will meet people that will remind you who you are. You will notice in beauty in places you never looked before. You will meet parts of yourself you never knew You will have a gratitude for the simple things in life. You won’t sweat the small things because you are intimately familiar with just how quickly, abruptly, and violently life can change and how hard those changes can shake you and shake a life. You will live again. A different life. A life that has cracks in it, but as Leonard Cohen sang in his song “Anthem”, “There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Whatever cracks exist in your life whether they are major fault lines created by a great lifequake or small cracks in your foundation, don’t cover the cracks up. Leave the cracks and let the light shine through them.