You Don't Get Over Grief — You Build Your Life Around It | Mandi Leigh

Content note: This conversation touches on suicide loss. If you’re struggling, in the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time.

There are some conversations that stay with you long after you hit stop on the recording.

My conversation with singer-songwriter Mandi Leigh is one of those.

Mandi’s music career grew out of profound loss. She lost someone deeply important to her in 2017, followed by several more losses in 2020. During a health journey, she picked up a guitar, and the guitar became a way to process what she was carrying.

The songs started coming.

One of them began with a simple chord progression and eventually became a conversation with the person she lost. That idea really stayed with me because sometimes grief needs somewhere to go. It doesn’t always need to be fixed, explained, or understood.

Sometimes it just needs a place to exist.

Mandi described putting a feeling into a song so it could “still have a place to be, just not inside me anymore.”

We talked about that, and so much more.

We talked about the things we hold onto after loss, including Mandi’s story about a bed frame and what it can mean to finally let an object go. We talked about shadow work, boundaries, moving across the country as a kind of forcing function, and the uncomfortable work of getting out of our own way.

We also talked about what healing actually looks like.

Not forgetting.