Grief is a funny thing. Well grief itself isn’t funny . . . but as a concept I find it a bit odd, especially here in mainstream mid-America. Everyone deals with loss in their life, and not just of people they love – when you move, change jobs, have a baby, deal with a breakup, quit a hobby, or make any big change, you are losing something. If you don’t grieve that loss, it can build up and bite you later. “When we bury feelings, we bury them alive” is one of my favorite quotes that reminds me how important it is to actually allow myself to feel my feelings.
Hold on, let’s talk about feeling feelings. When we’re babies we’re GREAT at feeling our feelings! We laugh, we cry, we wear it all on our onesies. But somewhere along the way, most of us are taught that it isn’t “appropriate” to show our feelings in public (or at all). We’re taught to “suck it up” and not show others when we’re sad. The problem with this is that all of our feelings serve a purpose. Have you ever felt awful and let yourself really cry for a while? How did you feel after you were done getting those tears out of your system? For me, I feel exhausted and still a little sad (but not really sad because being sad takes a lot of energy). The next day? I usually feel lighter. Maybe not HAPPY, but definitely not stuck in despair. We have to let our feelings flow through us to heal and grow.
A few years ago I went through a series of losses. As the first losses hit (divorce and death of my grandfather), I realized that growing up I never really learned how to feel my feelings and actually process loss. I didn’t know how to grieve. I knew how to avoid grieving – I didn’t go to funerals, I didn’t think much about the person who died, I was in denial about how I handled death in general. I was reading a couple of books at the time – one about divorce and one about grief. It also made me realize how our memories aren’t necessarily the most accurate things – I was going through the “loss history chart” and talked to my mom about my childhood cat who died while I was at college. I remember her being sick and my parents calling me to tell me that they had to put her to sleep. I remember being mad that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. When I talked to my mom, she remembered the situation very differently – she called me to tell me they were going to have her put to sleep and gave me the chance to say goodbye but I told her I was “too busy” to deal with it. Yeah, college life was busy but I lived 20 minutes away from home on campus and I could have very easily made time to go say goodbye if I really wanted to. My brain decided to remember incorrectly to justify my not saying goodbye. That was a shock to me but made me realize that my whole life I had just avoided grief as much as I could and nobody stopped me.
I realized how important it was for me to actually go through everything and allow myself to cry as much as I needed to. I went through days where I cried for 4 hours straight, making strange animal sounds and just letting it all out. I remember feeling exhausted, but eventually it helped. I think that grieving the loss of my marriage was extra hard for me because I had so many feelings built up from previous losses that I hadn’t grieved. Obviously avoiding dealing with feeling my feelings was a coping mechanism. I feel things very deeply and up until that point in my life I don’t think I had the tools to handle the intense emotions that came up when I started cracking that armor.
I wrote this a few years ago and would like to add that it can be hard to continue to allow ourselves to feel our feelings. Even when we know the best way out is through, it can seem easier to just push them aside for later. I'm reminding myself now how important it is to process and feel ALL of those feelings. Here's to more feeling.