Here we go again.

It's all just so heavy.

It's been over a year of this- whatever 'this' is- and here we are still feeling heavy and drained and divisive. Each day there's somehow something worse or equally horrible to hear about on the news or read online. And for each of those events there's this invisible line drawn in the sand and everyone picks their camps.

Last night I got into bed and abruptly started crying. The event followed a typical mellow week night in our household so my husband was surprised by the swing of emotions. (Though let's be real, not THAT surprised. It is me, the ultimate feeler of feels, after all).

"I'm just really fucking sad," I said, for lack of better articulation.

On top of the news of more racially driven hate crimes, a very close friend lost her dad this week and it was much sooner than expected. Her loss has pulled me into my grief for obvious reasons, and I can't help but feel the amplification given the current state of our world. We're now living in a time when you aren't only navigating your own grief, you have to manage your individual experiences stacked on this collective shit show impacting our society. It's suffocating.

I literally ache for my friend and her sister. My heart and my gut feel heavy thinking about what they're experiencing.

There's a natural order we seem to understand and respect as humans that makes it easier (for lack of a better word) to accept loss. Of course it's sad and difficult when we lose a grandparent or an older loved one, but the loss is processed differently when we know they've lived a fulfilled, long life. It's nature's order and that's what our brains have been trained to accept as "normal".

I don't believe there's an age it suddenly becomes any easier to lose a parent, but I do believe the younger you are when you lose a parent the more there is to grieve.

It's not only the grieving of the relationship, it's the grieving of everything that was supposed to come.

When we found out my mom was sick, events unfolded incredibly quickly. Looking back I was operating from this ultra heightened sense of being. My body kicked into overdrive because if I had to truly process the reality of what was happening in real-time there's no way I could have. We're not built to handle complex loss so quickly, so our brains take over and shove the emotions deep down in a dark corner in order to kick us into survival mode. This is a very non-scientific take on a legitimate phenomenon- seriously, Google it.

I got a lot of "you're so brave", "it's incredible how well you've handled everything". The truth is I wasn't handling anything. I was subconsciously pushing it off because I was still on autopilot. And not to sound unappreciative of the support, but I wasn't brave. I didn't volunteer my mom to get cancer and die. I showed up and did my best just as anyone else would. In reality I drank a lot of alcohol, excessively online shopped and projected a lot of anger onto my partner, but that's for another post.

When operating in that heightened state a lot becomes blurred. I was so focused on logistics that I overlooked conversations about the future. We never got to look at bridal magazines like we said we would, or talk about how she'd like me to honor her at my wedding. I didn't ever ask her about her pregnancies to learn what mine might be like. These are the recent waves of grief that hit the hardest.

I've talked about finding gifts in the grief and I do believe the pandemic uprooting our wedding plans resulted in the best case scenario for us. Even though we had decided on a destination wedding to make things more manageable all around, I was still falling into the trap of creating this perfect fairytale moment. Creating a story of what that day was supposed to be and in turn creating unreasonably high expectations and pressure.

Marrying my husband, literally just the two of us, allowed me to intimately feel my mom's spirit instead of missing her physical presence. It allowed that moment to be ours, not the pony show I was creating.

When I think about trying to get pregnant I start to create stories about what it's supposed to be like, much like the wedding. Of course I have the normal fears that come with making the jump to decide to grow a human inside my body, birth it and raise it to be a decent, kind human being, but I also get myself into this spiral of thoughts about how I'll be missing so much not having my mom a phone call away through it all.

So yea, that's part of the grief of the things you lose when a parent dies too soon. I've lost sight of the intent of my words (shocking) and where this was all going, but if nothing else it's cathartic to type it out and be candid in the fact that working through grief is just that. Working through it. Processing. Sometimes it's through movement or art or meditation or tears. Sometimes it's just physically being in the presence of someone you love. No words needed.

That advice should be applicable to everyone in our world right now, really. Everyone is grieving, whether it's a life or a missed event or a past version of ourselves. There is no comparison or scale of whose grief is greater or worse. It all just is and it all deserves space to be acknowledged.

I created this space a little over a year ago just before the world shut down. I've written and saved drafts in the time since, but it hasn't felt appropriate for me to hit publish. I feel a little out of my lane here, but there's also this unexplainable feeling I have that there's something important I need to do.

We're living in a vital moment of history and I refuse to passively float through life without offering something of value. I find myself feeling exhausted not knowing how to help or better advocate for marginalized groups, so this is where I'm choosing to start.

Stay tuned-

P.S. I'll do my best not to leave you hanging for another year.