Episode 94. Between Grief and Beauty: A Year of Becoming
The Inner Briefing Podcast
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Episode Description:
What happens when your life unravels all at once — your home, your identity, your pregnancy, your job — and you’re forced into a version of yourself you never planned for?
In this deeply personal episode, Marie shares the extraordinary year that dismantled everything she thought she was becoming… and the unexpected rebirth that followed. From selling the oceanfront cabin that held her heart, to navigating pregnancy loss and career upheaval, to discovering pottery, rebuilding home, and carrying a new life — this is a story about duality, resilience, and the quiet intelligence of intuition.
You’ll hear how:
Grief and joy can coexist in the very same moment
Identity shifts when external structures fall away
Creativity can become an anchor during profound change
Intuition becomes louder when ego dissolves
Forced transitions can lead to the most aligned chapters of our lives
If you’re navigating uncertainty, loss, reinvention, or a season of “not knowing,” this episode will meet you exactly where you are — offering grounding, perspective, and a reminder that sometimes the most beautiful beginnings emerge from the ashes of what we didn’t choose.
Outline/Transcript:
[INTRO]
What happens when life dismantles everything you thought you were building?
In the last year, I lost a home that felt like an extension of my soul, a pregnancy that reshaped my identity, and a career chapter that I never expected to walk away from. And in that same year, I found myself in the middle of an unexpected creative rebirth, a new sense of home, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be fully alive.
This episode is a story about contradiction — about how grief and beauty can coexist, how identity can fall apart and rebuild itself in surprising ways, and how moments of emptiness can open the door to intuition, creativity, and unexpected new beginnings. It’s about holding duality, rediscovering truth, and allowing life to remake you when you least expect it.
[..]
I used to live in a small cabin on stilts, where my backyard was the Atlantic ocean. It was a patchy blue house, built in the 50s. At one time, it was a 3 bedroom, but thanks to hurricane Florence, this house was a perfectly suited for me, 2 bedroom when I bought it. The walls were the original, old pine. And the floors were something similar, which I ripped the carpets off of and against all well-meant advice, painted black. I added whimsical tiles to the bathrooms and the kitchen, and colorful rugs collected from around the world gave life to every room. My artwork and photography dressed the walls, and small crystals lived on every windowsill and doorframe. Books and more books overfilled every shelf and surf boards could be found in every corner, closet and even on most walls. Where there were not books or surfboards, there were plants. I painted the kitchen cabinets, baked bread and homemade cakes in the original double ovens from the 50s. I woke up every morning to the sound of waves and the sun rising through the big 4x4 window facing the ocean. I sipped coffee on the porch above the sand. And my life, my work, my business revolved around the tide and the wind, which dictated when I could and would surf. All, which I could see and track, in real time, all the time.
Everyone who walked into my house would say that it was such a perfect representation of me, and the truth was that if you ever stepped foot into that house, you stepped foot directly into my heart.
That tiny little beach cabin wasn’t simply an external representation of my inner world, but it was an anchor for my entire life and my way of being and how I moved through the world. It was magical.
One year ago, almost exactly, I sold that house.
At that time, I was just about 3 months pregnant and I, with my partner, began preparing for a whole entire life to change. We bought a new house – off the island, a newer build, with functioning heat and AC and proper insulation. You know, the basic living conditions for anyone, but mostly for a baby. I moved and just barely started to settle, and a couple short weeks later, I wasn’t pregnant anymore. We lost the baby.
In the span of the 12 weeks before we lost the baby, everything that I knew about my life, everything I had previously built about my life, and who I was and who I was becoming, shifted entirely – inwardly and outwardly in preparation for a child and in preparation to become a mother.
Where I lived, how I spent my time, my belongings (because I sold my beach house furnished), my routine and structure, everything that I knew and regularly experienced changed. My whole inner and outer world had shifted and was continuing to shift, moving fast in a new direction.
And then in a span of a few hours, the night before new years eve of 2024 (going into 2025), everything about who I thought I was going to be, where I thought I was going, what I was preparing for, what I was trading my old life for, was gone.
Losing a baby is not just losing a little being that you never got to meet – it’s losing a life that you never got to live. And if you were me last year, it was also losing the life that you had very intentionally built, because you switched it all up in anticipation of something that never fully came to fruition.
Simultaneous to that, around the same time my house was going under contract, I reported my boss to HR for sexual harassment. It was something that I never wanted to do, but upon finding out I was pregnant, it became something I knew I had to do. Which is a whole other big chapter that I’m not so sure I’m ready to talk about, yet.
But what I can say is that while my entire personal life and identity was shifting and eventually dismantled, my entire work life was also shifting
and eventually also (later) dismantled.
The only thing, actually, that wasn't dismantling was my business. And in fact, around this time, we booked one of our biggest engagements ever – a team astrology reading for Zoom, like the Zoom, which was definitely a highlight, or the highlight of that season for me.
And on top of that, pre-baby-loss, Cristian and I got engaged in Guatemala. So, there was this wave of so much happiness and excitement building,
Which is really funny and kind of cruel, how life can be so dual – so opposing or contradictory in what it brings to you. How good and how bad, how excruciatingly painful and how utterly beautiful it can be in sometimes the very same moment, if not the very same season.
Because also, just under a year ago, right after rearranging my life and then losing that pregnancy, I met two of my girlfriends for coffee and we wrote a 2025 ins and outs list. To be honest, it was purely out of an attempt to pretend that everything was normal and not, in fact, falling apart for me. But, I remember saying something so wildly out of left field to them, which was:
“By the end of the year, I want to sell mugs that I’ve made in our local shops.”
Which is crazy because, I had never made a mug. I had never taken a pottery class. I had never touched clay. My work, outside of operations, was coaching and team building. My business was (and is) The Corporate Psychic. And I think because I was going through some serious shit, my friends just like didn’t even bat an eyelash at that crazy statement. They just kind of nodded their heads and didn’t point out that I had zero pottery experience or equipment. That I never even mentioned an interest in pottery prior to this moment.
But somehow, in the midst of my rearranging life, I had signed up for a pottery class. And somehow in January of 2025, before I had even taken that class, I was onto something.
Sidenote: One thing that I will say that I’ve noticed in life is that when we are in moments of despair, when we are completely empty with despair, empty of identity, empty of expectation, empty of plans or ideas about ourselves and our lives, we get clear access to non-ego filtered information, because (I theorize that) it’s in these moments of emptiness where we finally open.
Anyway, I took the pottery class. I then posted up in Florida to get away from this new house and my then-vanished old life, and this small island that I called home, so that I could grieve and try to just be. On a whim, while I was in Florida, I signed up for a longer pottery class series. Turns out, I really enjoyed throwing on a wheel and as the class series was coming to an end, I decided that I wanted to buy my own wheel. After doing some research, I realized they are very expensive. So I let that idea go, until one day I walked into the studio and someone was selling their wheel because they were moving back to europe. So I bought it. I share this piece because sometimes when we want something and it’s right for us, the universe just puts it in front of us in a way that makes it hard to say no.
I moved that wheel back up to North Carolina into my new garage in my new house that then felt slightly less foreign and a little more mine. By this time, I had left my job (the one where I reported my boss for harassment), and I kept throwing pottery.
But it wasn’t easy. Despite my personal instagram highlight reel of traveling to 10 different countries in 2025, to a handful of US cities, surfing while I was at home, and of my client work and pottery progress, I was grieving, I was lost, I was depressed, I was in the trench work of rediscovering myself. I felt hopeless. I felt disconnected from my purpose and my work. I had so many moments of just not even knowing who I was.
And in truth, throwing pottery was my anchor
In fact, my pottery was maybe the only real thing that I consistently shared publicly in 2025. Likely because it was the only real thing that I could fully grasp onto.
But guess what?
My mugs are being made for two local coffee shops, two local breweries, one local brand, one local run club, one team at Minecraft, and dozens of individual households. And even though I said, a little under a year ago, that I wanted my mugs in the local shops of surf city, I had no fucking idea that this was possible or would be my reality come this time. Where btw, I had 120+ orders for just the month of December.
And, and – at the time of this recording I’m 25 weeks pregnant with (so far) a healthy baby boy, due in April. Cristian and I couldn’t be more thrilled.
I had coffee with a girlfriend this morning and shared with her that Cristian and I are moving in the new year, into another new house, but a house that will truly be our house. And she said “Your entire life has really changed in the last year. It’s a completely different life than it was a year ago.”
And, I realized, it really has. Your entire life really can completely change, inside and out, in the span of one year. In fact, it can look nothing like what it did before.
For me, this last year wasn’t always pretty. So much of it was forced. So much of it, I resisted. So much of it, was challenging and uncomfortable. And soooo much of what I once believed to be true, has shifted.
My current truths are that:
I’m in rediscovery of what I believe to be true about this world and how I am able to move through it.
I am rediscovering what it means to be alive.
I don’t know anything with certainty and everything that I once thought I was certain about has either shifted or disappeared or is now in question again.
What I do know is that life can be messy, complicated, nuanced, simple AND far from simple. Contradiction can not only exist side by side, but within one single experience, within one single moment. And that being alive is often living in that contradiction.
My current theory is that our capacity to experience peace and joy is directly related to how well we can hold the duality of life, of self, of being without identifying with one or both opposing pieces. It’s about how well we can live with the contradiction or the polarity inside of us, without allowing it to become conflict in our hearts, and without allowing that conflict to rule our lived experience, and how we respond to the world.
I’m sharing all of this because it’s been a hell of a year and it’s the first season in my life where hardship has lingered over such a long period of time, where I haven’t had a clue what I was doing or why I was doing at all, where I felt more lost than clear.
And after it all, I can finally see that there were always flowers growing from the ashes.
I don’t think we share or talk about these experiences enough – the bad alongside the good. I don’t know if we even allow ourselves to slow down enough to process these experiences. So often we just keep moving forward, trying to get away, or move into the next thing.
But sometimes life has other plans for us.
I’m sharing all of this because if you are going through a long season of hardship or challenge or even just straight up fog in your life – give yourself grace, listen to what speaks to you in the quiet moments, stop trying to make sense of everything, stop trying to make sense of anything, and practice simply being with the dualities that may be present for you. And whatever you have that you can grasp onto – that roots and grounds you, allow it. Make space for it.
Don’t beat yourself up for all of the other things that you are maybe not doing.
Because life has a way of shifting us and showing us where we are going. And something that I say a lot is that the story often doesn’t make sense when we are in it. So, how might be lessen our grip and allow ourselves to be in it – even if and when it isn’t what we thought it would be at all?
[OUTRO]
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Inner Briefing. I’m your host, Marie Groover. I’m the founder of The Corporate Psychic and Essential Teams and my work is to foster genuine connection through the human condition, bringing back online empathy, joy, self-leadership and authority. If you feel called, please reach out. I’d love to work with you or your team. And if this episode resonated, please share it with one person – whoever pops into your mind first.
Thank you again & talk to you soon.
