Good Grief
I get a lot of writing newsletters sent to my inbox. I’ll sign up for them because at the moment, I’m thinking I’ll somehow benefit from the content in them, but more often than not I end up deleting them the moment I glance over the subject line. This morning one of them caught my eye.
“How do you write through grief?”
Hm.
I feel like this is when I write best. It’s easier for me to write through times of hurt and loss because I’m familiar with those topics. I know how to navigate life with them always being at the forefront, which isn’t to make anyone feel poorly for me - this is just the way it was. Happiness and joy were not naturally created feelings within me for some time but were what was longed for.
Lately, my life has been on the up you could say. I landed the job I spent months interviewing for and I’m happy to be learning something completely new from the comfort of my home. The money and benefits (therapy!!) are great too. It’s my second week and so far, I’ve got nothing but good things to say, which is the first time I can say that about a job I’ve had. I’m so grateful and proud of myself.
I’ve got friends. Not just one, but a couple now. Very good ones at that. It’s still early on, but to feel like I’ve got folks to call on, and want to be called from, is great. I go out from time to time and experience the life I thought I was going to have when I moved to Chicago years ago, or at least the beginnings of one.
I’m reflecting on these good things because it’s important for me to maintain gratitude for all that I have and have done to be where I am as well as for those who’ve helped me continuously throughout. I just thought of the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child” and I’m wondering if the same could be said for adulthood, but tweaked just a bit.
It takes a community to support the individual.
When I started writing this morning, it was my intention to essentially complain about how it’s harder for me to write during times of happiness. I haven’t felt inspired lately and that’s, in part, due to me not setting time aside to write each day as I’ve done for 80+ days in a row. I don’t necessarily need to be inspired to write because there’s always something tumbling around in my brain, it just gets so repetitive and I’d hate for others to judge me for that. Then again, I shouldn’t care about what others think. Sometimes I do, it happens.
I realized I never answered the question of how I write through grief. I do think that’s when I write best and that’s because I began writing at a time in my life when everything was upside down always. I wrote in the back bedroom of this little tin trailer during the summer I was 13. I wrote about all of the things no one wanted to talk about because everyone wanted to feel normal when we could. When there wasn’t an active hurt happening in my family, the past was immediately disregarded and not talked about. Writing gave me the chance to talk about what no one else would. I think that’s why my memories are preserved in the way that they are. I talk to my siblings about the things we’ve gone through now that we’re adults. They often ask how I’m able to remember all of this, and the answer is really because I journaled about it all from an early enough age.
All that to say, writing about grief, though indirectly at times, and then writing through grief are most comfortable to me because I get to be raw and people can justify that rawness because the subject matter, society tells us, permits it.