Partying in your twenties when you're grieving...

Part two of my conversation with Rachel Wilson on quarter-life grief...

Photo by Antoine J. on Unsplash

We spend so much time in our own heads. There are times I find it excruciating. I write because it’s as if I am clawing at my brain matter, smearing it on a page. I need to get it out, I need release. After writing I often feel as if my body has clicked into a new state, and the world has a golden edge to it. Plants wink at me, trees wave. Promise returns. I’m content in my slow edge towards my future.

How else can I reach that state? That purge of emotion? Jumping into sharp, cold water. Lifting something very heavy. Helping someone who needs it. But… also… holding my arms up to a rainstorm, encased in a crowd. Being flooded by liquid smoke, awash in blue lights. Feeling a stranger’s sweat drip onto my back.

I held a party the night of my mum’s funeral. My bedroom became a hot box, and I crammed myself into it, leaning into the foggy arms of the friends who loved me the most. I was about to enter into a new decade: my twenties and I wanted the opportunity to be brand new, the chance to reinvent myself over and over again. I wanted to be naïve. To chase love, experience… to tumble into heartache, dust myself off again and keep going.

That was an impossible dream.

I was carrying a head full of conflicting, scrambled emotions. I had so many wounds and I could never repair them. But, that didn’t stop me from trying. I didn’t know about water/weights/writing back then, I did what everyone else did: fired back shots of tequila and let the vibration of the club carry my crumbling heart away… For a few hours, at least.

I didn’t see grief like this. I didn’t know whether what I was doing was normal, or if it was damaging. Everyone else was behaving the exact same way… but they hadn’t just lost their mum. Even today, 18 years later, I’m deeply conflicted – I party more than my friends do, is that because I haven’t grown up? Am I trapped in a never-ending loop as I try to resolve issues from my past in sticky dive bars? Do I crave dangerous adventure because life is so damn short? I don’t know. It’s tiring overthinking.

What I wish I had done sooner is seek out other young grievers. Those who were facing the exact same thing as me. Who could say “yeah me too,” which is something I found myself doing, to words on a page, when I read chapter two of Rachel Wilson’s Losing Young: How To Grieve When Your Life Is Just Beginning. I’ve highlighted and underlined quotes, from people like me, who found themselves seeking respite in partying. The tug and the pull of the happiness it can bring, but also the deep lows that come with it.

There’s Ben who lost his mum at 24. After her death he soaked himself in disco lights, dancing in queer spaces, losing himself, his mind to the beat…

“I wanted to feel surrounded by love. I wanted to feel joy. Some of that joy was artificial and chemical as fuck, but it was a relief. It was the opposite of death, you know?... It took the numbness away, allowed me to feel physically present… Mum would have loved me to have taken those moments of happiness where I could find them.”

Then there’s Mia whose mum died when she was 18, after being in and out of remission for cancer since she was two years old…

“I had been a pretty good teenager, but I started going out drinking all the time, and going to all the parties that I could. Because I was 18 people just thought I was so fun… Everyone drinks at uni but for me I didn’t have a healthy outlook with anything or anyone. I slept with a lot of people. I hung around with people I shouldn’t have… I wasn’t very happy…

But it was the first year of uni – you’re supposed to be drinking all the time. I had no idea it was a mask for my grief. One time I got so drunk and felt so sad, I just threw mugs all over our student house. It seems obvious now it was an expression of grief that I wasn’t facing but no one around me at that age understood it, beyond me being a bit mad and strange. Sometimes I wish I could go back and explain it to them.”

I have been both Ben and Mia. Partying has given me beautiful, brilliant and freeing moments, moments when I have stood and known I’m in the exact right place, living the life I should. But it has also pulled me deep into despair, into holes that felt impossible to claw out of. Seeing myself in both of their stories has helped me understand that my behaviour was natural. I was living in the way that I had been taught and I’ve learned from it.

It's why what Rachel is doing, both with her book, and The Grief Network – a support group for young grievers – is so important. We need to be able to see ourselves in others, and, as we talk about below, that’s incredibly hard to find…

Find part one of our interview here if you missed it. And please order her brilliant book, it’s available here and out now.  

I was so grateful that you broached the tricky nuances when it comes to alcohol and partying, when you’re young and grieving. And thank you for quoting me (Rachel quotes this newsletter where I discuss my own complicated relationship with alcohol).

When I wrote that piece I didn’t want it to look like I was promoting something unhealthy, but I wanted to be honest about how unhealthy behaviours are also a natural part of grief. It was a way to work through my own shame. How did you navigate that in the chapter? 

Drinking was something I thought was quite distinct about [my] grief and what my life looks like. And it's what lots of young people's lives look like but then you have the criticism that that's a big overgeneralisation, that 20-somethings aren’t just going out drinking all the time. But, it’s just that a large part of socialising is going to the pub and being in big groups of friends. Then there’s this split between wanting to be young, wanting to be able to go to the pub with your friends but also feeling as if that’s a trivial want [after facing loss.]

For me, it felt more straightforward because my mum was very: “you have to keep living your life. I want you to go out and be happy. I want you to enjoy yourself.” So when I was doing these things, I felt like it was totally sanctioned and I was doing stuff that my mum would have approved of. Quite early on I came across Julia Samuel who basically said you still need a break from your grief. And so actually, where your friends can be helpful is that they can take you out and distract you, if you're feeling up to it. I leaned into that and felt that that it was an okay thing to go and do. But I also know that a lot of young people have faced a lot of judgement for partying. One of the girls I spoke to in the book, who lost her very first boyfriend in car accident,  said she felt like if she went driving around town that everyone would be looking at her and thinking “why have even left the house? Why aren't you at home like crying and grieving and being sad?” And if she was out with her friends, as a normal 18 year old, they’d be like “what are you doing?”

Then there’s the huge misconception that you've gone off the rails. But [young people] get drunk and go out, you can have lost someone and still be going out and getting drunk and it's not always problematic. Sometimes it is but it's also a normal behaviour that young people should feel that they can do it without feeling ashamed or guilty about. All of this taps into the big question of: “how should someone grieve? What does it look like to you?” Because we have only like, depictions of people either going off and becoming unhinged like Fleabag which I love but, I don’t think is a very good depiction of grief.

I agree, I could only begin to enjoy it if I began to lose the idea that it was going to be something I could accurately see my own grief within… 

I think the second series does a bit better, as engages a bit more with the audience knowing what she’s going through. But, for the first season, you don't even know her best friend is dead. How can you know that what she's doing is a form of working through her grief? I think we have really bad illustrations and, when you’re young, they might be the only resource you have to say this how you should be grieving. So if you don't fall off the like wagon then you think you're doing something wrong and if you do you think you're a mess. That's why we need a lot more depictions of what it looks like to grieve in general and obviously also for young people because that is a tricky thing I think to navigate. 

Mia, who you interviewed, said that she was creating these OTT dramatic scenarios in her head, which, looking back, she thought was funny as what she was going through was already dramatic! I used to do the same, I’d picture myself as this tragic, hot mess character and be so annoyed with myself that I wasn’t going through my grief in this almost glamorous, vulnerable way… Which, obviously, is because my only references to grief were from TV and film. Do you think any media gets it right? 

The one I always reference, even though it's not about grief, is I May Destroy You. It's about sexual assault, but she makes the drama out of the recovery from a trauma, rather making the traumatic experience the drama. It goes through her healing process and I think that's done so amazingly showing all the different feelings in the aftermath of something so difficult, and how the show’s root is the cyclical nature of healing. The fact that you can have a few good days and then you have another bad day, and then you can have a few good weeks and then you have a really, really shit week. It allows the viewer to look at what a healing journey actually looks like. And there is no destination, there’s no end point there's just coping and trying to get out, trying to get out of the thick of it and into a place where you've begun to sort of adapt.

I also really loved This Is Us – I thought the show captured really well the long-term impact of losing a parent when you're young. I couldn't get through an episode without crying and I know it's written to be like that, but I found the episodes particularly about the anniversary of their father's death hit home so hard for me. It's not the kind of show I would normally watch but in terms of the legacy of a formative loss, I think it gets it spot on.

You mentioned in the book that you've had therapy, but you also speak to others who, kind of similar to my experience, fear what it might bring up, and how intense it could be. And I just wondered what have been some of the benefits for you?

I'd already had some experiences of therapy and how useful it could be and so I think I was always open minded to the fact that it would probably help me at some point. I think I had some when my mum was ill but, to be honest, I didn't really find it all that helpful because I just felt in terms of sitting with your feelings it’s already so overwhelming. It's like “I’m constantly beleaguered by bad feelings, I can’t feel them any more.” Then I had a little bit, about nine months after my mum died, [but] I didn’t stick long enough in those sessions. I think the one takeaway with that was that I was told by therapist, “I have to be an adult now.” And she pointed out that I can still have people look after me, I don’t have to do it all alone. That was nice. 

It’s good having a place to feel that you can say what you need to say and feel heard and validated. I think it helped me to be a lot kinder to myself, I don't know how true it is of everyone, but I do think during grief you start being quite shitty to yourself. [You tell yourself] you should be doing this or you should not be behaving this way or you should be responding this way. But five years down the line, I think there's probably still some way for me to go with grief, [particularly] how it's affected my family so I can understand people's fear about what it's going to bring out. As the longer it’s been the more painful it can feel, for me anyway, it feels almost more intensely painful now than it used to be. The other side of that is that [time passing means] you can function more in your day-to-day life not constantly thinking about your loss. But it also means that the moment you do think about it, and the older you get, you realise how much you have lost. I think you are constantly in the process of realising how bad it is. Confronting that is the ongoing process of being like: “oh no, I have to grieve the fact that she's not here for this thing, or I have to grieve the fact that I’ve achieved something and I can’t show it to her.” It’s like this constant buildup of things that are quite intense. I think I probably still have quite a lot of unpacking to do.

I recently attended a friend’s birthday and her family were so amazing. I loved her mum so much and we had the nicest day, but a few days later I noticed how off I was feeling, how I was slipping back into dangerous coping mechanisms… and then I realised it was because I’d spent the day being faced with what I can now never have. And, like you say, you can cope most of the time, but then something hits and it’s like… I don’t know… not good… 

I think these moments can take you right back to when you were young. I’ll suddenly feel like I’m 25 again and I need people to treat me like that. Those moments are really intense. I think these are the things that people who lose someone later in life might not understand. Because by the time you’re older your parents have been at every big thing, or at least the majority. 

We are having to not only grieve the person lost, but also all the lost moments and experiences as well…

In one chapter you speak to someone who lost his friend, and how the friendship group all responded really differently.  I always think that's so interesting, because as you know, from The Grief Network, it's so important for us to find people that have gone through grief so that we can relate to them. But, at the same time, everyone handles these things in such a different way.

I find as I've got older, people turn to me and ask “oh, I need some advice on how to deal with this person's grief”. And I feel so ill equipped to answer as I don’t know, I don’t know their grief. The way that I dealt with things will be completely different for how they dealt with things. What do you think is the best way to navigate conversations around loss?

Within a friendship group losing someone who was very much part of the dynamic of the group is similar to losing someone within a family. But you can’t necessarily rely on the people going through the same thing as you, as they’ve all lost someone too. All your styles of grief are going to be very different. I certainly found that my friends who didn't know my mum very well were much better at supporting me than my family. Whereas before I had lost my mom, I used to think oh, well, “the family all rally around each other.” 

I've even heard of people who have lost someone at a young age and then found themselves getting less close to someone who has been through a similar thing soon after. Because you're incapable of supporting one another in the way that’s needed. But with supporting people if you're not bereaved yourself, I think that's just a matter of acknowledging that the loss is there and it’s big. That’s the cardinal rule.  Otherwise I agree. I think it's very difficult to give hard and fast advice because some things that I found helpful other people, aren’t for others. 

I remember talking to one girl who said: “I really like it when people say, ‘I can't imagine what you're going through’, because she thought that that was an acknowledgement of how big it was. But I don’t like that. To me, it’s as if someone’s saying “I’m not even going to try and begin to connect with what you’re going through and therefore I’m not even going to try.”

So I think the main thing is acknowledging and also not diminishing what people are saying. I think people will rush to say things like “you won't feel this way forever.” If you haven't been bereaved, then you can't possibly say that with any knowledge. Because also, nine times out of 10 when I speak to other people who've been bereaved at a young age, they're like “well that's just not to true, as you will feel pain about this, to some degree, forever.” I like just sitting and listening to people and not trying to modify what they say.

But between bereaved people it's a bit harder because you each are going through things and what you might want from that person might be something they can’t offer. I think if you want to kind of retain the friendship or the connection that you have, you just have to be very forgiving of each other. But it’s tough if you've got very conflicting kind of grief styles.

For people who haven't been bereaved, I think the two big things are acknowledging it and  active listening. Which is very, very important because otherwise, you don't want someone that's just like humming along and then offering you platitudes. Also know that people can play different roles. I didn't need every single one of my friends to be someone that was going to sit and have a cry with me. Some of them showed their support by doing the things that we would normally do together which would be like go out and go to the club or do whatever. Some friends would invite me to things and even try to make light of the situation in a way that was acknowledging the humour [in it]. Not all support looks the same, support is very unique to what your relationship with that person is. You can kind of lean into that whilst avoiding diminishing their feelings. Also everyone I spoke to was like, “I get it I get it's fucking weird. I get it's difficult to say the right thing.” We know that no one can offer perfect support, and minds can’t be read. That’s also where grief support groups come in because then you just go to someone that you know will understand. You can kind of vent that in a space where people will get it.

What do you think? What are some good examples of grief you’ve read or watched? Let me know in the comments below!