As I’ve gotten older I’ve had to come face to face with a hard and unexpected truth: I don’t know how to grieve. As I am learning now, at the age of 27, I have never properly or adequately grieved any of the major losses in my life. And, to specify, I am not speaking about physical death. While grief is generally associated with the loss of life, grief is also a very essential component of emotional growth through processing everyday losses. Because grief is often framed as a large and dramatic thing that occurs when we lose someone to death, I never really understood that it was necessary to grieve the loss of friends who had drifted, opportunities lost, or pieces of myself that I have outgrown.

What some, including myself, may not realize is that grieving is something that occurs naturally and pretty frequently if we are allowing ourselves the time and space to do so. Processing these losses in a healthy way is what allows us to truly move on with our lives *cough cough* without having unresolved emotions that are triggered randomly on a Tuesday afternoon as we wait in line at Starbucks because someone said the word Macchiato strangely. Basically, if you don’t want to fall apart in 5 years randomly then you should allow yourself the time to do it while the feelings are fresh. Although grief may sound like this big scary thing, it doesn’t always have to be this way. Obviously, depending on the person and the magnitude of the loss, grief can range from minimal to overbearingly consuming. However, even when the grief is minimal, acknowledging its presence and the process that you are undergoing to get you through it are what make dealing with much larger losses more “bearable”.

This wasn’t an easy or painless discovery. In fact, it was pretty traumatic, to say the least. I say this as someone who is still learning how to grieve and is still grieving things that happened years ago. I have lived my life wielding a shovel– burying all evidence of hurt, disappointment, resentment, and rejection. Without even thinking about it, I have gone day in and day out making the bad things disappear so that I didn’t have to face them. Unbeknownst to me, there are only so many directions in which you can turn until you’re stuck right where you started and must face the things that you once ran from. And, while it may seem much more enticing to bury the bad so that you can exist without sadness, shame, guilt, or insecurity, those emotions will always be there, sitting beneath the surface.

As time has passed, I have found myself unable to process certain situations or overreacting to new ones because I never dealt with things in the past. Now, all of those buried emotions have begun to seep through the mud and reveal themselves. I find myself feeling more sadness than I should, more anxious than I should, and angrier than I should because in addition to what I truly feel in the moment, I am feeling all of the experiences that I never felt in the past. Since I have buried negative emotions for so long, it is extremely hard for me to cope with them. I often remind myself that in order for me to actually feel better I have to be sad. I have to be mad. I have to be disappointed. I have to allow myself to feel all of the negative emotions that may come up at a given moment so that I can actually let them run their course in my body and pass. This is difficult and tiresome, and I frequently fail–finding myself looking for that shovel.

Now, I am grieving the version of myself that did not feel. I am trying to accept the new me– the me that cries more frequently than ever. The me that wants better. I am trying to say goodbye to the me that wasn’t phased, that “didn’t” give a fuck, and that never hurt. I am trying to accept the me that wants to tell people when I am upset or sad. I am encouraging myself to open up and let people into my emotions, not for them, but for me. I am thinking about my feelings and trying to identify why I feel the way I do, is it because of what someone said or did, or is it because I already felt something that they triggered? This process is long and hard and it is honestly not fun, but it is extremely rewarding when I am able to uncover the truth beneath my reality. It has allowed me to better my relationships and my ability to communicate. For a long time, my first step of grief was simply “don’t”. I am trying to bury the me that never grieved, and am planting the me that grows and evolves through feeling. So, I welcome you– come grieve with me. Q