Grieving and Achieving: What It Means to Build While Holding a Decade of Loss
This season, I find myself holding two truths at once: I am grieving, and I am achieving. And for the first time, I’m allowing both to be true without apology.
As I prepare to graduate from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program, as new opportunities open, and as the next era of MINDART emerges, I’ve been sitting with a heaviness I can no longer ignore. On Friday, November 29, it will be ten years since the passing of one of the most important people in my life — my friend, my creative counterpart, and the person whose belief in me shaped more of my journey than most will ever know: Dro.
Image capture: Dro and I spending the holidays together after my return from Germany. Photographed November 2013.
Ten years.
A decade.
A full cycle of becoming.
People see the milestones. The growth. The creative work. The events. The wins. What they don’t see is how grief quietly shapes the architecture of a life — how it becomes the soul of your purpose long before you understand that’s what’s happening.
Before MINDART existed, before I ever used the words “creative wellness,” before I had a process, a brand, a team, or even a strategy, Dro and I used to talk in private about what it would look like to build a space where creatives could thrive, be nurtured, and be seen. We didn’t have a blueprint then — just a shared truth that artists deserve care, community, and room to breathe.
When he passed, that vision didn’t disappear.
It transformed.
His loss birthed CROWN, my first body of work honoring the intersection of art, identity, and healing. And CROWN became the foundation for MINDART, which has now served more than a hundred artists, dozens of organizations, and countless community spaces.
Image caption: CROWN, pen and ink. October 2016. Created after hearing the words, ‘Create, it will free you,’ as I braced myself to face the one-year mark of a deeply traumatic loss.
The irony — or maybe the sacredness — is that the work people see today began in a moment of the deepest pain I had ever known.
That’s the part rarely spoken:
Grief is not the opposite of purpose.
Grief is often where purpose begins.
And yet, grief isn’t linear.
It doesn’t fade.
It revisits.
Especially in seasons like this — seasons of growth, achievement, and transition. When life expands, grief rises to meet it. Not as regression, but as remembrance.
The holiday season magnifies all of it.
For those of us who carry loss, this time of year brings the quiet ache of memory:
losing someone who shaped the core of who you are
the weight of generational responsibility
navigating cycles alone
the loneliness behind the strength
external reminders of the things you don’t yet have
the pressure to be grateful even when your heart feels heavy
It’s not a lack of gratitude.
It’s the body remembering what the calendar doesn’t say out loud.
This year, as I reflect on nearly ten years of MINDART — a company born from my healing, my artistry, my grief, and my resilience — I’m confronting something I didn’t expect:
Image caption: This moment captures me working on CROWN days before the one year anniversary of his transition. Image from November 26, 2016.
I am outgrowing the version of myself who built this company from pain.
Which means I’m outgrowing the vision I held in memory for the last decade — the version shaped by survival, by loss, by the need to make something meaningful out of what broke me.
Letting go of that version is its own grief.
But it’s also an evolution.
As MINDART grows, I grow.
As I grow, the memory of Dro grows too — not as a wound, but as a foundation. Not as a moment frozen in grief, but as a legacy that continues to unfold with every artist we support, every story we amplify, and every space we create.
This moment — this tenth year — is not just an anniversary.
It is a threshold.
A place where grief, gratitude, and becoming converge.
Image caption: Dro and his twin cousin — my forever sister, Shirely — doing what they always did best: laugh, love, and live life to the fullest.
To Dro’s family: I am holding you in love as we cross this milestone with you.
You all became my family long before I understood the language for it. To know Dro was to love him — and I can only imagine what life was like with him 24/7, because even the four years I had with him changed me forever.
Thank you for allowing me to mourn with you, grow with you, and celebrate his legacy alongside you. I carry your strength, your love, and your memory of him with me in everything I build.
Image caption: CROWN evolving into paintings in color — the beginning of rediscovering joy after grief. April 2017.
And to myself — the woman who survived a decade, built a new identity, held space for others while holding her own heartbreak — I honor you too.
My hope in sharing this reflection is simple:
to remind anyone quietly navigating their own duality that it’s okay to hold both the light and the dark. It’s okay to build while grieving. It’s okay to celebrate while remembering. It’s okay to evolve even when the past still tugs at your spirit.
Grief and growth are not opposites.
They are twins.
They shape each other.
They shape us.
And as I step into this next chapter of MINDART — more grounded, more certain, more aligned — I am choosing to carry my grief not as weight, but as wisdom.
A decade later, I’m still becoming.
And that, to me, is the most honest way to honor both the past and the future.
In loving memory,
long live Didro Joseph.