My Turn, Your Turn

God, what a completely f*cked time, right?

Anyway, hi. How are you today? I feel like total shit. I barely left my bed. I ate approximately 456 grams of carbohydrates in the form of Reese’s peanut butter eggs, a burrito, and bread my mom made the other day. 

Oh, shit. I'm so sorry. 

Not the inspiration you were hoping for? 

You know, I'm a recovering pessimist. I grew up having an attitude that made both my baton coach and my parents probably want to murder me. I once threw my baton so hard at the studio wall I got kicked out of baton class. I was 12. I had virtually no confidence growing up. Idiots in middle school made jokes and I believed those jokes and wound up with the self-esteem of what I imagine a literal fucking turtle having. I have a point here, I swear.

As my confidence developed and years of traumatic experiences ensued, I told myself I probably had two choices in this life: I could continue to be a pessimistic nightmare and choose to believe life happened to me, playing a righteous victim card that, let’s be honest, I was good at playing, or I could give up the act and finally allow life to happen for me, even the arduous times. I could choose to find some form of meaning in the times that hurt the most. I chose the latter. Life became vastly more enjoyable by this choice. I never said easier; I said enjoyable. That’s an important note here. But this also required another choice and that other choice is what I am here to talk about today.

Some people think I'm still a pessimist because I choose to acknowledge the bad in this world. That does not make someone a pessimist. I’d argue that it simply makes someone aware. I'm an optimist that knows the good in this world far outweighs the bad. To make this realization that love can be greater than hate and, yes, even heal people and the world of it, you must recognize and understand what hate looks like. I once had a friend who told me that to "appreciate a feeling you must have an intense and intimate understanding of its opposite." I think this is true for every emotion, but love and hate the most. To know immense love, you must know immense hate. Or loss. Or grief. We can lump those all into a category for all intents and purposes today.

I have been dealing with an enormous amount of grief lately. This grief has felt familiar in some senses and completely new in others. I find that when we’re grieving, we don’t really want to call it for what it is. And so the underlying emotions of grief come in and take charge. Anxiety, tension, sadness, anger. Grief is not stagnant, though. Grief requires we become awake versus our usual deliberate numbing. We’re experiencing a time of collective grief. Everyone is grieving the life they once knew. If you think you are an exception to this grief, I assure you that you are not, and believe me, there is nothing I enjoy more than being right (this is where you can quietly chuckle… or want to punch me in the face. Either one). 

I think grief (at least for me) often leads to numbing. I’ve talked extensively with friends, family members, and my therapist (this is where you all take a collective sigh of relief) about my deliberate avoidance of grief. The shoving away, the feeling of panic because I’d rather experience that then feel the real death of what it is I’ve lost. But you know, only we really know what we're numbing and sometimes the avoidance really just is the only coping mechanism we've ever learned. And so we pray and we hope and we become unconscious and we think that the booze or the food or the sugar or the relationship or the sex or the shiny screen in front of us will take away this... this gunk. This hate. This grief.

And of course, it doesn't. And then you wake up one day and you realize that you've been X period of time (days, weeks, months, years - and yes - even decades) just stuffing and stuffing, hoping it goes away, whatever 'it' is. Hoping that whatever you neglected to feel then won't catch up with the now. Stuff, fill, eat, unconscious, drink, shove it down, repeat. 

We can all speculate as to why people don't want to feel their feelings. But the hard truth is... that's what they're there for. Feelings are -- yeah -- meant to be felt… even the really, really shitty ones. Even the ones that surface in the middle of the night and greet you with a racing heart and a sweaty forehead. Even the ones that render you speechless, and not in a pleasant way. All of it. It’s all meant to be felt. And when they aren't felt, they show up as things like... oh, I dunno… pure adulterated rage. Or severe panic. Or addiction. 

I know why I don't want to feel my feelings all the time. I can't speak for you or your family. But I do know what keeps me running from my feelings and what has taken 24-almost-25 years and countless therapy sessions and a laundry list of fuckups to learn. I do not want to feel my feelings because I am afraid they will swallow me whole. I am afraid they will come along, eat me up, and I'll die. Literally. I will die from feeling. That is why I am afraid. There. I said it. Maybe you can, too. 

So, I avoid. I use snark and shopping and boys who treat me like garbage and booze and clout and Instagram to shove it all away. And then I get into a place where it's all shoved away. Good. Deep down. A shiny gold smile, shit together, all in order, crisp edges, perfect.

Feelings are hilarious in the sense that they'll say, "you can run but you can't hide" until literally the day you die. And then you're dead. And then you spent a life running. And shoving. And hiding. And drinking. And eating. And purging. And on and on and on until it's all over. Silence. And maybe finally the illness caught up with the shoving or the thoughts caught up with the grief and we thought it was all too much and then… poof. Over. We’re 85 and never dealt with the cards… we were... dealt. 

I do not want to spend a life running. I do not want to spend my life avoiding all of the pain in an effort to keep myself safe when really what will kill me is the avoidance. But a healthy does of honesty is required here. And honesty is far more terrifying for most than numbing and stuffing and avoiding. 

Our job is not to numb and not feel and contain so that we can make other people (or ourselves) comfortable. And while we have all this time to feel, consider this permission. I am not saying to sit and cry all day over something that happened twenty years ago. But maybe you do, and that’s okay. Or, maybe you journal about the thing from twenty years ago and then leave it be. There's no right way to feel. There’s no right way to process. But especially hear me when I say: there is no right way to grieve. 

So, maybe this is when you make the deliberate choice to be honest. Honesty has gotten me farther than anything else in this life, even if it required a vulnerability that made me want to puke or forced me to get clear with myself on what I really wanted, even if others would be heartbroken by that choice. Maybe you get real about how you feel. Or maybe you even venture into the territory of getting real about how you numb. Either way, that's information and information allows you to learn and then analyze and change patterns if wanted or needed. Information is valuable, no matter what kind. 

Here, I’ll go first:

I am grieving. I am grieving the loss of a life I felt I was just getting the reigns on building in my favorite city. I am grieving the loss of my identity in the form of two jobs. I am grieving the loss of my identity of who I was when I left my parents’ home a year ago to venture to build a new life in New York. I am grieving the loss of a friendship with someone who I thought would be my friend for life and now will not speak to me. I am grieving. And that grief is so exhausting and most days I’m too damn tired to deal with it anymore, but then I do... just a little, even. When I do this small dose of feeling I give myself the capacity to feel on my own terms. This, in the end, is what I know will save me.

There. Now you go.