Thank You For Your Support

Dear friends, family, and followers of Defending Your Life: 

It is with mixed emotions that I tell you that I will no longer be contributing to Defending Your Life. For the last year or so, I have been managing two accounts. One focused specifically on joy and one focused specifically on grief. 

But handling both separately is not authentic to my own truth. Every single day, I live a life of both joy and grief. And by managing both sites, it forces me to compartmentalize each of these emotions, which is difficult to do. So in an effort to be more authentic and frankly, to simplify my life, I will be merging Defending Your Life into the Forced Joy Project. On the new site, I will continue to write about my grief journey as well as my search for joy. It will be a single place to talk about the full range of emotions in the search for joy in the face of loss. 

Defending Your Life, the website, will remain. The blog posts, the podcasts, and all the content is extremely meaningful to myself, to Jeremy, and most importantly, to Brad. But the reality is, ever since Brad died, I’ve struggled how to make it my own. And I finally realized, it was never supposed to be mine. It was ours. And that’s how it will remain.

I have some additional podcasts (several from before Brad’s diagnosis and several from after) that I will eventually be adding to the site and will let you know when those are up. But other than that, all new content and blog posts will be on the Forced Joy Project’s new site. 

I hope you all hop on over and continue to follow and contribute to the Forced Joy Project. I have some pretty exciting ideas and plans for the future, including focusing on other people's Forced Joy! Your comments and support have been invaluable to me over the last year and a half and I look forward to continuing that dialogue. 

With love and joy,
Dana