There is an account I follow online (@dr.zelana) and she posted the other day about griefscape. She defined griefscape as “the space between the life you had and the life you didn’t ask for.” When I read that, I felt gut punched. She shared two other thoughts that grew that ache in my gut, as follows: “(i) grief isn’t an end[,] it’s a reckoning, and (ii) grief isn’t just sadness-it’s love with nowhere to go.”
These aren’t revolutionary ideas that I’ve never come into contact with before, but they were gathered in such a succinct, profound, articulate way that they really grabbed my attention. Furthermore, they felt meaningful based on some of what I am struggling with at present.
When I look at the word griefscape, I immediately think of loss. Death. But my thoughts may not be your same thoughts, or even similar, when you take in those sentiments. I don’t think that death needs to be the traditional failure of the physical body. And the loss does not have to mean the actual removal of a human from Earth. Sometimes it’s as simple as a shift in our lives, from the life we had to a new landscape.
Sometimes it’s not even the loss of a relationship or a friendship or job. Sometimes the ground shifts under our feet without the infrastructure of our lives changing one bit. Sometimes the shift is entirely emotional or spiritual and sometimes it has nothing to do with another person, but rather, the entire shift lives within our own psyche.
Maybe we’ve lived with a particular situation for a long time for whatever our reasons and suddenly, we can’t seem to handle it anymore. There is something where things have become unpalatable. And this can occur for a million different reasons. There may be an external event that precipitates the shift, or sometimes the whole job is internal. There are times when we wake up in the morning and we can feel the change within us, even if it’s barely perceptible.
Now, I will often sit with that tremble, that shudder, for a moment before I begin to really process it. Why? Well, maybe I’m having a tough day or a difficult week. Maybe I’m feeling overwhelmed or hormonal. Maybe it’s the perfect storm of the world being upside down and work being difficult and someone saying something creepy to me and me getting a parking ticket outside of the gym. So perhaps, what I’m reading is not an impetus to change, but just a reaction to a whole bunch of things that don’t feel good.
And so, I sit with it. As time passes, I have the opportunity to gauge what that twinge feels like. Does it stay? Does it grow? Does it go away, altogether? Now, it’s important to examine the disappearance of the feeling. I know, this feels like overkill, but it really isn’t. Sometimes the vanishing of the feeling isn’t that it wasn’t real to begin with, but more so, that we are working on making it smaller or nonexistent, so we don’t have to deal with it. I’ve historically been catastrophically bad at this, but I have SO MANY FRIENDS who compartmentalize like champs. On the odd occasion when I’ve tried, I find myself tormented, returning to the space where I stored those feelings again and again, like a box of clothing for donation where you just aren’t ready to let go, and so it sits in your hallway for ages, collecting dust.
Okay, so once we’ve determined that the feeling is real—what then? Well then, we need to act. Right? Well, yes, sort of. And this is where griefscape comes in, at least for me. And for me, it’s pre-during-and post the shift. I don’t even need to pinpoint when the actual change occurred to feel the difference in these stages. I can feel the anticipatory grief, the middle of the muck grief, and the post-grief.
The pre part feels like the purest form of anxiety for me. This is where some part of me has acknowledged that change is necessary, but I haven’t arrived at the change part yet. This doesn’t mean that I’ve fully worked through what it is going to look like, but rather, that my feelings have reached that point of critical mass, where I just can’t take it anymore. I will find myself irritable and short tempered and almost irrationally sad.
The middle feels like fear, partial regret, a desire to move through things as quickly as possible, and an endless understanding of the uncertainty of it all.
The after, I think that’s the real griefscape. That’s the last bit of it, where the shift has happened and the dust is clearing, and it’s just what was and what is. Sometimes I think that the most challenging part of this phase is that it can be extraordinarily lonely and made more so by people who aren’t aware the shift has happened and intend on chugging away, business as usual. Historically, I’ve expended energy trying to explain to those people how things have changed, and they need to understand and accept, but I don’t actually do that anymore. There is literally no point. First of all, that exchange usually provokes confusion, anger and sadness that cannot be reconciled (as you are dealing with your own feelings). Secondly, these exchanges are often the place where temptation arises to go back to things as they were.
I’m not suggesting avoidance, but I am sharing that I think hunkering down in the discomfort is sometimes the safest place to be, even though it feels anything but safe. I think sometimes we need to sit in the thing and not have to spend time or energy explaining to anyone how we go to where we are.
We need to face that reckoning. We need to perform our own reconciliation, free from someone else’s view or opinions. We need to acknowledge the love that has no where to go and understand how to gently set it in reserves for the time being. Or how to apply it to ourselves, or relationships that serve us.
We don’t always ask for the life that we move into when we need to, whether because the universe has brought it to our feet or we have, in advertently, through our choices. And sometimes, the most painful and challenging exercise is to look back on what was, and how we felt about things then, and what is, and how we feel at the present moment, and feel good about it all. And I’m not suggesting that things always end up rosy in the end, because they don’t, always. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s all a journey and the reason that griefscape is part of our journey is because we are doing the hard business of living. Not just living but growing. Evolving. We are pained because we are in it.
And painful or not, that’s the real stuff, right there.
Right?
X
L.
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