hard things.
I’ve been thinking about the effect that grief has had lately on my life and the ways in which it has permanently affected my being. If we’re lucky, and in many ways, I like to believe that I am, grief becomes a friend and not an enemy to fear. It becomes a confident in the dark spaces that reminds me of the courage found in my own resilience and the ability I have it in myself to endure more that I would let on.
So in no particular order, here are my hard things:
To move across three continents, five cities, twelve time zones before the age of twenty.
To move out of my family home at sixteen, to a home that I had to rediscover again.
To work odd jobs on contract, while everyone around stumbled into continuing roles.
To be the only one of my siblings who can attest to being raised by both sets of grandparents at a given time in my life.
To being an survivor of abuse, to the shadows that often come with a quiet wince before a smile.
To waiting for a global pandemic to find the validation of a life lived not of loneliness but isolation.
To knowing how to walk in and out of relationships with people because of a lack of capacity.
To have the shadows of trauma catch me in my periods of floating to remind myself it is okay to break and not just bend.
To see the people I care about and love go through unimaginable, and say I see you, I hear you, and you are not alone.
To watch as you see innocence leave a space where it should have been protected.
To know love that is afraid of being its authentic self because it has been damaged.
To find courage not out of defiance, but of quiet whimper when survivorship takes over.
To loose a love one miles away and not being able to grieve.
To live miles away, and recognize that you will never be there for the big celebrations or the little ones.
To know that life endures as much as you have the courage to, and that sometimes capacity is not out of want, but necessity.
That resilience has become a word in my lexicon. To explain things, I do not have the energy to show up in.
To recognize the space that fear takes up as we sit in the worry of a relapse.
To be “too much”, yet “not enough” for the people whom you thought would be there forever.
The beauty of relationship is sometimes recognizing that in all the above things, I am never truly alone. That all of us have our shadows that we sit in when the hurt takes over, but often times than not, as soon as we give space for vulnerability in a sanctuary of safety, we find that there are others very much like us, who have learnt to grieve through hard things, and built resilience as overachievement in a tough exterior. In that we find a little bit of ourselves that we learn to love greatly and better than we could ever hope to imagine. In community, grief, when prompted, can turn the tide for healing, and once more feel the joy of living under the sun.