What's the point of grief?

Can I not escape reality forever...?!

Last Thursday I left my body. I haven’t been back since.

My departure began around 10.32pm, after a perfectly nice evening. And then… I want to say ‘she’ came to me. But that would be over simplifying the rush of everything that flooded through me that night. Each emotion I’d choked upon, for decades, acidified within my stomach, became a bile that managed to seep through into my veins, an all consuming rush that was far too much too handle. So my body did what it does best. It separated itself. 

Have you ever felt that way? Like your body departs itself from your brain? Or perhaps, most likely, it’s the other way around - your brain decides to float off, a tiny rebellion, as if it decides to untie itself and give your body permission to act entirely on past lessons? Hasn’t it been studying all these years? Surely it knows how to behave?

At first it did. I did. Words, actions, others, they floated over me and I responded accordingly, when it was needed of me. Perhaps a few people noticed, the odd “you seem distant” squashed quickly with a pre-recorded “I’m fine” followed by a false smile, so perfect it’s taken years to get just right. This stage is OK, this gentle yet numb plod through life. But (for me) the problems tend to begin when my brain tries to remind my body of its existence. It thought it wanted to be away… but has now decided to meddle. 

How does it manage? There’s the excess mugs of coffee (and by coffee, I’m being polite) to hammer at my heart, knocking frantically, “take notice, take notice, take notice.” Or, why don’t you open my Chrome browser, see “what are the symptoms of cervical cancer” ready and waiting within my search bar. My diaries are dusted off, full of old obsessions, if I can’t find a new one in time. 

I’ve been through this cycle so many times, eventually I know I will manage to snap out of it (don’t ask me how, I’m not quite sure and it differs each time.) It’s why I have mixed feelings about this detachment, and the so-called “unhealthy” coping mechanisms my being employs to get me through. I’m not saying partying to oblivion and indulging health anxiety until I cry in alleyways imagining my own funeral is “healthy” but what I am saying is I’ve also practiced the “good” (yoga, meditation, etc, etc) on rotation for weeks, and find I’m still in a bubble floating above my body. When (on the odd occasion) one night of “bad” can cause me to burst back into myself. 

The cycle feels shorter this time. I know (in a way) how to cope, stop the spiral. This escapism was a common theme of my twenties. Over that time I’ve functioned, thrived even. There’s no need to worry. But, I want to know (fully knowing the answer) why now? Why, after a long time of feeling if not complete, then close to it, have I reverted back to this old way of existing? It’s this new project. Pulling up the dusty relics of my reality, my own insistence to write about and examine grief - and share the findings. I know my first newsletter was all about accepting that grief will last forever. But (perhaps naively) I kind of meant the missing part. Not a hurricane back to a state of mind that’s understandable, questionable, enjoyable and horrendous all at once. 

I meticulously planned this newsletter, what I’d send out each week. Instead of reading this right now, you were meant to be reading a guest post from one of my favourite writers. I thought launching a newsletter on grief would be simple - I’d voice my own thoughts, speak to others about theirs, share experiences and it would be this glorious joint healing process… that came with very little difficulty on my part. But I’ve thrown myself into a field of thorns, expecting them not to scratch. I can’t plot this like an article or a novel - with a beginning, middle and end. Of course writing about grief was going to unearth parts of myself I thought I’d buried. That is becoming frighteningly clear. 

And, I have to confess, I have been struggling to understand the point of it all? Why am I doing this to myself? To my family? As when I write about my past, I also dig up theirs. I feel that I (we) had reached a state of equilibrium. Where we could trudge along with our grief. Why am I disturbing our peace? Washing our faces in the murky sludge of our old sadness? Can’t I just continue to live in a state of part-time denial? 

I am aware of why we must feel the hard stuff. I know that the bile will secrete itself in other ways: no matter how hard we try to swallow it, it won’t stay down (and believe me, I’ve tried.) As well as the aforementioned health panic and partying (although grief and partying is another grey area I want to expand on later) I know that my aversion to confrontation and extreme people pleasing are reactions to my past. And my inability to ever face it head on. 

So, that’s why I interrupt my carefully diarised content plan to voice all this. I know that’s why I keep writing. As there’s something within me that wants the confrontation, that needs the pain. I once wrote a line in a poem that said: “let’s pluck the buttercups from your trampled past, hold them under your chin. Look! See how you glow!” As I truly believe our struggles create our light. The people I love the fiercest have all faced so much. I love their brittle layers. I love my own.

But that doesn’t make it easier. It doesn’t stop the craving and the need for the numb.

 

I’ve let the days pass. My brain untangling itself on paper. My body untangling itself on the ground (in ways that have included dancing high under neon light, and swimming in expansive, empty lakes). I’m slotting back into place, knowing it won’t be permanent. 

And, as much as I want to tie this piece of writing/ this train of thought off neatly, perhaps even if I’m very clever poetically (my current preferred ending: I keep cracking, simply because I keep living) I can’t. As I don’t think I will ever truly understand the point of pain, of why we do the things we do in reaction to it. Why we need it. We simply do… as what’s the alternative? 

What do you think? When grief (or really any of your past hard times) resurface how do you cope? How do you handle pain? Do you find you cope better than you did in the past? What are your coping mechanisms, the so-called “good” and “bad”? What do you think helps? What do you think really doesn’t? And how do you steer yourself to the stuff that works long-term, and not sink into the (perhaps easier) stuff that is short-term? Please let me know in the comments! I have a feeling I’m going to need a lot of advice…