I once stumbled upon an image that now I regret I lost. It showed a Venn diagram with two circles, one circle was your personality. The second, smaller and inside the first one but definitely took most of the space of it, was grief.
Now, most people think that over time the grief gets smaller. But that’s not true at all. The grief doesn’t change, it stays there. But, if you grow as a person, as your personality gets larger, while the grief is the same size, it starts to take less space inside you.
This is why the worst thing one person can do about grief is doing nothing. If you do nothing, and you stay the same, the grief will always hurt the same.
But if you start to move, slowly at first as you must. And grieve when you have to. And laugh when you have to. Connect with others, and slowly start moving forward and growing and learning again. You the grow, and the grief little by little, takes less space. And it still hurts, but it hurts a little less.
LedgeDrop@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I don’t have advice, but I can share my experiences.
When I was young, a family member died (cancer): I soldiered through it. Yes, there were some tears shed, but by and large I just pushed through it.
Fast forward 10+ years, I always felt I never really “processed” it. At least on an emotional level, I was always detached and not really “present”. It’s been something, I wanted and have been trying to address, but with limited success.
Recently, a close friend was diagnosed with cancer (probably terminal). I am a point in time in life, where I don’t need to soldier on. I’ve emotional grown confident enough, that this time - I’m allowing myself to sit with this pain.
Words cannot express the gut-wrenching sorrow it brings. …yet, I welcome and allow it. I tell myself that the depth of the sorrow, is relative to the depth of love I have for this person and that I’m capable of carrying. How painfully beautiful it is to “feel” in this moment. At moments, there is a certain catharsis in all the tears being shed.
I’ve started to play the guitar, just so I can play Smashing Pumpkins “Landslide”. I can’t sing and I can’t play, but I can channel that sorrow into those lyrics in a way, I could never before.
And as much as all this hurts - it also feels healthy, it feels human.
One thing I did was, share this with the people I work with. Not necessarily the deals (effectively what I shared here). I told my boss, it will impact my performance and might require some flexibility in my schedule as I want to be able to support my friend. For me, this was an (accidental) wise move: I’m not expected to “keep it together” …try as I might, I am failing: anger bleeds out in unexpected ways, I miss details on tasks (cause I’m not focused). And that is “okay”, I apologize, people understand the why - some share their tales of grief - and we move on.
tl;dr : give yourself permission to feel, to mourn. Bring people into your life. Be “proud” that the sorrow you carry is purely a reflection of your capacity to love. Hiding from it, suppressing it, won’t make it go away.