Today is a heavy grief day. I’m not sure, exactly, what set it off, if anything. I’m just moving through it.
One thing about grief as compared to other heavier emotional states (such as anxiety, depression, etc.) is that any point in a normal day, the most mundane and illogical thing can just set the grief off, out of nowhere. You’ll just be going about your day, and BOOM- it sneaks up behind you and punches you straight in the back of the head. And you have the wind knocked out of you and you have no idea what the hell is going on.
One way of handling the grief is to stay very very busy and distracted, but that’s sometimes just as exhausting as dealing with the grief itself, you know? And even then, something you come across can set it off. So it’s like this sneaky emotion, as well as being a big black cloud emotion.
I’ve been dealing with grief for about six months or so after doing some work to come to terms with my feelings over going no contact with my parents, and some other losses I haven’t properly come to terms with over the last five or so years. I thought I made peace with certain aspects of that stuff- it wasn’t something I thought I cared about, but it came up during the process of working with grief that I thought it was worth paying attention to. It apparently meant more to me than I realized. Damnit.
Sorry I am being nebulous… it’s just deeply personal and something I haven’t shared with anyone. It’s not earth shattering, but I’ll admit that I do have a private universe inside me, and there are parts of that I want to hold on to, simply because it almost feels like there’s a “surface tension” of sorts that holds it together, and when I try and articulate it using words instead of just feeling it, it falls apart a bit.
On a lark, and with not much to lose, I decided maybe giving this idea a little more attention might be a useful way to distract myself and move on to something new – maybe I could use the energy of the grief and funnel it into this other thing, and create something out of it.
I knew it was a complete and utter shot in the dark when I started. But stranger things have happened, to be honest. Every so often in my life, things I deeply hope for some together from some weird little decision I make and this felt like it might be worth at least trying for. I decided to go for it- to invest a lot of effort, energy, intention, and focus on it- just to see… I had nothing to lose. If anything, I would come out the other side with some personal goals tackled, because I knew that would be part of it.
So, in the middle of spring of this year I started doing work towards it.
Along the way, a weird thing happened- I developed a much stronger sense of self-worth than I ever had in my life. Not a sense of entitlement, or that I “deserved” a good outcome from it, but a sense that it was okay to want this thing. Like, I didn’t have to prove myself worthy for it. It really changed my perception of myself and my experiences and who I am. That was shocking after decades of questioning my value just as a human, taking up space.
And, surprisingly, something I thought *might* be an opportunity literally popped up out of nowhere. But then… zero. It didn’t happen.
Looking back, it was a very surface impression- boxes were checked in a weird way, and it was very hard for me to NOT see that situation as an opportunity aligned with what I was working towards. But nothing came of it, so it wasn’t anything at all, just something that came up that was unrelated.
I’ll be honest- when I started wondering if that was the opportunity, and it wasn’t, I was absolutely shocked by how much it disappointed me. I should have known that there was a high risk of big emotions associated with this because I guess I didn’t realize the reason why I hadn’t really gone for it before was because I was afraid of finding out definitively that it wasn’t meant to be.
I know there are some positive aspects to this- the first is that it showed that I have neuroplasticity, that the wiring in my brain has changed so much that I entertained the possibility of an opportunity where probably before it wouldn’t have even registered to connect that situation with my goal. That’s a good thing, because it means if the opportunity ever DOES pop up- a real one, a good one- I’ll see it.
The negative aspect is that it showed me that I might be so eager for this thing that I would go after the wrong opportunity a little too eagerly, be willing to negotiate and ultimately go in the really wrong direction. That was troubling, but a lesson to me. It’s hard to say “no” though, to a little of something when you want a lot of it.
I am incredibly jealous of people who can do this sort of stuff and just let go. I’m not one of those people- things that matter to me I hold closely. That’s not something I can just stop doing, it’s just a deep part of who I am. Some days I think I need to maybe work super hard to drop it and move away from it, knowing I gave it my all at this point and deal with the grief and disappointment, but every time I think about doing that, something inside me is, like, “sorry, too late.” .
If it’s not going to happen, I want to know so I can heal from it and move on once and for all. Period, end of story. I’m kind of afraid that I’ll be wounded constantly by seeing potential opportunities in life and feeling like I am missing all of them. I don’t want to walk around in this world being bruised by everyday life, or feeling a constant sense of longing and searching.
Hope HURTS. All those optimistic people waxing poetic about it are lying. It’s one thing when you are in a state of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but if there’s no visible chance or even remote way of making something happen, and you’re. just operating in total dark, groping around for the next move with absolutely no indication that it will come to anything, it just a lot of slamming headfirst into very hard jagged walls.
“It’s hard to know when to give up the fight
Some things you want will just never be right…” – Patty Griffin