WYG Day 30

 WYG Day 30

Because I love me…

One of the things I have learned about in the last 30 days is that grief is not just about grief. It’s not just about the deep sadness that comes from losing a person who was important to you, a pet that was important to you, or a part of your life that is irreplaceable. It’s actually about love.

And actually that’s what life is about, right? Love. Even in death, there is love. There is love in how we react to our loved one’s death. Even in those first awful moments and weeks and months after, when we will our breath to cease, or at least maybe just let us not exist in this prickly, sticky, dark and deep world of grief. There is love to how we try to take who they are and make it a part of what we put out into the world. 

Toward the end of the month, I realized I was feeling lighter, and I was regarding myself with a lot less self loathing. My brain was still getting down on me for not doing the things I should have been doing while I was in depths of first grief, but that’s because my brain is broken and I am working on it. But I’ve been regarding those things that my brain says with less seriousness, with less Yes-I-need-to-not-be-so-lazy. It’s been a hard couple months, and it was hard to just exist and survive, let alone work and be a mom and a wife and a writer (although I did better with that last one than the other things). 

Having anxiety and a brain with a penchant for saying the most negative things about who I am is hard, and I am in therapy for it, and therapy is trying to help me learn to love myself. Learn to live with my anxiety in such a way that I don’t let it defeat me. And learning to love myself is one of the ways I can defeat anxiety. Actually, not defeat. Anxiety is like grief–some people just have anxiety that shows up one day and just stays forever. You can’t get rid of it. It’s a part of who you are. But you can learn to manage it.

And it’s similar to grief in the respect that it’s not something to get rid of, but something you learn to live with. I don’t know if you actually learn to manage grief. Grief is an altogether different animal.

I am going to continue to remember the things I have learned about grief and about love from this course. I think I am going to be okay–and it’s not because I was never going to be okay after this. Obviously I am a different person since the day of Sarah, Lula, and Tyler’s murder, in the same way I was a different person the day my father died, my mother died, Ryan broke my heart, Jeremy walked out on me, Jenni died, Scott made me believe I was a terrible human being and that I could never be worth anything to anyone, let alone as a friend. Each grief shattered me and I had to put myself back together.

The difference this time is that I didn’t let the way the world treat grief take me down. I didn’t try to get rid of it. I learned to understand more about it, and as I continue to grow with my grief, I know I will understand more about it. I will continue to love my friend and live her through me.