Grief can compel us to do some shitty things. Our mind can become so blinded by the internal rage of loss that at the moment we can find ourselves in places that we promised ourselves we would never tread. Our subjective morality ebbs away as if it was never there in the first place, and all that is left is the grief-stricken anger of an enraged monster ready to pounce.
I was such a person. I’ve written about my grief before and how it had impacted my life negatively. Grief isn’t a feeling of eternal sadness that most people would think; grief is a mixture of many feelings. Rage, hurt, shame, sadness, distortion, and so much more. A person can be fully functioning in society with lovers, friends and family, but still suffering from grief.
I was a boy grieving over so many things in my life. It may have gone unnoticed but I grieved hard over not having an involved dad.
Some may say that to understand loss, you first have to have experienced what you lost. I disagree. I knew what it was like as a child, playing with my friends, going into their houses, watching what their fathers were like and how they handled their sons and daughters with love and appreciation. Yeah, I grieved that. It was like a burning empty hole in my stomach, that I had no-one to admire me with such love.
I grieved over not belonging. I watched as my friends and family belonged to something more important than themselves. A family mostly, but more so a sense of belonging to a community; a communal purpose of sorts. I was whisked all over the country — I had no sense of grounding, or where I was going. I would cling onto nonsensical feelings of belonging such as football clubs and street gangs.
I grieved over not feeling warm and comfortable inside. The relaxed feeling of satisfaction that I’ve grown to know over the last 10 years but was a distant hope as a teenager. The wretched knotting feeling in my stomach that would drive me to avoid some of the easiest social interactions and cower for cover anytime something difficult in life came along. I solved this with alcohol and drugs and for a brief moment at night would make me feel human again, if only for a small amount of time.
Through my grief I’ve isolated friends in the fear that they would be seen as better than me. That their popularity, their shine, their raw love for the world would have people liking them over me, and through that raw jealousy I would seek to discredit them, and to disempower them, ultimately pushing them away, when in reality they just liked me for.. me.
Grief is enveloping, constricting, and horrible. It can turn a once bright eyed and bushy tailed mind ready to explore the world into a maximum security prison with a lifetime sentence. Yeah, grief can be the abrupt ending to a prosperous future. Grief can kill.
The doctors didn’t know what to do with me in hospital. Some thought I needed to, “man up” and see the world for what it was, others thought I had to take responsibility for my life, and some just didn’t give a shit — only that I was pieced back together and sent on my merry way. None of it helped though, in fact I’d say I walked out of there worse than when I walked in — only that I wasn’t excessively paranoid anymore.
Grief can have a young man with his whole life ahead of him with a noose that he tied with his shoelaces about to kick the chair from underneath him. Grief is not to be sneered at; “manning up” just doesn’t cut the butter I’m afraid.
What helps is unbridled love and acceptance. A sort of raw heartwarming light shone onto the darkness of the soul. Light cures darkness, for wherever there is light there is no dark. The bright ultra rays of awesomeness extinguishing anything that could remotely pass as dark. Yes, I met such people in the end; they shone such brilliant light on me that I could no longer refuse the brilliance and I began to accept it over a long period of time.
But I was lucky. I know full too well I was one of the lucky ones. Others aren’t that lucky. I’ve seen some people destroy themselves from the inside-out. I’ve had family die on me, friends overdose on me, and people that I know no longer want to associate themselves with anyone in the bright circle of life, because when you’re used to the darkness, the light can blind you.
Don’t let the light blind you.
Some people just like to give. I had to learn that the hard way.
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Originally Published on Narrative
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