On sunflowers, setbacks, and growing a little differently than you planned.
Earlier this summer, I was going through something hard. I still am, in some ways.
Maybe someday I’ll share more about it, but right now, I’m not ready to. What I can say is that it rocked my world a little bit, and for a while, life just felt really heavy.
Around the same time, Zach and I had planted sunflowers in our backyard.
The seeds came from his grandmother, which made watching them come up feel extra special. We’d planted a bunch along the edge of the garden, (almost like a natural fence!) and one large one by our front door. Every day they were getting a little taller and I couldn’t wait for them to finally bloom.
And then one morning, we woke up and they were basically gone.
The deer had come through overnight and eaten the tops off every single one.
We even had the surveillance footage of the culprits to prove it. 😂
Under normal circumstances, this probably wouldn’t have felt like a big deal. They’re flowers. Deer eat things. That’s kind of their whole thing.
But life already felt pretty shitty and those sunflowers felt like one more thing to be sad about.
I remember looking at all the sad little stems sticking out of the ground and thinking, welp, I guess we’re not getting sunflowers this summer.
Then a month or two later, I noticed something.
There were these tiny little buds starting to grow off the stems. Some were branching out on their own, but others were growing in these weird little clusters, almost like twins, all packed tightly together.
I honestly wasn’t even sure what they were going to turn into.
And then there were more.
And more.
Eventually, they started opening.
Now, every sunflower that I thought was ruined has multiple blooms growing from it. They’re not the perfectly straight, giant sunflowers I pictured when we planted them. They’re kind of funky. They’re branching in weird directions. Some are huge, some are tiny, some are completely open, and others are still figuring it out.
There are probably 50 sunflowers out there now. (Maybe more!)
…when the deer ate the main growing point of the plants, they stopped growing the way they normally would – straight up, reaching toward the sun.
Instead, they branched out in different directions and produced multiple blooms where there may have only been one.
Which feels a little on the nose for this particular season of my life.
The thing I thought had ruined them didn’t stop them from growing.
It changed the way they grew.
And they still found their way toward the sun.
Every time I pull into the driveway now, I see this slightly chaotic patch of sunflowers growing in every direction. They don’t look anything like what I pictured when we planted those seeds.
But they’re here and there are more of them than I ever expected.
I got my sunflowers.
They just didn’t look the way I thought they would.
And lately, I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
I don’t believe every hard thing happens for a reason. Sometimes shitty things happen and they’re just shitty. I don’t think we have to find the silver lining immediately or convince ourselves we’re grateful something difficult happened to us.
But I do think we can surprise ourselves with what happens afterward.
You can be disappointed about what you lost and still be curious about what’s growing in its place.
You can get knocked down and grow back a little funky.
You can have some parts of you completely open while others are still figuring it out.
And maybe growing differently than you planned doesn’t mean you stopped growing.
I’m still somewhere in the middle of my own version of this story. I don’t have a perfectly tied-up ending for it, and I’m not going to pretend I do.
But things feel a little lighter lately. I think I’m in a blooming season.
And every time I come home to those weird little sunflowers, I feel hopeful that maybe I can stay here for a while.
Not every setback stops your growth. Sometimes it simply changes the way you bloom. 🌻