Ep.8: Taylor Swift Made Me Cry (Dealing with GRIEF)
God, I'm crying in the car. Did you listen to that Taylor Swift song? You're losing me.
So the quality of this recording is going to suck right because I'm in the car, but the last episode I recorded was in bed. So I just I'm just going to do this imperfectly and bear with me, or deal with it, or don't. You can stop listening now. But at least it's not raining, which it was just a few minutes ago, and my car was being pummeled with rain. Now I'm sitting outside of a grocery store and there are cars pulling up alongside me. I just played that song. It was released yesterday. Who knew that I was a Swifty? I turned it up loud and my whole car was thumping with the heartbeat and I cried. Why did I cry?
Life is not linear. Grief is circular, and it goes away and it comes back and there are steps to the grieving process, right, do you know about these steps?
There's anger and denial and bargaining and acceptance and more. I can't think of them off the top of my head, but you know it's not a straight line. We don't check off each step and then we're done. In fact I've read that with each grieving episode, with each event that occurs in your life, that makes you feel grief, You're feeling grief for that and for every grief that you haven't felt fully before. So all the times that I have felt aching sadness, loss, rejection, pain every time requires a great deal of processing and compassion for myself and love and gentleness and patience. And I don't know about you, but I don't have time for that. I want to grieve and be done, get it over with. But it doesn't work that way and it's not up to me how I process it or how quickly I can move through the stages. I don't get to choose, I don't get to decide.
So in the last few months I've had some grieving to do. I've had the grieving of a loss of a relationship Super painful the loss of oh yeah, that fucking song the loss of someone important to me and also the loss of my community because I moved away from a place that I lived for 25 years, the loss of my career that I left, and other things too. And I'm not saying that I didn't choose all of that because I did. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to grieve it. You know it's loss.
Even if I choose to leave a relationship, even if I choose to stop interacting with a person, even if I choose to leave a long-term career or my home or my community, it still aches. Sometimes. I can miss all of those things. I can feel sadness about it. Humans are complex, right?
You can feel all kinds of feelings at once. That's emotional intelligence. You can feel sad and happy and relieved, and afraid and hopeful all at once. You're amazing in that way. Give yourself permission.
I've been giving myself permission to grieve, to feel sadness in many, many layers, and I have cried and I have journaled and I have read books and I have listened to music and I've shared with others. And then I feel like, okay, I'm good, I'm done, I'm done, now Time to move forward. And then it comes back, it resurfaces, like today in the car, completely unexpected, someone said hey, listen to this song that was just released yesterday. Okay, just hanging out here ready to go grocery shopping, it seemed like a fun few minutes that I would spend before I went inside and it wrecked me. And I know this. I know that I can handle it. I know that running from the discomfort of my feelings doesn't make them go away, it just stuffs them down.
So yeah, I guess you know I have in the past done a lot of things to avoid feeling grief, to avoid feeling sadness, to avoid feeling air quote you know negative feelings. Yeah, I have done that. Humans do that. Many of us are afraid to sit in that discomfort. So I have drank alcohol to excess, I have taken drugs not to feel. I have spent money, I've had sex so that I didn't have to feel grief. I have filled my schedule with busyness. I have put on toxic positivity, right, that armor of everything's great, everything's fine, I'm fine, you're fine, everything's fine. None of those things help me heal and grow.
Running away from that emotional pain, putting up walls to resist it, that just keeps me stuck. Are you running from sadness? Are you pushing it down? Are you pretending it doesn't exist?
It'll come out. It'll come out somewhere else. The real healing, the real personal growth is to sit with it, to appreciate it, to ask it questions. Welcome the grief in, love it. That might sound just ridiculous to you, but my experience has been that when I do it, I come out the other side stronger, more joyful, clearer about who I am Experiencing. Grief and sitting with it allows me to grow and change and become an integrated whole person.
So, yeah, I'm sitting in my car crying to Taylor Swift. I give myself permission to do that and already I feel lighter. Just in the last I don't know how long I've been recording, 10 minutes or so, it's okay. That feeling of sadness and emotional discomfort that's not going to kill me, not feeling it chips away at me in ways that I just don't want. So listen to the song. Maybe you will cry.