Grief

My intention was to write short intros for these old essays but I find myself contemplating what has passed since the time of writing. A few weeks ago, in conversation with a friend I mentioned that I couldn’t clearly remember the time after I had a breakdown, not how terrible the grief was, how intense the fear that I could not see a way forward and just did not know how to be a person. Reading the essay below, I do remember how it was and I’m glad that I wrote it and others too. I’m also glad that I now remember, because I see how, over the last three years since writing, so much has changed but also much has been revealed that cannot be changed. Learning to live with but not obfuscate or dwell on or avoid difficult memories and experiences, this is something that takes time. I’ll talk about this in following posts, for now I’ll share a few thoughts on grief and healing .

The essay is below the subscribe invitation.

Grief is an essential acceptance and validation of our long buried denial. As I wrote in this piece below, the tears burn their way into our reality, opening us to how much pain we have squashed down inside, that in our self blame was impossible to release.

For me grief came in waves, each episode of sorrow emptied me a little more and helped me see more clearly the false belief in my innate corruption.

Since I wrote this, I have allowed not just grief but anger and hatred too, though these powerful emotions never stay for long. There have also been periods of incredible breakthroughs that I never imagined could be a reality for me. Presence, stability, vision, an effortless peace where possibilities that had always been impossibilities were clear choices to be fearlessly made. Yet beneath it all there is still sorrow, both intimately felt and profoundly shared. This sorrow is not mine and maybe not even ours, it is the sorrow of this world.

So to me, healing is not the ending of pain, not joy, not happiness but equilibrium. The capacity for equanimity within the ebb and flow of experience. To be consciously present, neither refusing nor holding.

In a few of these old essays and also in my older videos, I describe the journey toward this state as disappearance.

What disappears was never truly real, it was more of a projection, a compensation, what remains is the simple revelation of truth.

WIP

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The essay.

Over the last couple of years, while experiencing intense episodes of grief, I cried the most real tears of my life. I felt like a block of granite being crushed under immense pressure just to squeeze from it the tiniest drop of moisture.

I don’t know whether those tears burned so much because of the salt or the intensity of what they contained. The distillation of a lifetime of heartbreak and sorrow.

Breakdown was catastrophic but also the best thing that ever happened to me. It was the essential disintegration of the coping identity.

As I shattered and literally fell to my knees, the I that I thought I was, the I that I tried so desperately to be, dissolved into the little boys scream of anguish. There, was only pain, pain that for a lifetime had defined me.

What is the essence of that pain but the betrayal of innocence at the heart of childhood trauma.

Words will always fall short of describing what that betrayal does to us, how it lives in our thoughts and behaviour, how, though we crush that anguish down inside us so deeply that even we forget its there, the dark intensity of its weight becomes a gravity well of grief we simply cannot afford to feel but feel it we must.

Grief brings a full and final acceptance of the loss we feared to acknowledge. The loss of so much. The loss of love that we wanted to give, the loss of love we needed to receive, the loss of a life, the loss of our ability to find true belonging but most of all, it is the loss of ourself.

We blame ourself and in this blame is the cruelty of self hate and the apology for our presence in the world.

“ am I allowed to be here, am I allowed to be me “ The answer comes “ no, you are not enough “

So, in desperation we make up a person, we contort and contrive a succession of brittle and hollow personas, all of which serve only to draw us away from that grief in the centre of our being but in the unrealness of it all, we continually fall backwards into the unbearable ache of inner desolation.

There, in the depths of grief is the truest part of us.

In exhaustion, surrender is the ending of denial and the beginning of discovering who you really are, who you’ve always been but just couldn’t accept. It is the scream of the child that has waited a lifetime to be given a voice.

“ I AM HERE, LET ME LIVE “

You are here, so be here, without apology or plea, inhabit your self.

Be.

The drawing is by Veronique.