On loss, grief and dealing with pain
There’s much spoken about grief and loss. There are various rituals for mourning around the world, from cladding on whites and eating simple food for a few days to the simple act of staying quiet and put, all making you feel the loss before routine life passes by you.
Loss triggers a lot of unresolved issues. If you don’t release it out of your system, it only accumulates more space within you. Pain is not only in your head, but a lot of physical energy, if not released it only brings more hurt for yourself and for others. It’s been close to five months that I lost my grandmother, who wasn’t just an ageing elder at home, but one of the only constants in my constantly transitioning childhood. My sense of stability was challenged, furiously so. Meanwhile, at the other fronts, I was going through my own challenges in dealing with work, friendships, relationships, and past trauma.
It’s been close to two years that a former partner left saying ‘I’ brought misery, and close to a few days, another walked out saying ‘I’ brought negativity. Earlier it made me angry, made me question how could someone just give up? It gave me a shield where I said, since I am being toxic, I shall keep people at bay. It only surfaced paranoia, and emptiness, with some extremities of self-harm. I tried expressing, suppressing, curbing, impulsively reacting — but nothing seemed to bring back any sense of self, and that wholeness back within me.
Meanwhile I had begun therapy a few months back, on the insistence of a few well-meaning friends. Introspection, therapy, and afterthoughts today, make me question where is all this negativity nestled in? How did I let it accumulate? Where has it stemmed from — and it roots back to repressed memories of childhood, adolescence and the formative years of adulthood. It’s exactly half-a-decade that I have been an adult now. Bearing the baggage of what I felt were other people’s expectations of me have left me only at crossroads with myself. I didn’t know I’ve been living in a state of panic and dismissiveness since forever.
The moment I realised it, every time I felt the sudden rise of panic in my system, I went towards making it better using substances — as simple as pot full of ice-creams to packet-full cigarettes in a go or by attributing external reasons to what I was feeling, letting others and my relationships with them take the blame for my disturbed relationship with myself.
I’ve been going through cycles of depression since I was 7. Again when I was 11, and then every four year cycle it resurfaced. Since adulthood, it has surfaced almost every year. My previous attempts in getting out of depressive and maniac cycles was through restless distractions, but I realised how that doesn’t work anymore because nothing has been resolved, only suppressed — and how it has a rather detrimental impact on me.
Loss needs to be felt, pain is a part of the human experience, we can’t avoid it. We tend to avoid it in various ways, but the only way to deal is to accept it as it is, to sit with what’s difficult, process it. It might feel that the pain is making you weak in the knees, but since the muscles are pulled, that is what gives the strength and courage to be.
Vulnerability is quite the talk of the town ever since Dr. Brene Brown talked the power of being vulnerable, and letting ourselves be truly seen. It’s tough, letting yourself be without any shields, and letting people know what and how you’re feeling, and really feeling it instead of having that mask on your face — well, it’s difficult and yet it is easy. The layers of inauthenticity get pulled out. When you’ve learned and conditioned yourself to mask these feelings, it can get difficult to just be yourself. You no more know who you are — and when you hit that awareness that you’re no more in touch with yourself, is when rediscovery starts.
So when pain hits, that’s a time to learn who you are instead of covering it up with raw chillies and a couple of smokes. It’s difficult, it feels like pain is oozing out of everywhere, feel it, grow from it, see what it is wanting you to learn — perhaps empathy, compassion and probably the act of loving.
As Leonard Cohen writes,
‘love is not a victory march, It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah’.
