These past few days have been immensely difficult for me. Writing this is immensely difficult for me. A good friend of mine passed away last week and I was of the opinion that I was not handling it very well.
And then I asked myself, what does “handling it well” even mean?
When someone is taken from this earth much too soon, or when we experience any kind of trauma or tragedy, there is no such thing as handling it well. All you can do is handle it the way that is best for you. Grief looks different on every single person. Yet, it is a unique process that everyone must go through in their own way.
All you can do is ride the waves as they come and try not to push anything down. As much as it feels better to push away the painful emotions, they will come up in other ways…trust me, I tried. I tried to compartmentalize and push my emotions into a box to deal with later, and it worked for a little while. Yet, while my mind was numb, my body was screaming at me to feel the things I was pushing down.
You see, when we don’t feel our emotions and move them through and out of our bodies, they manifest in different ways. One way may be somatic symptoms, which is what I was feeling. I was nauseous and had the worst pain in my neck and shoulders. My emotions were begging me to set them free. That negative and stagnant energy needed out of my body.
And when I allowed myself to feel and release those emotions, as painful as it was, I felt better afterwards. There is still so much to process and grieve – all I can do is take it one step at a time. The only way to get through the grief is to honor the process and actually grieve.