Starting Over
Bedroom’s living room
This is a new view. A view I will gradually get used to. There’s a heaviness to the air when you wake up, when the first light of day presses against your eyelids, and all you feel is the absence. It’s a dull, aching hollowness that consumes you before your feet even touch the floor. The kind of loss that isn’t easily named, the kind that stretches beyond the boundaries of simple grief. It’s the loss of something you never really had, or maybe something that was never truly yours to begin with.
I think about Joan Didion (yes, I love Didion; cliche, I know.), her precise, almost surgical dissection of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. How she peeled back the layers of her mourning, not just for her husband, John, but for her daughter, Quintana, who seemed to slip away from her, moment by moment, until she was gone. Double grief, she called it—an overwhelming wave of sorrow that drowns you, drags you under. But what about when that grief is spread out, like a fine mist, covering everything, even the parts of your life you thought were untouched?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief about the desire to make grief your own, to hold onto it tightly, as though it’s the only thing that connects you to the person you’ve lost. “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved,” she writes. But what happens when that love is fractured, incomplete? What if the grief you carry isn’t a celebration but a weight, a reminder of all the things that could have been but never were?
I find myself wanting to make this grief mine, to claim it in a way that feels authentic, even if the love that underpins it is jagged, sharp-edged, and elusive. It’s a grief that comes from the loss of potential—the potential of what a relationship could have been, of who I could have been had things been different. It’s the loss of a future that will never exist, a mourning for all the missed moments, the conversations that were never had, the questions that will forever remain unanswered.
I live in a world where I hold space for the grief of others, the losses that shape them, the sorrows that define their narratives. But what we rarely talk about, is what it means to go through your own devastating, life-altering experiences while simultaneously helping others navigate theirs. It’s a strange balancing act, this test of holding oneself accountable, of creating boundaries so that my own personal losses don’t bleed into the therapeutic space, contaminating it with my own pain.
There are days when this boundary feels like the thinnest of walls, almost transparent, and I wonder how much of my own grief seeps through, how much my clients can sense even when I’m doing everything to hold it back. But then I think about whether this could be a strength, too—this shared human experience of loss. I wonder if there’s something in the rawness of my own grief that helps me understand what my clients are going through, that gives me a deeper empathy, a more profound connection.
Rachel Cusk writes with an honesty that cuts through the noise, laying bare the rawness of life’s disappointments, its failures. I wonder what she would say about this kind of grief, the grief of what never was. Maybe she’d see it as a form of self-deception, an attempt to rewrite a past that can never be changed. Or maybe she’d see it as a necessary part of life, a way to come to terms with the fact that some losses aren’t about death at all but about the slow erosion of hope, the quiet resignation that comes with realizing that some things are simply out of your control.
This balancing act, this navigation between my grief and theirs, is perhaps the ultimate test of what it means to be a helper. It’s about holding space for others while carefully containing my own sorrow, ensuring that it doesn’t overshadow their pain. But it’s also about recognizing that this shared experience of loss can be a bridge, a way to connect more deeply, to empathize more fully. It’s a delicate dance, one that requires constant vigilance, constant reflection.
So I sit with it. I let the loss fill the spaces around me, knowing that it’s part of me, part of my story, even if it’s not the one I would have chosen. Because in the end, grief isn’t just about death. It’s about life, and all the ways we lose it, bit by bit, day by day. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what makes it bearable—that even in the midst of all this loss, there’s still something worth holding onto.
1:12am Monday, August 12, 2024
I think about Joan Didion (yes, I love Didion; cliche, I know.), her precise, almost surgical dissection of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. How she peeled back the layers of her mourning, not just for her husband, John, but for her daughter, Quintana, who seemed to slip away from her, moment by moment, until she was gone. Double grief, she called it—an overwhelming wave of sorrow that drowns you, drags you under. But what about when that grief is spread out, like a fine mist, covering everything, even the parts of your life you thought were untouched?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in Notes on Grief about the desire to make grief your own, to hold onto it tightly, as though it’s the only thing that connects you to the person you’ve lost. “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved,” she writes. But what happens when that love is fractured, incomplete? What if the grief you carry isn’t a celebration but a weight, a reminder of all the things that could have been but never were?
I find myself wanting to make this grief mine, to claim it in a way that feels authentic, even if the love that underpins it is jagged, sharp-edged, and elusive. It’s a grief that comes from the loss of potential—the potential of what a relationship could have been, of who I could have been had things been different. It’s the loss of a future that will never exist, a mourning for all the missed moments, the conversations that were never had, the questions that will forever remain unanswered.
I live in a world where I hold space for the grief of others, the losses that shape them, the sorrows that define their narratives. But what we rarely talk about, is what it means to go through your own devastating, life-altering experiences while simultaneously helping others navigate theirs. It’s a strange balancing act, this test of holding oneself accountable, of creating boundaries so that my own personal losses don’t bleed into the therapeutic space, contaminating it with my own pain.
There are days when this boundary feels like the thinnest of walls, almost transparent, and I wonder how much of my own grief seeps through, how much my clients can sense even when I’m doing everything to hold it back. But then I think about whether this could be a strength, too—this shared human experience of loss. I wonder if there’s something in the rawness of my own grief that helps me understand what my clients are going through, that gives me a deeper empathy, a more profound connection.
Rachel Cusk writes with an honesty that cuts through the noise, laying bare the rawness of life’s disappointments, its failures. I wonder what she would say about this kind of grief, the grief of what never was. Maybe she’d see it as a form of self-deception, an attempt to rewrite a past that can never be changed. Or maybe she’d see it as a necessary part of life, a way to come to terms with the fact that some losses aren’t about death at all but about the slow erosion of hope, the quiet resignation that comes with realizing that some things are simply out of your control.
This balancing act, this navigation between my grief and theirs, is perhaps the ultimate test of what it means to be a helper. It’s about holding space for others while carefully containing my own sorrow, ensuring that it doesn’t overshadow their pain. But it’s also about recognizing that this shared experience of loss can be a bridge, a way to connect more deeply, to empathize more fully. It’s a delicate dance, one that requires constant vigilance, constant reflection.
So I sit with it. I let the loss fill the spaces around me, knowing that it’s part of me, part of my story, even if it’s not the one I would have chosen. Because in the end, grief isn’t just about death. It’s about life, and all the ways we lose it, bit by bit, day by day. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what makes it bearable—that even in the midst of all this loss, there’s still something worth holding onto.
1:12am Monday, August 12, 2024