We don’t need to bathe in grief or anoint ourselves with holy misery. There is, after all, a mastubatory element to counting our flaws, calculating our sins and enumerating the wrongs done to us. It is indulgent. It solidifies our already resilient excuses. It is…icky.
But oh, how grim circumstances plant the seeds of a good story. Often, when I’m the midst of existential despair (every six weeks or so) or have been wronged egregiously, I comfort myself with the knowledge that this will make a great story some day.
Set me up at a cocktail party (or a blog!) and I’m good hours of storytelling entertainment. But even an endless stream of pretty stories has a dark side. Sometimes we build personal narratives the way we do prisons: to keep the bad things in.
And when we disparage ourselves, luxuriate in our flaws, and spin intricate histories woven through generations of Why We are the Way We Are, we cast ourselves as the inmates.
So…this is not an engraved invitation to a pity party. This is not a Be Miserable! manifesto or an incitement to the inaction of complaint.
This is simple truth talking.
While we probably don’t need to stroke ourselves with tales of incapacitating woe, we do need to acknowledge that all of those things – sickness, misery, death, loss, divorce, random unkindness, broke, discrimination, frustration, heartbreak, loneliness, soul-deep disappointment – are real, inevitable and mostly (mercifully!) transitory.
Transitory, not simply “temporary”. As Alexander Graham Bell – and I think we can trace “social media” back to the party-line phone – said, “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
So misery – or even joy – is transitory. You walk through it and land somewhere else. You walk through it and your life is transformed. You walk through it and you are transformed.
Grief is mourning that which has passed. A time, a togetherness has been lost. A new time is at hand. Periods of intense emotion – or even being insulated from any emotion – herald the end of one experience and the birth of another. A new life is upon you.
But in the squall of grief, in the hardened eye of despair, this is small comfort. What is even less comforting is denying and fighting the fact that pain and suffering exist.
Why are we compelled to deny our realities and the full spectrum of our feelings?
Within ourselves are entire orchestras of emotion and possibility. High notes, low notes, sour notes, dissonance, heart-rending harmony. We are not one note in a symphony. When we confine ourselves to one sound, one note, one colour, one mood, one tweet, one endlessly repeated facebook status update, we abbreviate all that we are.
And that’s a lyrical and mmm-hmmm easy-to-accept truth. But the more urgent and pressing truth is this:
- when we squelch our grief, we deny ourselves the breadth of experience. We deny ourselves the richness of life. There is a divinity in pain. There are truths in heartache. There is a reckoning in slammed doors. None of this is to be courted for the sake of experience – though artists often paint and write and create and dance in the fire of a self-destructive struggle with exactly that gas and those matches – but it is to be endured. It is to be acknowledged, even savoured, in the moment. Once when I was heartbroken and valiantly fighting the fissures with “It’s all my fault; I shouldn’t be this upset; I need to buck up…”, Dave told me: Be sad. Cry. Feel it all and let it pass. And that is essential advice.
- to be relentlessly chipper we must ignore the sometimes disheartening demands of daily life.
- when we wave the “everything is awesome” flag, all the time, we inadvertently shame and silence people in the midst of very real suffering.
- and…it is a lie. When we only glaze our faces with pasted smiles and only adorn our profiles with cut-and-pasted positivity, we lie. We seek to impress others with outwards signs of happiness. We hope to impress ourselves too or else we content ourselves with appearing happy and well. We lie. We lie to ourselves, we lie to others, we build lives and relationships on sand and salt and lies, and then we wonder why it all tastes fake, like tears and mud. We wonder where our true friends are – the ones who’ll be with us through the grit we hesitate to admit.
There’s pleasure and pain in knowledge, truth, life. Reality is a fucking mess and yet in that morass we dig in and we grow. We grow and we grow and we glow.
And buried therein are the tangled roots of juicy fear and fearsome joy.
Excellent, excellent post! I am one of those habitual “I’m fine!” people. It somehow seems stronger to exclaim “I’m fine!” than admit when I am hurting or simply sad. I love your point that both misery and joy are transitory. Great food for thought. I’m going off to think now…
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Dave Doolin
replied:
on August 16th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
@Katie Mack, the amazing thing about Kelly is that doesn’t actually unload these feelings. Instead, she stores them all up and transforms the despair, the misery, the pain, the overweening awfulness… into brilliant, uplifting inspiration.
We should all be so gifted.
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Dave Doolin
replied:
on August 16th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Also, Pisces. Typical.
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Kelly, this is beautiful.
“Transitory, not simply temporary” is a deep abiding truth that I live each day. I’ve had many such difficult times steer me in new directions, not the least of which have been injury, loss and alienation. Each so difficult at the time, but the depth and richness they added to my soul, and to my eye, find themselves seeping into my photos, my words, my interactions with my soul-family, every single day.
While I still believe that beauty is in everything, that he will save us, that our searching for her in each moment, especially the troubling ones will bring some sort of meaning, some tiny pause of relief from our troubles, I know those troubles still can’t be denied.
Funny thing is, I’m rarely one to talk about them. Not at the time, anyway. There are stories after the fact, almost always: the this and the that and isn’t it odd how that all turned out. Is that harmful? Perhaps. Maybe it’s time to add hurt to my day to day vocabulary.
Oh, my soul-family could be in for a surprise!
Hugs and butterflies,
~Teresa~
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Right on with everything. As usual.
And don’t you think that when we deny ourselves the acceptance & feeling of pain or sadness, we cheat ourselves out of the ability to react to that sadness?
While I was stuck in my dead-end retail job, I tried looking for the bright side in EVERYTHING. I had myself convinced that things were moving forward, that I was getting somewhere in life. But I wasn’t, I was depressed & suffering on the edge of a complete meltdown.
It wasn’t until I allowed myself to accept that pain & depression that I was able to react – positively – to that feeling. It was motivation. And it made the success & happiness on the other side feel so much more real. But I don’t think I would have even had the opportunity to find success if I hadn’t accepted just how low I had gotten myself.
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I came up with a philosophy of life that I call ‘beauty and impermanence’ after an enormously difficult break-up a few years back. It helped me when I realised that EVERYTHING in life is transitory (impermanent) and so to find the beauty (even in the pain, sometimes) in every moment is the way to bring joy.
Those sort of heart-wrenching times add a new depth to the experience of life, which while painful, inform you as a person and shape your outlook on the world.
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That reminds me of the Litany Against Fear:
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me and when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path.
When the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
As you say, we shouldn’t deny our feelings exist. We should feel and see them through, keeping an eye on them so that they do not stick with us, but rather “flow over and through”. We change and grow, and only we remain…our true selves.
.-= Carlos Velez´s last blog ..Why is Selling to One Customer a Joy- and to Another a Nightmare =-.
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As usual, you speak right to the heart of me. I think at both extremes – everything is always great! and everything is always awful! – we are hiding something from the world and, more perilously, ourselves. Something we don’t want to unpack and examine and celebrate. Thank you for your always elegant, always unflinching excavation of nothing less than the meaning of life. xox
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“Feel it all and let it pass”. That Dave is one smart cookie.
I’ll add to the rest of all of your smart-cookieness that being afraid of being in an emotion (or experience) creates an even more toxic space…we avoid situations that may elicit such responses. Back my coach training, we were offered the visual of a circle (representing a client’s life) and then asked to draw in that circle OTHER circles intended to depict what clients (and just about anyone with a pulse) may not want to “be with” (i.e. sadness, disappointment, fear, anger, disconnect). It became apparent how little white space was left in which to move around. If we are constantly avoiding a situation for fear of bumping up against an ignited emotion, well, life can get pretty narrow.
Exploring and experiencing an emotion in a real and meaningful way can help us to learn how to dial up and dial down what’s here, right now. In this precious moment.
Thank you, K, for your truth and honesty and frickin’ off-the-charts “hell’s ya!”. As ever.
XOX
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I love transitory. And the six weeks window is hard. I’m hoping the very best that you go from transitory to transcendental.
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Kelly you are a poet. With this standard of lyricism and raw honesty you could give Walt Whitman a run for his money. “…the tangled roots of juicy fear and fearsome joy.” I read your pieces with awe.
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Wonderful post!
Somehow I am wired to be real no matter what. While I can put on a quiet face for social interactions as absolutely needed (and there are circumstances where it’s needed), I prefer to be real, especially in my writing/social-networking. Sometimes that’s the only place I can be witnessed. And I think it’s important that those of us who are willing to share our stories, do so with complete honesty. It’s where true connection lies. It’s usually my most vulnerable postings that touch people deeply.
Sometimes being real means exuberant joy (aren’t we just as afraid of being publicly exuberant as we are of being weepy?). Sometimes that means I’m in the throes of grief. And sometimes it means I’m in the wilderness of apathy. It’s a journey and the terrain continually changes.
Resistance creates suffering. You and Dave are right on that it’s the moving through the emotions that matters.
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Kelly,
While I often tell others to dive headfirst into the pain because the only way out is through, I also know that diving in is H*A*R*D and sometimes really tears us down. Do I do it every time? No. Sometimes I eat my way through (oh hai, pants that don’t fit!), sometimes I bury it and sometimes, just sometimes, I let myself sit in the stew and marinate in the pain.
It is transitory but hard to see that in the middle of a breakdown when the world has narrowed so much that all you see is what’s in front of you.
Sending a hug and a special “Wand of Happiness” you can use when needed.
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One word. Juicy!
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Kelly, this post is pure poetry. I read it twice. And then all the comments.
I certainly agree with your premise: trying to hide and deny feelings is dishonest and destructive. It’s also unproductive. You said a lot more than that, of course, and covered different types of emotional pain. The pain of loss probably cuts the deepest, and that’s something only time will heal, as cliché as that sounds.
But there’s another kind of emotional discomfort which I carry way too much of, and wish I could jettison most, if not all of it. It’s feeling like I’m not good enough, or I’ve failed in some way, or I’m not getting the love and appreciation I deserve, or life is not going as planned, or I’ll run out of cash tomorrow, or all of the above. These ideas floating around in my head, which most of the time are not actually happening, generate depressing feelings that take the luster off my enthusiasm and creativity. The hurting in my heart also makes me impatient with myself and others, grouchy and gloomy. I’m no fun to be around, inside and outside of myself.
But I’ve been taught from wise old souls that negative feelings can be useful, up to a point. They tell us when we are mentally out of alignment with our core intentions and our true being. Like blaring warning horns, they scream STOP WHAT YOU’RE THINKING! YOU ARE FOCUSING ON A RESISTANCE WHICH IS IN CONTRADICTION TO WHAT YOU WANT! Meaning, Irv’s not living in the moment of WHAT IS. He’s submerged in fear about what MIGHT BE.
That said, I wish I COULD live in the moment, more than for just a moment…or two. I’d be happier. I’d feel more free. I’d be kinder to others and myself.
But alas, I do worry and fret, usually about tomorrow. And when that happens, everything is not okay. And although I wish I could feign faith, it just doesn’t come, and I end up mouthing the words, “This too shall pass.” Yeah, it’s transitory, until something comes along that comes close to matching what I want. Then I’m happy again. And that’s okay I guess, but this happiness shit should really be coming from outside me and not from turn of events.
Irv
[Reply]
Irving Podolsky
replied:
on August 18th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
@Irving Podolsky, …really be coming from INSIDE me and not…
THAT’S WHAT I MEANT TO SAY…
IRv
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Acknowledging the pain and sorrow is sometimes the best medicine. I remember times of intense grief when I would just wallow in it. I’d get some wine, chocolate, play sad songs on the stereo, and just dive down into the middle, experience it in every fiber of my body, and cry until I was exhausted. Something in me needed that catharsis, and it was always the beginning of healing.
Another inspiring post — thank, Kelly.
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Right on. Sometimes the best way to get through something is to just f.e.e.l. it, not wallow, mind you, but let yourself really, truly feel it, whatever “it” is.
This has worked for me lately, though I do have to remind myself that it’s OK to “feel it,” rather than immediately going to pretending, and saying, “now worries, it’s all good.”
Awesome post.
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