Making Space for Grief—Engaged AF
“We all experience change and loss throughout our lives—through big and dramatic life-quakes and in smaller, more habitual ways. It takes work to use crisis and stress as vehicles for transformation.” Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow.
Grief is defined by the loss of something deemed important. That could mean someone or something–even an idea. Grieving is the acknowledgement of deep sorrow. Whenever I hear the term deep sorrow I am thrust back into my high school AP English class when we were digging into Shakespeare. The dramas taught were filled with such pain and remorse; which in hindsight seemed right on time for the beginnings of my angsty teen years. Our teens years are when we are just in the nascent stages of trying to make sense of our bodies and our lives and how they measure up against societal norms. In retrospect, I see now that this reconciliation of ourselves against the world around us doesn’t ever really go away, it just mutates over time.
Lately, I have found myself grappling with grief. Trying desperately to understand the pains that I’ve been experiencing that leave me tossing and turning in the middle of the night and awakening to tear stained pillows. America has me f***ed up right now. The state of our country has me vacillating between fits of rage, fear, and grief on an hourly basis some days. We have all learned about “fallen empires”, but I tell you it never occurred to me in one of those many lessons, what was happening to the people while their country and all they believed to be true about their neighbors, friends, and community crumbled alongside the institutions they placed their faith in. Just think about the last nine years in America. There has been a rise in white nationalism, a flood of disinformation, a rise in anti-semitism, islamophobia, anti-Blackness, transphobia–etc. Over a million Americans perished from a global pandemic and we as a country pretend it didn’t happen. No memorial, no recognition of the devastating loss, just empty place settings at dinner tables and holiday gatherings. In the North Carolina Senate the Republicans have gone so far to erase the impacts of Covid-19 that they are trying to ban masks in public, even for those that are ill.
We are in a wild place.
So, the unease and distress we are all feeling is very real and warranted.
When we couple our collective national grief with our own personal lives it can feel like we’re all trying to swim through quicksand. What I have learned over the last seven years in therapy and with the last few months in somatic coaching is that we can’t pretend we are not grieving. We can’t just hurry up and “get through” or “get over” our grief. We must sit with it, talk about it, stretch and feel our way through with both hands. There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We don’t move through these feelings the way you seamlessly run through a recipe. Sometimes we jump around, straddle two at a time or sit with one for a while.
The point being that healing isn’t linear and more importantly we need to provide ourselves with grace as we move through it. Here are a few tips that I have found helpful as I navigate my own grief:
Journal. Getting thoughts on a page or into a recorder can do wonders. It’s like letting the air out of a balloon.
Walking and connecting with nature. I go walking almost everyday and there isn’t a day I come back home and say “I wish I didn’t walk today.” Being outdoors is a natural stress reliever.
Therapy. I can’t recommend therapy enough. The point is not to fix you, you’re not broken, it’s to give us perspective and a skillset to navigate our lives in a more connected and authentic way.
Connecting with friends. Getting offline and hanging IRL can help us yo in making us feel less alone in our grief and a reminder that there is still so much good.
Rest. When you are having a hard time listen to your body and give yourself permission to rest.
“But grief is also a tonic. It is a healing elixir, made of tears that lubricate the heart.” —Elizabeth Lesser
