Grieving

⚒️ Once we become aware of the patterns we have, of the tools we’re using and the tools we’re not using, the strategies that we employ, we often become aware of how poorly our tools are actually working for us. These patterns help us escape specific scary situations, but only to perpetuate those situations longer term.

We recognize that we are not our ideal self, that others aren’t as good or as bad as we think they are. Everything is much more boring, messy, and meh than we ever imagined it could be. Life becomes gray. 

We may also recognize how much we’ve hurt others and have to reconcile with the fact that we did bad things to people we care about in the name of our survival. 

We may realize how much time we’ve wasted, how much of our life has passed us by, how behind we are in something we wanted to do.

Through this process, we are forced to grieve. We have to grieve the bad, ugly sides of ourselves, grieve our messiness, grieve the hurt we’ve caused, grieved the life, the relationships, the opportunities we’ve lost. 

This grieving process is incredibly painful. In some ways, it’s easier to stay sick and wall ourselves off from the reality of what we’ve made of ourselves. It’s safer to live in the delusion that if only life had been different we would be better. Life sucks, but it’s out of our control. It’s not our fault.

The only way for life to get better is to work through and digest the grief. No matter what happened. No matter who hurt you, what you’ve gone through in the past, the only person in charge of your life now is you. Wherever you are now, and wherever you’re going, it’s you driving, it’s you making the choices. You must take responsibility, you must lay claim to your agency if anything is going to get better. 

Let yourself grieve what you’ve lost, what you never had, what you’ve done, what you’ve not done, what’s been done to you or not done to you. And start to move forward now.