Dealing with Grief
I’ve wanted to write a post on this topic for a long time, but I’ve avoided it because for the longest, I didn’t even really understand how I dealt with grief. I thought to myself, how can you help other people understand how they grieve if you can’t even do that for yourself?
Well life has a funny way of forcing you to revisit certain things, regardless of how much or how often you try to dodge them. It’s in those moments that I have this epiphany: you don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to know anything. Sometimes the story is enough. I’ve learned that in a lot of situations, people don’t always want you to give them the answers. Yes, sometimes people just want the answers but many times, they just want someone to listen to them and empathize with them. So with that in mind, let me preface this by saying that I don’t know everything, but I’ll share my story with you in hopes that it will be enough to get you going in the right direction when it comes to dealing with grief.
With the way my personality is set up, I can be very hard to read and perfectionism is a real problem. My world could be crashing down on the inside, but on the outside you’d never know. My hair is still neat, nails are still done, clothes are clean and outfits are cute. I still go to work and get stuff done. I still show up for birthday parties and celebrations. But it’s all a façade, a defense mechanism of sorts. Even if things are terrible, I think:
If you look the part you’ll feel the part.
If you continue to live like everything isn’t falling apart, things will get better.
If you look good, you’ll feel good and honestly, sometimes it does work. But sometimes it doesn’t work. I’ve learned that when it comes to grief specifically, it definitely doesn’t work for me. It seems like there’s at least one death in my family each year, and I’ve had trouble dealing with it since I was a little girl. I remember skipping my one of my uncle’s funerals because I thought that if I didn’t go, I could kind of act like it didn’t happen. Fast forward 12 years and those kinds of habits have only gotten worse. Now I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll go to the funeral; I need that kind of visual closure and I learned that the hard way. But as soon as it’s over I’m burying myself in something else: work, grad school applications, blog posts, outings with friends. Anything else to maintain some sense of normalcy.
While that kind of band-aiding may have worked for the moment, it ate me up inside. Despite being a person who always advocates for the expression and allowance of feelings, I had taught myself to bury my hurt. We live in a very fast-paced society where many things don’t wait for you to work through the hurt. Paid leave isn’t infinite, bill collectors don’t cut you any slack, and many other things need to be addressed on a daily basis to make sure that the wheels still turn. Quite frankly, I felt like pain was too time consuming to work through. Pain wasn’t a feeling that was worthy of being expressed or worked through like the others. Happiness, joy, discontentment, even sadness I can work through or experience relatively quickly and get back to work. But pain? That one takes a little extra time that I don’t have. That kind of destructive behavior that was birthed from my inability to deal with grief began to leak into other areas of my life. It was no longer limited to death. I began to feel pain in lots of different ways: the pain of grief, the pain of rejection, the pain of mistakes, the pain of self-hate and neglect, the pain of being overextended and undervalued. Whenever I felt pain as a result of anything, I put on the same act. Don’t acknowledge it. Don’t write about it, talk about it, or even think about it. Just act like everything is okay and you’ll eventually be okay.
If I’m being completely honest, it wasn’t until recently when my grandfather passed that I made the conscious decision to retire that act and it shocked the people around me. I had been dealing with so much stuff for months beforehand that I was trying to bury, and then death on top of everything else was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was so tired of trying to fight feelings and power through. Although it’s hard to acknowledge the pain of grief or missing a loved one, dealing with my grief instead of burying it in the abyss of other things I’ve ignored has allowed me to be less dismissive of pain in other areas, less dismissive of the many sides of myself. Acknowledging pain, however that looks for me on any given day, has given me access to a certain level of vulnerability. Allowing myself to ugly cry, to stay in bed, to ignore phone calls and texts, to play the same song on repeat for hours, is sometimes how I deal. I also think that acknowledging pain and grief has helped me improve my self-care. How can you care for self and ignore certain feelings at the same time? It’s impossible. Here are a few things I’ve learned, in this very short time, as a result of actually dealing with and working through grief.
Everybody won’t get it, and that’s okay.
Sometimes, people just won’t understand that this is how you process things. But that’s okay because it’s your process. Being patient with yourself opens the door for others to be patient with you too. Those who love you will pay attention and adapt as best they can.
It’s absolutely healthy.
There is nothing wrong with grieving. Even if you haven’t cried in months and all of a sudden you’re overwhelmed with emotion, it’s okay. And even more importantly, it’s healthy. Healing is a process, not a moment.
Grief has many faces and many ways of presenting.
It doesn’t look the same for any two people. Heck, it might not even look the same for you between today and tomorrow. You may want to cry today, and simply be alone tomorrow. As one of my self-care favorites Alex Elle says, healing is not a linear process. There is no right or wrong way to progress because grief has so many ways of presenting. Fight the urge to power through to feelings and force yourself to feel the feelings. It helps in the long run.
So, that’s it. I hope that somehow, sharing my story helps you work through your own process of grieving, and I hope that in some way I’ve made you feel a little less alone and a little more hopeful. Death is not the end of the world. Like many difficult situations, it’s God’s way of showing you that you’re stronger than you think you are. Thanks for journeying with me.