FRUSTRATION IN GRIEF
I found myself getting increasingly frustrated as I contemplated all that Mom, family, and I went through.
All the phone calls we had to make about wrapping up the active parts of my Dad’s life that ceased to exist. All the ways in which I felt proud to do it. And, those that made me feel unnoticed in the enormity of such a task.
How complex it is to put a period on the end of a life that meant and still means so much to you.
How invisible it feels to go through such a thing in a world that continues to turn, in a process that is no longer turning, while wishing, desperately, thunderously, that it was.
How convulsing it is to look through an explanation of benefits that describes the tumultuous and traumatizing final days of someone who meant more to you than you know how to feel or even express.
And to feel so misunderstood, so lost, so unrelatable, so hidden, so forgotten in a World that wants you to go on, and can’t relate or maybe even doesn’t want to, because our world is full of people who hold hard and fast to the sentiment that “Life must go on”.
But what do you do when it doesn’t?
What do you do when you can’t do anything but live in the progress of a life that has ended and unrelentingly continues to end, over and over again? With every day, breath, and task that must be completed to round it out like a slow and painful death, recurring endlessly for someone you love more than you know, how do you fully feel or even express?
I found myself angry. Better yet, enraged. I wanted someone to see me. Someone to know that while the world states that life must go on, the only thing that continues to be ongoing is that someone I love more than I know how to be with is gone, and I have to relive it every day as if it is something I should know how to do. But, I don’t.
And I am beyond frustrated. I am engulfed in it. I am mad that it happened and that I have to continue to relive it every day as if it is something I am supposed to know how to do and or should have to.
When I found myself on the other end of a series of text messages that I could give a fuck about, from someone who is dear to me, doing something that seems less than important, dare I say it mundane and unpromising, I felt it. The rage. The resentment. The isolation.
I’ve been here before. In the same feelings I have felt before in life when I am so invigorated by anger that the only thing I want to do is to lash out and to make others feel the same as me. Yet, I know I don’t. I know I don’t wish this pain on anyone. I know that on my worst day, I wouldn’t want to inflict even half of what I’m feeling on my worst enemy. Let alone, offer it to someone I love and trust. So why do I feel this way? Why do I want to project the frustration of my day-in and day-out for the last month onto anyone?
In a word: Avoidance.
I haven’t lost a parent before in my life. But I have experienced extreme trauma processing. I have dealt with the pain of avoiding myself, what I’m going through, and how I feel to the extent that I wasn’t able to feel anything, and therefore, I wanted someone, anyone, to tell me how to feel.
Someone, anyone to tell me that what I was feeling was right. Healthy. Someone, anyone to tell me that what I’m experiencing is tremendously painful, unrelenting, and devastating, and how I feel is allowed; how I feel is important; how I feel deserves to be acknowledged.
There are many things I could say about being with grief, but the only thing that seems to befit its true magnitude is that it demands to be felt. It will take nothing less than fullness and if it doesn’t get it, it will come back for you to claim its rightful spotlight until you give it what it wants. It’s dignity. It’s place. It’s wisdom. And until you do, you will not only be compromised in feeling you, feeling it, but also being able to feel consciously, responsibly with other people.
Tonight, as I felt the fury of emotion bubbling up within me, and resentment beginning to boil over into what felt like an impending projected, attack, I saw it. I saw grief rearing its head and saying, if what you want is to be seen by other people, by people whom you care about in order to feel cared about by them, then how much of you is genuinely feeling you?
How much of you is acknowledging the bigness and layers of what you experienced today?
How much of you is allowing the frustration and hurts of today’s grief to be real, observed, validated, and even loved?
For the past few days, I’ve been listening to people talk about getting back to appreciating the joy in everyday life with judgment on whether or not I’m doing that. I’ve been witnessing people confirm their plan of action in moving on wondering if I have one, will I notice it, and what I plan to do if I don’t have one soon. I’ve been privy to people in the motion of their lives, making progress in the land of the living and questioning how I’ll know when it’s time for me to move forward.
A common factor in all of these observations is that I’m not them and I’m not there yet.
Another commonality is that I don’t know when I will be. I don’t know if I’m ready. And, all other shit in life seems far less important to me than grieving the loss of someone who is and was the epicenter of my Universe and I guess I’ve been frustrated at the fact that I don’t care how that looks or sounds, and yet, I guess I do.
What I know right now is that I want to love myself through this, through grief, through all things, in a way that allows me to feel full and healed within my healing. I want to choose what feels intuitively right for me irrespective of what others are doing or how they’re doing it in their way, and whether or not it makes sense to anyone but me. I want to allow myself to call out what feels unimportant and what does— without the frustration that feels the need for validation from anyone else but me.
But, I’m realizing that in order to do any of this, I’m going to need to validate that what I’m going through is a lot. It is frustrating. It is painful. And, it matters. I matter. What I need matters. How I feel matters. And how I feel about how I feel, matters.
Today, I learned that in order to process the frustrations that come with grief, that include existing in a society that encourages us to move on from it, get back to life, and live in a way that proves we’re capable of progress, and doesn’t feel like a world that I want to progress in at all.
And maybe that is the point I’m meant to see and develop within myself.
That progress shouldn’t have to come at the cost of our mental, emotional and physical well-being. It shouldn’t have to feel like something we need to be witnessed in by someone else as valid in order to be validated by ourselves. It shouldn’t have to be something that operates or becomes permissible on a timetable that coincides with getting through it quickly to prove our stability or the quality of human we are.
Frustration happens when we are not giving ourselves the space to Be.
It happens when we don’t feel allowed or validated within ourselves to be true in our human experience and therefore, can be identified only after we express it by lashing out at other people, or by showing up to reality before we’re ready for the sake of optics, or by seeking validation for our truths from anyone outside of ourselves. It is the result of feeling disallowed to take up space honestly. And, out of fear, that what we take-up for Self is in the wrong way, at the wrong time, or in a way that is too much, too long, or unsavory.
The frustration that built up in me today showed me that I’m still in the thick of my grief and I need to allow myself to know that.
I need to continue to allow myself to go at my own pace in it and with it because I am still moving through some pretty heavy shit. This grief isn’t just some surface-level shit. It is for someone who lived in the core of my Soul, my heart, my DNA, my Dad. It will be ongoing forever in some ways. I know that.
But, in order for me to love myself through this in a way that feels stable and healthy, I can no longer dismiss the enormity of all that I am doing to process this experience other than to allow myself to acknowledge when it feels like a lot; when it feels heavy; when it feels unrelenting and unforgiving; when it feels like everything else in the world pales to compare to this experience—both good and bad, whether or not anyone else agrees with that.
What matters is how I feel, what I need, what I think, and whatever I am experiencing in these moments, be it frustration, bittersweet, or anything else in between.
It doesn’t matter what others think about it because I am the one living in this body through it, so all that matters is what Shannon says… and that’s because I am in the middle of this. I am the one living it.
No one else needs to buy into where I’m at in this moment or other moments, from now until forever,… as long as I do. It’s true for me. And, whenever you’re ready to access the depths of self-validity, it also gets to be true for you.
With Blessings,
