Here you are. Grateful. Scared. Angry.
You danced around your apartment, violently swinging your arms and legs, hoping to bypass what you knew intellectually was coming, but was desperate to bypass emotionally — the undulating stages of grief.
They do not come in predictable patterns, these stages. They come and go on a seemingly nonsensical whim. When in actuality, they are usually right on time. Like high maintenance dinner guests you know you must entertain. Guests that no matter how well you set your table, will leave your house looking like an F5 tornado hit.
So what do you do to brace for the inevitable storm you know is coming? You spend hours at your computer creating online classes, working your heart out until your shoulders round forward in an aching hunch, feeling your eyes grow blurry and cross until you can no longer see straight from staring at screens from morning til’ night.
You workout to help move anger and grief through the body. Pushing so much that the strain of it wakes you up in the middle of the night, your back stinging and aching but your mind and heart still full of fear and feelings.
All of this is met with insane amounts of gratitude for people who have reached out to support you. Gratitude for people you haven’t even met, but you know are putting their lives on the line everyday to save others and keep you safe. And so here you are; living in a paradox of gratitude and grief. Wanting to reciprocate just how much you feel loved, but desperately needing to sit still while tears stream relentlessly down your face.
Do you dare to enjoy the sting of these hot, cathartic rivers as they run over your cheeks? To savour their saltiness on your tired tongue. To feel your chest heave and release the weight of sadness. A weight you didn’t even realize you were carrying until it slowly started to lift.
You know in your heart of hearts, these tears are a salve. They are the soul healing itself. And a soul can only heal itself if you get out of the way. Let yourself cry. Let yourself feel and exist in the midst of this turmoil.
So today you let yourself feel. The single most terrifying thing all humans must do. The single most freeing thing all humans must do.
This is the paradox of grief – it is terrifyingly freeing.
And so your gift to yourself and to the world around you today will be to do just this: grieve. For if you do not grieve, if you do not let yourself feel, it will be transferred either consciously or unconsciously to others. And that you do not want.
My grieve is my gift to bear and breathe through. To let burn through me and ignite me to my core. I will let the tornado hit. I will let it bring what feels like chaos, while trusting that what looks like wreckage is actually renewal. Renewal I am still telling to go fuck itself. Renewal that one day, when I am ready, I will call my good friend.
But until that day comes, I will grieve.
