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Man vs Wild

PhotographyAmanda WormannMarch 2, 2016nature, manmade

ABOUT SIBLING REVELRY

SORRY YOU’RE HERE, BUT COME ON IN.

It was 2015, the tenth anniversary of my brother’s death, and I was lost in my thoughts. It was supposed to be a major milestone, but really, it felt like any other day. I missed Warren immensely. It came in waves – the deep breaths of feeling light in between the tears and memories – the moments of reflection thinking about how this person I am today is not the same person I was before. And, like any other day, I thought to myself, what do I do with this?

I sat down at my kitchen table and started writing, allowing the ebb and flow of emotion and gratitude form words on a blank sheet of paper. What did I wish I knew? What have I learned? Is there any good in any of this? What are the feelings that move through me? What are the ones that tuck themselves away in the nooks and crannies of my inner soul? How can I made sense of it all?

After I stopped writing, I read it with tears in my eyes. I was moved. “THIS,” I thought. This is what I wished I had all along. It’s what I was looking for when my brother died, and every day after. But like anyone who is enduring the loss of a sibling will tell you, this area of grief is an overlooked and underserved kind of loss. There was nowhere out there. Yet, here I was, finding comfort in the very feelings tucked away inside of myself all along. The answers were already there.

This journaling exercise sparked a fire-in-my-soul desire to share. I wanted to share it with the hopes that when someone else set out on the same search I did, they found something worthwhile. Or, at least the very least, found something.

I shared it on Medium. Then it got picked up by the Huffington Post. Then it made it to the homepage of HuffPost (a huge friggin deal! this meant people were reading it and confirmed sibling loss needed to be talked about). Before I knew it, I received hundreds, maybe even thousands, of emails from people all over the world. I still do. They were strangers, but soon I was reading their stories, too.

We needed each other. We were the resource. We were the words. We were the heartbeat of it all – the familiar comfort that can help us keep going. Not to fix it, but to make us feel heard, understood, and a little less lost. We were the answer.

I created Sibling Revelry out of the idea of celebrating our siblings and experiences through sharing – a place for candid dialogue, a place for comfort, a place to be real. A place for their memory to live on, and a place for us to keep living on, too.

Together we’ll share and celebrate our siblings to create the resource we wish we had when they died. Sorry you’re here, but come on in.

– Amanda Wormann, Founder