Postcard: Renewal
No. 011 - on grief and depletion.
Postcard is a weekly curation of things I think are beautiful or interesting. Each postcard will be named after a word and contain something to listen to, something to look at, and something to think about. I welcome you to share any thoughts in the comments. Thank you!
renewal:
(n.) The act of beginning again after an interruption.
(n.) To have given fresh life or strength to.
(n.) The replacing of something broken or worn out.
†Meanings from OED
Something to listen to:
It is easy to make the mistake that just because something is popular it is overrated. Well, turns out Billie Eilish’s music is popular because she’s an incredible, prodigous talent who taps into those juicy universal parts of the human soul with her songs. There is a raw, aching honesty to her work, a maturity beyond her years reflected in her music. I get the sense that she will be capable of growing, making mistakes, learning—in the harsh and unflattering light of public scrutiny and fickle fandoms—and pouring it all into her work, creating many more beautiful things yet to come.
By the way, I wasn’t surprised when I learned she had been homeschooled. To have achieved what she’s achieved, at her young age, speaks to the way she was encouraged to specialize in her interests and accelerate beyond what would have been allowed in the mainstream schooling system. There’s an alternative timeline where she gets the default culture path; spends K-12 mostly bored out of her mind in classes that have little to do with anything important in life, and graduates the system like so many others do, dull and spiritually flattened. And that version of Billie Eilish might not get to an equivalent level of musicality until she’s 30. If ever. Isn’t that a sad thought?
Can’t help but wonder: how many potential Billie Eilish’s, in how many different domains, are being spiritually strangled out of existence in America’s schools?
Something to look at:
Something to think about:
Grief is totalizing. Lately I have been mourning the death of a decades-long friendship and struggling with the powerful, turbulent emotions it has evoked. Harmony and connection are incredibly important to me, and my inability to achieve that kind of an outcome here cut me to the core. My writing moved to the backburner as I struggled to cope with the intensity of what happened and its effect on me.
What did happen? This is the essential question, after all. Well, me and two close friends had a falling out and really that’s all that needs to be said. It’s tempting to tell a story about the conflict, to use narrative to protect my ego, which is necessarily hurt—deeply, in fact—by the clear and unflattering fact that some people I loved don’t want me in their life anymore. But telling such a fiction would not serve me, it would not serve truth, or the world, or anything good. Incompatibilities were revealed, breaking points were reached, and the threads of friendship were severed.
These things happen in life.
People grow and change, roots bending in one direction, new buds sprouting and blooming in another. One person’s sunshine becomes another’s hell.
Ah, but how using the passive voice feels like a nice way to create distance. “Incompatibilities were revealed, breaking points were reached—” Just the sort of cool, clinical detachment one might bring to bear in the aftermath of an airplane crash or a school shooting, typing up your report in a way that sanitizes the tragedy into something bureaucratically digestible. If I’m being honest, truly honest, I was emotionally wrecked, annihilated, flayed, even, by what I went through. I did my very best to achieve a mending, a reconciliation, and it was not good enough.
When I said grief was totalizing, I meant it. You feel it in your chest. A tightness in your heart, along with the sense that relaxing at all will leave you vulnerable to some sort of cosmically cruel killing blow. You show it in your eyes. The sadness lingering underneath them, evidence of an ever-present desire to cry that’s simultaneously too close to the surface to hide yet too deep, too raw to actually be accessed. And that shameful sense that you’re a wounded animal, that you must hide your limp, you absolutely MUST, or a predator will detect your weakness and end you once and for all.
Sometimes love, in the true, unconditional sense, means letting your guard down. It is terrifying to express to someone how much they hurt you. And in untender hands, such an admission just becomes more ammunition to hurt you with. Another bullet.
As days turned to weeks and the weeks started stacking up, I began to fear that this horrible, stuck feeling of grief and despair would last forever. Crying is difficult for me to access; that’s a story for another day, but something from my childhood taught me that crying is not a safe response to grief and so I instead learned to instinctually suppress and repress all the emotions associated with sadness. I cried just once between ages 10 and 30. And only with my eyes, not my chest. Only with my eyes.
I had already been interested in renewal as a topic to write about, but under these conditions I became obsessed. What I carried was an aching, desperate hunger for depletion. To feel all the feelings so deeply that my grief would be annihilated, that I would become empty (and thus could be refilled). Renewed.
One of the stories I told myself as I was going through it is that I need to feel this grief all the way, that I need to let it into my heart and feel it so deeply, let it destroy me so that I can be remade, so that I can live again.
Depletion, after all, isn’t just a precursor for renewal, it is the precursor for renewal.
But the depletion I sought proved elusive. My emotions mainly swung back and forth between a suffocating sadness and brief flashes of anger. I imagined what it would be like to make those former friends feel small the way they tried to make me feel small. No, we must tell the truth: the way they did make me feel small. I had been badly hurt. My ego, fragile, conjured absurd imaginary scenarios where I could destroy them with righteous anger. How good it might feel to hurt them the way they hurt me!
My sleep became broken, dysregulated. I struggled to get out of bed in the mornings, to find the energy to exercise at all in the day or create things. And I let myself go.
I wish I could tell you that there was a grand moment, an epiphany that led to a turning point and a turning point that led to a breakthrough, but real life is always less convenient than fiction. What happened was this: one evening, listening to a favorite song, the sort of song with a deep emotional resonance… it hit me. All at once. And I was finally able to cry. I’d been holding quite a lot of sadnesses, in fact, both near and far, familiar and unfamiliar; I honored them all and I cried and it felt so good.
Every day since, the tightness in my chest loosened a little, the pressure in my head lightened a bit. Weeks went by and one morning I woke up and finally felt good. Not good as in great, but good as in alright. And that meant the world to me. I felt free, I felt alive, I felt so grateful for how beautiful life and the world and God is. There are big renewals and there are small renewals and both alike carry the life-giving force.
As I reflect on this chapter of my life, I do not think this sorrow is squarely in the rearview mirror. I expect I will keep feeling pain, keep feeling disrupted by it in little waves that come and go, but it will be okay. I survived the experience. Like water, I bent and I bent—oh, how I bent—but I did not break. And what a beautiful, truly beautiful thing it is to know that about yourself. I did not betray myself, not even for fear of losing a deeply cherished friendship. And that is something. That is something.
My feelings of grief and rage towards those ex-friends have—most unexpectedly—slowly morphed into something more akin to gratitude. Their absence from my life has already created space for new friendships to flourish, deep connections forming and unfolding in that most delightful and unlikely of ways in which the universe works. My life really is beautiful and my future is too. I have so much to be grateful for.
Like I said, though, for a while I thought this grief was something I would have to deal with on my own, alone. That I would have to feel it fully, allow it to bottom out and deplete me emotionally. But I’ve come to realize that’s not the case. I can keep living, keep moving forward, keep giving and receiving love, and that these acts, far from being a distraction, will instead be an essential part of the healing process. They will push what remains of the heartbreak out, like a dead branch falling from its tree. And while there will be scars, there will be rawnesses, love will prevail. Joy will prevail. God will prevail. This is the way. It always has been, and it always will be.
And in this spirit of renewal, so I close. May all who seek renewal find their depletion.
I WANT YOU TO IMAGINE WHAT IT WOULD FEEL LIKE TO BE A BIRD
This poem spilled out of me during a fleeting moment of lightness when I was in the thick of it. It’s the only thing I wrote that’s worth a damn from that period, but that means something to me. In fact, it means the world to me. It was the difference between 1 and 0, life and death.
