Grief

I used to treat it as if it were a person. As if it were some sort of entity that wouldn’t leave me alone. Every day it kept wanting to hang out with me. It wanted to follow me to school. It wanted to go to work with me. It wanted to be my date at every family reunion. It wanted to party with me. It wanted to sleep with me.

Grief ain’t the bad guy. Grief is a natural human emotion that simply has a bad reputation. It doesn’t mean any harm. It just wants to make sure it’s there to help you heal. It wants you to know that it has the right to be felt just like happiness and anger.

The more I avoided it, the more trouble I got into. The more I pretended to be healed, the harder it tried to get my attention.

You can’t pick up where you left off and pray your brain magically erases the trauma you’ve experienced. It’ll stay quiet for a while. But then it’ll slap you across the face when you least expect it. (Like, maybe when you’re at a party surrounded by people who don’t even care about what you went through.) But that’s a whole other story…

The day I decided to make grief a friend of mine, I began to really blossom back into the “good” me. I started accepting what I couldn’t change. I took control over everything I could. (And finally embraced being a control freak.)

Gained lots of critics, lost a lot of time, but it was worth it. I learned to make grief part of my emotional repertoire. I will allow myself to feel it when I need to. For the rest of this life.

It’s just like every other emotion. It needs to be felt and then controlled in order to truly make the most out of this weird interval between birth and death.

Everyone has their bad days. Make them count.