Grief Graffiti

Someone asked me how I was doing today & like I often do now, I paused to “check in” on how I was feeling before responding. Grief is such a roller-coaster of emotions & the “waves” come and go. One moment you are feeling “OK” & the next you could be totally drowning. I’m learning that it is important to be honest in grief. There have been times in my early grief that I just took the path of least resistance & would automatically reply “I’m OK” to these queries, simply not having the energy to explain my feelings at the moment, or maybe not wanting to. But grief is weird. It’s like a living entity, a split personality, a conscience (think Jiminy Cricket) constantly telling you how you should or shouldn’t be grieving, guilting you, making you feel like you’re going insane. And it is quick to point out any dishonesty or phoniness.

So I’m learning when I am asked innocuous questions about how I am doing to pause, check-in & try to reply as honestly as possible, even if it’s just a truthful “I don’t know”. Today I reflected inward & came to a realization; I have a completely new Baseline for gauging my feelings. I call it my BC/AD, or more accurately, my BL/AL (Before Loss/After Loss). Feeling “Good” BL, meant I’m fine & content. “Good” now, AL, means that I’m not curled in a ball convulsing on the floor. I’m sure this Baseline will change over time, but understanding that things will never be as they were is key to accepting the new me. I guess that’s the key: acceptance. So when I was asked how I was doing I replied with “I’m good today”. And in that moment I made peace with my “new good”.

As I do with everything now, I researched this thought about a new Baseline & found this article:

“Many of us might be feeling bad about life at the moment. One approach that may improve your mood is shifting your psychological “baseline” of what you view as normal to reflect the reality you’re currently living in. How bad we feel depends on our psychological “baseline” for what we consider normal. Accepting reality as it actually is (letting go of what we call “mental rebelling”) can reset your baseline, which can tremendously improve your outlook in some circumstances. If your baseline reflects the way the world actually is, rather than the way it recently was (before something was lost) or the way you want it to be, reality hurts less. Of course, we can (and should) strive to make reality better than it is. But you can still do this while accepting the facts about the current state of the world. Acceptance doesn’t stop you from taking valuable actions, but it does make it easier to deal with reality.

Acceptance is a mental manoeuvre that is hard to define (we generally lack the vocabulary in English for these kind of mental actions), but it might involve steps like:

• Noting the facts that actually make up reality (not how you would like reality to be, or what reality recently looked like).
• Noting that you CAN handle the fact that this new state is what it is (unless you literally can’t, which is another matter, but that’s rarely true).
• Noting that this new state does not mean that everything important is lost; there are likely to still be many things of value that exist.
• Avoiding “mental rebelling.” Mental rebelling might involve thoughts like: “this can’t be happening”, “this is awful”, “I can’t take this”, “this sucks”, or “why me?” When you notice this kind of thought, acknowledge it (“I just had the thought “this can’t be happening””), but don’t dwell on it. Let it drift out of your mind once you’ve acknowledged it.
• Reflecting on the real state of things and trying to feel an emotion of “acceptance” towards it. Feeling this emotion doesn’t mean you like the current state, but it might help you accept the facts of reality instead of trying to resist them. You can accept a situation that you really dislike, and sometimes it is essential to do so. And of course, even after accepting it, you probably will want to work to make that situation better (acceptance doesn’t stop you from trying to improve things, it just makes reality easier to handle).
• Paying the psychological cost of acknowledging that the reality you want doesn’t exist NOW, instead of putting off that cost. This means not trying to delay the sense of loss that you will feel, since this loss has already occurred (it isn’t the way you want it to be, and it’s better to acknowledge that now rather than later). It is tempting to avoid acknowledging this because the loss will hurt, but you actually hurt yourself more by delaying the experience.”

~Spencer Greenberg, clearerthinking.org