Body Grief

That last few weeks have been hard. Like brutal hard. How to pinpoint why things feel so hard is almost as exhausting as just making it through a day itself. It’s 3:34 PM on Sunday, the day before I have committed to show up and submit a piece for this here blog- a week late.  I haven’t even come up for air yet at work this month (February) and the month is already over. Which begs, or begged the question…

WHATS WRONG WITH ME? Here I was doing the very thing that brings me joy and fulfillment  (writing and sharing on this blog), crushing my work goals, turning forty (Yes that actually just happened- gasp-close jaw) talking about my exit from religion, grieving  the failure of my marriage with grace, getting help for my family in terms of OCD training, planning vacations, budgeting, killing my gym game, and then BOO! Sneaky, sneaky here comes little Mr. Anxiety. Now I don’t know about you, but I have only struggled with depression once for a brief stint in college, other than that I have no real experience with mental illness in myself. Research and education are a well sharpened tool in my kit, but actually dealing with the feelings themselves – well that is a whole other beast and my hats off to those of you who deal with this shit on the regular. No, literally, I bow to you in honor because mental illness is not for the faint of heart. It takes rigor and extreme strength, I mean EXTREME strength both physically and mentally to not only hold yourself together, but to stay out of the pit (and there are so many pits damn it). 

In an effort to answer my questions and figure out why my feet were not landing on the ground this month I began running mental lists I could check off with a yes or no. “Is it money you are worried about?” (as though that one ever has a ‘No’ to it lol)  “Are you worried about your ex husband?” (He has been away from our boys for months per a mutual decision after his father past and it has taken a major toll on him and them) “Is your day job bringing you joy?” (Not sure why I asked this one) “Are you feeling supported?” “Are things in your current relationship going good?”  “Are you worried about this kid, or that one?” You get the point. I think the scary part became when I realized it’s not one thing. There is not one way to answer why I have been experiencing a steady stream of  low level of anxiety in my body. It would be kind of lovely to say ‘well I am broke and that is causing me great stress’  because I would have a source for the pain, and then I could begin the process of controlling or localizing it. I found that this anxiety, this pain that snuck up on me a few weeks ago (that was not my hormones from an impending period – for once why couldn’t it just be PMS?) was actually just grief. 

Deep breath in. Exhale. Still, with the grief. This specific grief belongs to my marriage and the failure of it. A marriage is such a huge thing to commit too. Whole entire families are birthed out of marriages, complete lives started within a marriage, so when one falls apart- when mine failed, it was in so many ways the loss of that family. I would utter  the phrase “But we are all still family- it just looks different now” to my own kids when they ached for their mom and dad to be under one roof, but you know when you are sitting at the bottom of the lake of grief it sometimes just is what it is. And this is a fail. A great loss to each one of us within that family. That is not to say you never swim back up to the surface and see the sunlight, (I dare say we live there most days as we have been learning to re shape what our family is going to look like now) but sometimes I am finding I just need to call a spade, a spade. This spade that manifested as anxiety all month was really just  grief. Well at least I didn’t have to figure out what the problem was anymore. 

My brilliant sister reminded me that PTSD is not reserved for war vets and trauma victims alone. PTSD  is actually more similar to just recalling memory. When your brain recalls memory – good or bad- your body recalls it too. And your body keeps score. There is a reason my body got sick in the last five years of my own marriage. There is a reason I physically feel sad and hopeless sometimes when I think back to my family falling apart. This form of PTSD, when the memory recalled causes a spark of grief to wave over me, also causes my body to recall  how it survived/felt in that same memory. In this case the grief I was recalling and feeling made my body also recall, hence the anxiety. 

The last year of my marriage and the fall out of it, was survived with anxiety. That feeling of fear lurking in soft shadowed corners, the not knowing what, how or if I could endure, the steady heart race matched by a lack of appetite – that is how my anxiety looked. When I thought I was two years out from this war zone, a million miles into the well worn path of doing the grieving work (and finally starting to see Spring blossoming in my heart and that of my family) I can honestly say I was thoroughly thrown off to feel this impending doom of anxiety. I did not understand that the anxiety that seemingly crept in from out of nowhere could actually just be another form of my grief. What I am fumbling to articulate here is that grief can look and feel one way to your mind and heart but it can also shape out differently for your body. Same process of work, different symptoms. Back to what the baby sis said – your body keeps score.

What I learned this month is that my heart and my mind are not the only things actively grieving, or doing the work of it. My body is actually still grieving too. I am mastering the art of self compassion and being gentle with my heart as she moves through life’s wins and losses, but I need to equally be curating a space for my body to do the same. This month I saw my grief pull me back down towards her floor and instead of being willing to give her that time and space, I resisted her, and told stories in my head about why I was feeling the way I was. In truth, it was so much simpler than I made it. I was not suffering from true depression or anxiety, I was encountering the way my body has been dealing with the loss of my marriage. Essentially, my body was telling me it needed to do some grieving work itself and that meant re living the anxiety it went through to survive for a moment. What you resist, persists.  

For all the times I have championed my heart for not giving up in those last years, I feel quiet with reserve and honor for the lengths my body went through to carry me and also not give up. When my marriage started to go off the rails five years before it ended I was diagnosed with a hypothyroid. That turned into Hashimoto’s disease and most currently Celiacs. If I am to be very transparent we are currently ruling out Lupus and on a continual journey to figure out why my white blood cells like to hang out in such a low state, but you know what I truly believe? I truly believe that body sickness starts in the heart (which is connected to your oh so most powerful brain) and if I give the respect and space for my precious body to grieve and regain composure she will rise strong and able. The next time I get interrupted by this frightening feeling of anxiety, or whatever the emotion is, I am going to pause. I am going to remember that grief and the work of it comes for the heart AND the body. That is shapes and sizes (just like humans) come in many forms, and I am going to make the sacred space for it. In the same way we talk our hearts off a ledge, we need to also talk our bodies off one too. Embrace it, forgo the urge to resist it. 

Dear body, I want to thank you. Thank you for showing up and giving me the ability to go nights without sleep so my babies would. Thank you for enduring long days with little nutrition due to stress. Thank you for carrying me through hard workouts knowing that is how we dealt with stress when you otherwise would have been resting. Thank you for allowing me to carry that one last baby when you needed a break. Thank you for giving me strong shoulders to walk bravely into the unknown. Thank you for allowing my heart to beat and beat loud enough so that I would pay attention to her. Thank you for all the times I withheld calories from you in an attempt to fit into the worlds ideal of you EVEN in the midst of fucking trauma, oh thank you, thank you, thank you. You are brave body, you are mighty body, you are worthy body, YOU…..may…..grieve……any way you want. The space is all yours.

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