16 Lessons From Grief
What grieving twice this year has taught me so far + 1 soothing playlist | MC #87
Hiya,
Long time, no hear, right? It feels like forever since I last published anything here. There are several reasons, and summer break is not one of them.
Disappearing without a word for two months was not my intention. But life decided to serve me a hard pill to swallow. This July, I experienced another devastating loss, and it shattered my semi-healed heart. And so I found myself once again having my life turned upside down.
When you are forced to repeatedly switch on and off a survival mode, you end up disoriented, utterly exhausted, and detached from reality. Dealing with one loss soon after another destroys your sense of security, and fu**s up your time perception, focus, and memory skills. It distances you from others putting every single relationship in your life to a test. Thinking about mortality, self-reflecting, and reevaluating everything are unavoidably added to your daily repertoire.
For weeks, I had zero creative juices in me. Forming any decent-sounding sentence felt undoable. Blocked by anger, sorrow, and sadness, filled with frustration growing by the minute, I began to think I would never publish anything again.
As I am currently going through not only a midweek crisis but also an existential one, you can imagine today’s issue wasn’t easy for me to put together. The process felt rusty, slow, and uneven. Nonetheless, I hope it will be a good, and maybe even a helpful read.
Here’s what grieving twice this year has taught me so far:
16 Lessons From Grief
Summertime does not make grief go away. Sun-filled days and omnipresent cheerfulness do not automatically make a bereaved person feel better. Somehow everything becomes even harder, more intense, and confusing. The sadness and emptiness inside do not match the general happy mood around.
Grief is a surreal, uneven state that feels like a time warp. It makes you feel lost in a calendar, and forget important dates. Planning anything, even coffee with a friend becomes extremely hard in the first weeks and months after a loss. If you want to be around people, but have no inner strength to organize, and schedule, explain the situation and try to pass the initiative.
In grief, it’s completely normal to feel great one minute to fall to pieces the next.
The 5 or 7 stages of grief are just orientation points in the absolute chaos of the grieving process. There is no specific order in which bereaved people should process their emotions, and there is no "right way" to do it.
Grieving is different each time, so don’t expect yourself to behave the same way as before. If tears don’t come, don’t waste time and energy to force them.
Enormous emotional stress paired with bruxism can cause some seriously uncomfortable things like tinnitus and retinal migraine attacks. Unreleased tension can gather in not-that-obvious places like the jaw, neck, and upper back making it a problem worth solving with dental physiotherapy. If done by a pro, it will bring tons of ease, and bodily self-consciousness since the very first session.
Time, just by itself, does not heal. Lots of inner work is required. It is easy to get stuck in a void of sadness, feeling misunderstood, invalidated, and unheard. A true challenge here is to let go of the need to control the uncontrollable, accept what happened, and allow yourself to feel joy again.
You cannot speed things up with grief, and you cannot conquer it. Resistance is pointless, and acceptance is the key here.
“People often say, ‘You will conquer this grief’, as if it's an obstacle course you have to pole-vault over. But no one conquers grief, it is something you have to face, not fight; it can't be skipped over and it can't be defeated. You have to allow it to surround you like fog on a mountain top, and only when the fog rises can you see the path in front of you. It is not the enemy, even though it often feels like it. It is most certainly a giant - but it's a giant made out of love, pain, lessons, gentleness and a million other emotions. If we welcome the giant around the table, and don't try to make it stay on the other side of the door, it can teach us so much about ourselves and the world.”
— Zoë Clark-Coates
Acting with self-compassion by protecting your energy and respecting inner boundaries doesn't mean you’re an egotistic jerk. “You can’t pour from an empty cup” may sound cliché, but it is 100% essential to living well.
Shinrin-yoku isn’t just a nice-sounding concept. I think forest bathing should be prescribed as a medicine for hurting souls. Immersing yourself deep in nature, and being surrounded by forests’ soothing sounds, smells, and earthy colors calms the nervous system like nothing else. I spent most of Summer in my family’s cabin hidden in the woods and felt visibly better day by day.
Social media detoxes, mentally decompressing in solitude, and practicing JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out) or ROMO (Relief Of Missing Out) every once in a while should be normalized and considered a part of mental hygiene and acts of self-care. Social media algorithms are especially ruthless to those who grieve. They are constructed to mess with you, poke you with a stick, gradually making you feel slightly worse and angrier with every minute more spent online. They will try ANYTHING to make you more engaged or/and enraged. While looking for help and solace, I was repeatedly bombarded with hurtful and harmful content that was intended to evoke resentment in me and contribute to the polarization of society and the "us versus them" type of thinking. In that moment I knew I had to disconnect myself from it.
The famous "Morning Pages" routine by Julia Cameron works magic if done regularly. Your notebook becomes a fountain of self-knowledge and a perfect way to track down what worries you, blocks you, or drives you etc.
Putting together furniture, Lego sets, and puzzles can be go-to, dopamine-beneficial activities if you want your grief brain to stop overthinking, and let your thoughts drift away.
Grief makes you gain clarity in every aspect of your life. It strongly highlights areas to improve and verifies who genuinely cares for you no matter what.
Attentive, and action-oriented empathy and compassion are extremely rare. They require suspending one’s ego and seeing through each other’s eyes. Appreciate and cherish those who give you such loving attention, they are human gems.
Forgive people around you who probably completely unintentionally lessen your loss, and say something insensitive, hurtful, or simply dumb. We all have different levels of perception and emotional intelligence. Death and loss are still taboos that most people are afraid to talk about. Don’t expect too much from others, and educate them if necessary. Aim for kind honesty in every relationship in your life. Too many unnecessary conflicts are caused by understatements or over-interpretations, mutual expectations, shame, and guilt. So communicate clearly what you feel, even if it might be uncomfortable for others to hear.
Grieving people are often easily irritable, and overly defensive. I get that being around us isn’t easy. But please accept us with our unpleasant mood swings, bitterness, and emotional reactions to seemingly normal situations. Try not to rush to give unsolicited advice. It usually makes things worse. Learn how to support a grieving person. Read some articles or/and books on this. Try a different approach if the one you are currently using does not work best. Swallow your pride, and put on the empathy lenses. And remember, proactivity is the key factor here. I am pretty sure that the bereaved person will appreciate your efforts.
Self-hug Playlist
Now, let’s raise our oxytocin levels by giving ourselves a big, warm hug ❤︎. It is scientifically proven that self-hugging can ease pain and bring comfort. Don’t be weirded out by this, and treat yourself like you would treat your true friend.
Here’s a bunch of my recent favorite soothing, and cozy sounds that may get you in the right mood:
Thanks for stopping by, reading, and listening. I am very grateful to have you here. Let me know how you’re doing, and what’s on your rotation these days. Any suggestions on what would you add to today’s playlist?
May you be happy, healthy, and unburdened by fu*kery!
Until next time,
Needed this, I got a rough anniversary coming up tomorrow, thank you for sharing.
Thank you for your bravery in sharing this. You have a whole community here rallying for you.