On Love (&Grief)
I am listening to a record, one that my now “past partner” recommended to me, years after we broke up. That was one of the ways we would stay connected, he would send me music he thought I would enjoy, as someone whom sought it out as a means to his own healing and release. His music recommendations still take me back to the moment I first heard them, and back to him and us and the time we spent together.
And one of the songs he had sent me, one summer evening walking through the university district on my way to get an ice cream cone, came on, and for the second night in a row I heard it and wept, and felt the familiar deep grief in my throat. Not raw, but still as potent.
And it’s not because, as I would have thought years earlier (we broke up almost 6 years ago), I haven’t “gotten over” him/ us “right”, which is so much of how people discussed relationships ending -Move on. “Get under someone else”. You don’t need him. The grief is actually because I’m a human with a heart, that loves with Abandon (and so many scars) and aches with the loss of intimate connection. I can’t contain feeling deeply.
I often felt gaslit in my grief, because that is what we do to people over-culturally, in white supremacy culture, we find reasons to silence people’s grief, because of our own discomfort with it, by blaming the person who is suffering. Most often, people felt it was time for me to “move on” because he was hurtful to me, bypassing of course that I hurt him and we as flawed humans hurt and harm in relationship, but that doesn’t mean I am able to turn my heart switch to “off”. I am forever changed by his presence in my life, and our relationship, and it was time for it to end, and we did that together too- and it was the worst pain I’ve ever felt that exploded open old wounds and lead me towards deeper healing.
The message I got externally and internalized, was that I was doing things “wrong” because I was a human that let my heart have a voice, and tried to trust that process amidst all the information and barriers promoting the contrary. The thing that kept me attached to the external voices, that conflicted with my own reality and process, was the internalized narrative that when it comes to intimacy I’m broken, so I must trust others in this realm, who seem to be doing it “right”. This has been the operating narrative for much of my life, until I had the opportunity to grieve- in the way that felt true to me- the ways my intimate relationships were broken, in order to uncover that the brokenness was outside of me, in rape culture, racism, misogyny, and white supremacy’s goals of disembodiment which disconnects us from our humanity, our grief, and our love.
The most common thing I sit with in my practice is holding space for people’s grief. I’m a dietitian, Yes, but a fat liberatory eating disorder dietitian, which is a very specific thing. In my work, I support people in healing their relationship to food and their bodies. When we start to look at that, we pull on a thread that unrolls a web of grief (and joy) that is as expansive as the individual sitting in front of me. Most of the grief has been pushed aside, out of necessity and also because of what I named above: collectively we are not good at sitting with grief, because white supremacy culture thwarts this and promotes disembodiment. “Move On.”
Some notes on sitting with grief:
take deep care of yourself before, during, and after major grief releases
be welcoming to it and allow it to guide you
do not offer advice
hold your heart
Healing my broken heart took much the shape of all of my healing. Trusting my process. It took a lot to unravel the messages from the outside directly or indirectly(“get back out there!” “Time to move on!”) that I internalized as “the right” way, but as I did I sank deeper into my grief, which is the only place I needed to be. Now that I am in another space, I understand that I took the only way to this Aliveness I feel now, able to more fully welcome in the next Loves and Joys. Grief can be piercing and all consuming and soft and beckoning. It can be creative flow and deep self care and knowing and tending ourselves in deeply intimate ways. The ways that only we know how. And, as I'm finding, grief is always here, and that's Okay too. I have the capacity to hold both.
Grief is a doorway into our stories and our hearts. Healing without grief doesn’t exist. Life without grief doesn't exist.
Our grief is an expression of our love, our humanity, and our Aliveness.