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I went through a pretty gnarly break up last year as some of you have likely gathered from my writings on grief and relational loss. In my opinion it was not a “normal” breakup, and because of the way it unfolded there was a lot from the past that came up to be looked at again. That looking has not been easy at all, but the result has been the exposure and upending of some of the most basic stories I have about who I am and what I’m here to do.
When I say that I have commitment issues, what I mean is that I am a highly ritualistic and devotional person who can be rigid about the things I’ve decided to do, and who often doesn’t know when to stop. I refused the loss for as long as I could, so by the time the relationship officially ended I knew right away what was needed. I gave myself over to the process of mourning as fully as I knew how to do.
I leaned hard on the people around me who know what it means to lose the long way, and who have eaten the fruits of having taken one’s time. I found a bit of a calling there, I think, which is to become one of those people myself. I felt rushed every which way. But I knew, probably from all the old stories I read, that I was in the thick of a very rich woods. The chance of a lifetime, I think. That I’d miss if I tried to rush through it.
I’ve hurried before, or dug elaborate underground tunnels to avoid the work of walking that path. But there are times in life when avoidance is no longer an option, it’s usually incredibly painful, and for me that’s just where I was at. And if I had to give advice to someone in acute grief it’d be this: Find beings who aren’t going to rush you, and find language that’s just reflective enough of your reality to function. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you’ll want something to hold onto as you get your bearings. Good language goes a long way.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but one thing I’m proud of is my set of close friends with the cumulative wisdom of every old midwife on earth. I don’t want to glorify suffering, but I think a lot of them got this way in part by being willing to mourn. So I was shored up there, and at the same time troubled—in a good way, I think—because we’re gonna need a lot more people like them to tend the grief that is coursing in waves across earth as we speak.
With good people to talk to and a cohort of solid non-human animal friends, I started to look for good language about the benefits of mourning. I knew I had to do it regardless, but I was hoping someone could tell me it would all be worth it, since I was fixated on how unfair it was that I had to do it when it seemed like others did not. Here’s another piece of advice: Put those avoidance muscles to good use if you’ve got ‘em—and I’m sure we all do—and avert your eyes from what others are doing. I found the idea of “taking other people’s inventory” as a boundary violation to be useful here.
I also found the affirmation I needed in Line Ryberg Ingerslev’s writing on mourning and world-building1. Ingerslev writes about the power of articulating psychic pain with language as a way of committing to others and being a participant in a shared world. This was a useful idea for me in those early days because of how alienated I felt. It kept me connected to the importance of writing as a way to connect safely with others when I trusted so few. Those feelings of alienation and abandonment were themselves extremely important, but not easy to go through at all.
The alternative to articulating the pain, for Ingerslev, was the silencing and denying of loss. Citing psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok from their book The Shell and the Kernel, Ingerslev adds that this refusal amounts to “pretending that we had absolutely nothing to lose.” And that “there can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances.” When this happens, “the words that cannot be recalled, the tears that cannot be shed—everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject.”
There are probably a lot of good rebuttals to this idea that the human psyche is akin to a tupperware container or deep freezer inside of which memories are stored where they retain their essence until we have the capacity to retrieve them, presumably with the help of an expert. But when I was in the thick of acute grief you couldn't tell me a thing about post-structuralism or critical theory or any theory of reality aside from what felt real enough to hold onto. Those mixed up disoriented days call for poetry, not accuracy.
I guess in the end it’s still all about stories. So if the story is that there’s a secret tomb inside me with everything I never mourned that I’m going to be increasingly pressed to deal with sooner or later and therefore better get cracking, so be it. Honestly given everything I went through last year the crypt concept’s pretty convincing. It doesn't need to be true. Much more than true, it was useful.