My mind has never been a particularly “kind” place. Mistakes accumulate and failures persist. The sense of never-being-quite-good-enough lingers, and makes sure any new venture I start is heavy with the need to be perfect from the very beginning. To deal with this, I had a lot of mechanisms. I socialised, and drowned out the voice in my head with the quiet support of friends. I kept myself busy by picking up projects and setting deadlines for myself. I have 2 different To-Do List Apps, and at least 3 different notebooks tracking my tasks. At school, I tracked self-worth in grades received, events conducted, and teacher’s praise. When I started working as a teacher, my self-worth was contingent on how my students did, and I often thought of myself as the only factor contributing to their indifference/success in learning, completely sidestepping the multiplicity of factors that affected those students investments.
When the pandemic came around, I lost one of my coping mechanisms and I had a lot of time to myself. A lot of time to think about my mental space, and a lot of time to realise that the way I preferred to deal with my emotions was to not deal with them at all. Instead I rationalised and compartmentalised so that I never actually had to “feel” at all. I just needed to come up with explanations, I just needed to remain in control. When things happen, as they do, instead of allowing myself to feel guilt, sorrow, rage, frustration, I came up with excuses for why my emotions weren’t valid, or I would think of ways to suppress it all. I wanted to be different from my parents, so emotionally volatile, that I would rather feel nothing at all than drown in the depths. But the thing is, it’s also hard to feel joy and compassion and love if you have trained yourself to not let your emotions overwhelm you.
My therapist says that emotions remain in your body, that you can feel stress somewhere, anxiety somewhere else. If that’s true, my self-hatred rests between my ribs, always ready to knock me breathless when I am already down. My anxiety rests between tense shoulders, always ready to come to the forefront of any situation, and in a stomach that I hadn’t even realised I keep clenched, and in teeth that find themselves grinding, and in feet and hands that will not stop fidgeting and in my thoughts, “What if?”. I pushed my emotions down for years, but they stayed, making homes for themselves in my body, stubborn in their relentless need to be felt.
This year, grief has been so very loud. There have been so many endings. The suffering I have witnessed among communities, the struggle to stay ‘productive’, moving back to a broken home, and the constant fear of impending sickness– this is a year in which grief cannot be ignored.
So if you are grieving, for whatever reason or cause, know you aren’t alone. I grieve with you, and for you. Take your time, and let it overwhelm you. Your sorrow has a place in the world.