A journey through grief

Grief

The fight to heal from grief has been one I’ve trudged through like a soldier entering their last battle. With fear and courage, I take every step through the mud filled with regret, pride, and awe. You lose yourself to grief, and the reward at the end of the journey is supposed to be finding yourself again. Beautiful, isn’t it, the things you find in this search for yourself? That is, until you’ve lost your way in the search for something meaningful.

I speak from the heart as I always have, but how does one speak from something so broken? How does one get so lost in the memory of someone else, in the midst of their search for themselves? I’ve learned the hard way that grief is a personal journey, and love has a habit of deterring us from our good-willed, personal motives.

I don’t regret this journey of trying to find myself. After all, it started with you, and my heart fails to forget that with every step I take.

The Heartbreak

Losing someone is only hard to accept because of what happens after. In my experience, the heartbreak just gets worse and worse, and maybe a little worse before it gets better. Spend years denying that heart-wrenching pain, and it becomes this disgusting roach inside your chest that thrives off your blissful unawareness.

It’ll enjoy leaking into the other parts of your life until it becomes your entire life. When I was finally forced to confront my own heartbreak, there was nothing I could do to change the circumstances that led me there. I was drowning with no life raft in sight. Scary, isn’t it?

The pain that strikes me is unwavering. I feel it grow as I stare courageously at my own fate. My story writes itself beyond my control, and each page turns on its own. The deeper I go, the further away I am from you—whom I struggle to live without.

My insides crumble at the sight of you. I mourn the parts of my heart that used to be free. I crave the hope that used to feel like air beneath my feet. I miss what felt so real, I could nearly touch it. And the worst part is, I almost did.

Now, like a phantom, I’m soaring aimlessly through the wild, helplessly detached from my body. Clipped from its vessel, she lives to see a day not drowned in sorrow and regret. She hopes to feel like more than filth or failure, or not enough for you. She yearns for life as it was before.

Enough

Left breathless and deprived, there’s little room in the realm of possibility to redeem your sense of self-worth after heartbreak. You might believe there is, but not for someone who’s felt like nothing for too long.

Trapped in the depths of grief, any sane person internalizes this feeling of being unworthy of real love. The pain-propagating occurrences that led me here are fate incurred by the hands of God, and my heartbreak becomes the gospel. I can’t help but believe I deserve this pain for a simple (arguably vague) reason: I am not enough.

Repeating this to myself has led me nowhere helpful, let me tell you. I’ve laid witness to some curious corners of life, and the people hiding out in those corners couldn’t be any worse than me. Like finds like, and those like me aren’t spelling a unique narrative. We’re all preaching to the choir of our own unworthiness and paving the paths to our failure as a result.

The wilderness beneath my mind hides as many skeletons as there are gems. Navigating grief and heartbreak means staring directly at the skeletons and embracing them. It means recognizing the gems and appreciating them. Just because I can sum the concept up with a few pretty words doesn’t mean I know how to do it. Actually, far from that. Far, far, far… you get it.

Years of self-loathing have taught me how to look at my own skeletons with a stellar eye for imperfection. I lust for every flaw inside me and frame it with a pretty bow attached. I keep them in a shrine and visit my collection regularly. It’s a daily practice for anyone with a low sense of self-worth.

It’s really hard, arguably impossible, to rewire a habit that’s surpassed habitual and entered natural. It means stepping out of your head, from the infinity of incoherent thoughts, to enter a foreign, unadulterated perspective of yourself. For those who claim to have an ‘open mind’: it means finally having that same open mind about yourself.

Unbiased, unbothered by those supposed ‘facts’ about yourself, and unphased by the voices that reinstate your sense of unworthiness. It means entering a state of mind beyond all of that, and why the hell did I not realize this sooner? No, rather let me rot in the dark depths of my incoherent mind. Whatever, it was comfy while it lasted.

E-invite: Pain

Pain, you’re the friend that nobody likes but gets invited anyways. No matter how much time passes, you’re always somehow around. You’re committed, I’ll give you that. At some point, it’s just easier to accept that friend and come to see what the big deal is. So, I’m devoted to accepting you as an inevitable part of my life, pain.

I have a bad habit of getting into my head about things. Thinking is great until you’re helplessly trapped beneath a thousand layers of half-strung, incoherent thoughts, grasping for some resemblance of coherency. But the battle in my mind is a blissful escape from the one in my heart, especially after it’s been broken.

As my body craves to process the inevitable, my heart escapes in fear. My mind takes over, and I begin to intellectualize my pain instead of feeling it. I lose my heart in the process, but at this point, I don’t notice. It’s far too broken to notice. Everyone hits a crossroad at some point in their life, and mine was choosing between processing my pain and intellectualizing it. Of course, I picked the latter.

I had to reach my breaking point to break out of my own mind, and it happens with most people who have to learn their lessons the hard way. Tracing my way back to the root of my pain was a first step. Though admittedly, it led me nowhere helpful. No, when heartbreak threw me off the rails of life, rummaging through the dirt for a way back, the only thing that helped me was accepting my time in the dirt. I kicked at rocks, stepped on a few bugs (sorry), and got up to realize something even more heartbreaking: This is just how it had to be.

It still feels like I’m grasping at straws, searching for something coherent. I still feel like a phantom, mourning the time I’ve lost in pursuit of something intangible, but this phantom lives on faith alone. In truth, led by heartbreak, she searches for what she lost with the knowledge that she’ll never find it again. The pain is unwavering. The pain is unbearable.

As simple as it is, you don’t have a choice but to simply make note of that and invite the pain, regardless of how grey your vision of the world becomes.

Acceptance

As I rummage through the stray pieces of my broken heart, I find parts of me that I love and hate. I find admiration, rage, desire, regret, desperation, relief, and somewhere in that pile of broken pieces, I find acceptance. I struggle to touch that piece, because every time I try, it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

I’ve experienced grief at all different magnitudes in my life, but no matter how many times I experience it, grief never gets easier to manage. Each time is a different beast to tame, and acceptance isn’t as simple as it seems.

You’re never just accepting the loss of someone. You’re also accepting the entire journey that led you here. Every fault, flaw, and failure that presented itself on your journey to this point. You’re accepting your lack of control over the circumstances at hand. You’re accepting your love for that person, the inherent pain that comes with love, and the possibility of having to let go of that love for someone else. And not some distraction or forced failure, but real love. Trust me, hurdling over the fear of love that comes after grief is another beast of its own.

Into a million pieces, I’m destroyed by grief and hurled into a raging tornado. Desperately, I search for those missing pieces, but the harder I try, the faster it spins.

Just like the thoughts in my mind, the incoherency of life as it presents itself will always leave me stumped. There is no escaping that.

To Live

She yearns to escape the pull of your heart, the depth beneath your eyes, the wilderness of your mind. By the grace of God, she pleads for more than a memory. She prays for you.

To live is to feel, love, grow... the whole lot of complexities we aim to escape with every bone in our body. But to live is to learn, and let that be the foundation for everything you feel because you may just learn your way through.

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King