Tag: grief

BOTH SIDES NOW (Part II)

well, something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day, oh, I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow it’s life’s illusions, I recall, I really don’t know life at all…

One year ago today, my father died. It’s weird saying that.

I lose track of time a lot, and I often don’t know what day it is. I don’t sleep much and my days are very routine, so most days kind of blur together. I was aware of this day though. Painfully aware of how long it had been since my father died.

One year.

I didn’t think that I would grieve my father. I know that probably sounds terrible. It sounds terrible to me when I say it out loud. Unfortunately, it’s the truth. Our relationship was complicated. I had done many bouts of grieving throughout my life. I spent a lot of years being angry, disappointed, resentful, and all the things that come with loving someone who has hurt you. We hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way in a long time. There were birthday texts. That’s about it.

So if you knew that, it’s probably strange to hear that his death affected me the way that it did. It’s strange to me too. When he died, what I felt first wasn’t heartbreak. I felt a massive release. I remember feeling it physically, like something had finally loosened in my chest. It was something that I had been carrying for years that I wasn’t even aware of.

After the release, I felt forgiveness. Not the kind of forgiveness that erases what happened or pretends that everything was okay. I wasn’t about to rewrite history. It was forgiveness in the way of like “it’s enough now”. Plain and simple, textbook forgiveness. For the both of us. For a lifetime of hard work that never really paid off the way either of us hoped it would. For things he couldn’t give me and vice versa. For the ways we misunderstood each other. And the years we spent trying to navigate a relationship that neither of us seemed to have the instructions for.

I spent a long time being angry at my father. Which would ultimately be followed by a wave of anger at myself for being angry at him. I was angry that he couldn’t be the father that I needed. And I was angry that I couldn’t stop wanting him to be. There were so many times I wanted to reach out, to call, to try and fix it and tell him how I felt. But I also knew that I probably wasn’t going to get what I needed if I did. So I stayed away.

For most of my life, I tried very hard not to be like my father. I believed I was nothing like him. I thought that we were completely different people. I thought whatever was broken in him had somehow skipped over me. And then he died. And in the quiet after, I realized something devastating yet strangely comforting – we were much more alike than I could ever believe. Not in our actions, but on the inside. I don’t think my father did what he did because he was incapable of love. I believe that he believed he didn’t deserve love and that is a very different thing. Somewhere along the way he learned that his worth was connected to his usefulness. That you earned your place by what you could provide, what you could fix and what you could endure. And here I am today writing this blog knowing that I have lived the exact same way. Despite not being present in my life, I managed to inherit his conditioning.

The blueprints were similar. Each one consisted of a whole catalog of defense mechanisms. Ways of protecting ourselves and protecting others from us. Not because we didn’t love. But afraid that we were too damaged. That if we gave too much or too little, no one would hurt and everyone would be okay. That we could carry the burdens and continue to keep the people we love just outside so that they didn’t suffer. I have been shoving my feelings of inadequacy down my entire life. A quality that he helped instill in me by the way, but I digress. Where the blueprints differ is in the actions. I overextended myself to make sure that I was loved. He never let you see the love, so that he didn’t have to be responsible if he hurt you more. Love was always in both blueprints, you just had to look for it.

Noticing the places where we had both been shaped by the same idea that our worth had to be earned was a game changer. For the first time I didn’t need to make him the villain in order to understand why I had been hurt. Understanding didn’t erase the hurt, but it made room for compassion beside it.

My father had one foot out the door my whole life. I was used to it. But he always came back, even if it was just for a moment in time. There was always another possibility, another chance for us to maybe get it right. And so when he died, that was it. There was no coming back this time. There would never be another chance for us to try. It opened up a new level of grief I didn’t know was there. I was grieving the relationship that we might have had.

I thought I had already fallen apart inside. I thought that I had been rebuilding for the last three years. I thought that his death was a final piece of this transformation I was going through. But grief never seems to knock on the front door. It slips in the back door and raids the fridge when you aren’t paying attention. Sometimes it doesn’t even look like grief.

For me it showed up as abandonment. The past year ripped open an abandonment wound that I didn’t realize was capable of still bleeding this much. It has been gaping wide open, oozing into places I didn’t think it could reach. My anxiety has been the worst it has ever been. I’ve been white knuckling my way through life, too terrified to let go. I am terrified of turning into someone different. Which is ironic because I’m always saying that change is necessary if I ever want to move past this point. I have wanted to know what my life could look like if I stopped living according to everyone else’s expectations. But the thought of actually being different is terrifying.

The person who is writing to you today, she’s familiar. Even when she’s exhausted, unhappy, afraid or when she continues to hold things that were never hers to hold, I know her. I don’t know the woman on the other side of all this. And a lot of the time I convince myself that I don’t even deserve to know her. It’s terrifying to think that I could be happier, or finally put myself first or actually deserve the life that I dream about. I want to be that woman. And sometimes I look at her from afar and think “who am I to have all that?”

Some days, I can’t see a way out. Most days I wake up and I’m in survival mode. Get up, go to work, pay the bills, take care of whatever needs to be taken care of, make it through the day, go to bed. Wake up and do it all again tomorrow. Rinse and repeat. I keep doing it and I guess that matters. I keep thinking that if I’m not thriving, I’m failing. If I don’t have a five year plan, I’m failing. If I don’t figure it out soon, I’m failing. But surviving a year that has asked so much of me isn’t failure. The identity that I built around survival isn’t failing, it just can’t be how I continue moving forward.

My father’s death opened my eyes to something else. I don’t want to live like he lived or die how he died. I don’t want to spend my life angry, carrying a giant chip on my shoulder. I don’t want to spend years collecting evidence of all the ways the world has hurt me and let that be my identity. I don’t want to become so convinced that I am unworthy of love that I push away the people who are trying to give it to me. I don’t want to spend my life with one foot out the door and leave the people I love wondering whether I will come back. And I don’t want to leave this world with so much unfinished business inside me. This was the father that I knew and I want something different. I just have no idea how to do any of this. I’m trying, my God, I’m trying.

I’m trying to learn how to let things go without pretending they didn’t hurt. I am trying to forgive without abandoning myself. I am trying to love without losing myself in the process. I am trying to stop believing that everything has to be earned. To believe that I am worthy even when I’m not useful. Trying to become softer without making myself smaller. And to become stronger without shutting people out. Most days, I feel messy. I feel like I’m doing everything wrong. But I have to keep trying.

At this point I believe that I understood my father better than anyone, and that’s probably why I was one of the first people he always pushed away. Maybe being seen that clearly was uncomfortable for him. Maybe I recognized parts of him that he didn’t want to recognize in himself. Maybe I reminded him of things he had spent his life trying not to feel. I don’t know. I’ll never know for sure and that’s just something I have to live with.

I’m going to try wrap this up as neatly as I can with a lopsided bow. But for the last year, my identity around survival has been collapsing. I’m 45 years old, I constantly feel like time is running out, telling myself that I should have it all figured out by now. But the roles that I’ve spent my life playing are no longer working for me and I don’t know how to deal with that. Who am I when I’m not trying to hold everything together? Or when I stop measuring my worth by how much I can endure? Or when I stop believing that being needed is the same as being loved? Maybe I can only look at what is and go from there.

One year after my father died I’m still standing in the rubble. Still white knuckling some of the pieces that don’t belong in the rebuild, but I’m too afraid to let go of. Sometimes just standing in the pile sobbing. But I’m doing my best. I don’t need to know exactly who I am yet, but it was important for me to stop pretending that I was okay. Because I don’t think that I’m becoming someone new. I believe who I really am is buried beneath all that rubble, and I need to start letting those broken pieces go so that I can get to her.

Before the fear, shame, guilt and anger and the endless need to prove that I could handle everything completely buried her. I don’t know what the next year will look like and I have no idea what to do with that woman when I find her, but she deserves a chance to become.

One year ago my father died. And I didn’t think that it would change me, but it did. So if you made it to the end of this, thank you. It’s been a really weird year. I have no idea what the next year will bring, but I know that every day is another chance to try and for today, that’s enough.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m always here if you need me.

it’s life’s illusions that I recall, I really don’t know life, I really don’t know life at all…

Song name: BOTH SIDES NOW/ Artist: JONI MITCHELL/ Year: 1966

LANDSLIDE (Part II)

well, I’ve been afraid of changing ’cause I’ve built my life around you, but time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I’m getting older too…

I’m in the middle of writing another post, catching up on the last couple of months. But this one skipped the line because it felt more important.

Things have been heavy lately. The inner work has been heavy. The person I’ve been working on becoming occasionally peeks out from behind the curtain—but she’s still learning, not quite ready yet. Since I turned 45 in February, I promised myself that the weeks leading up to it—and everything after—would be dedicated to finally figuring things out. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

This post jumped the line because today is my father’s birthday. The first one without him. And I don’t quite know what to do with that yet.

It has me thinking about last year—how I didn’t text him. I was hurt. I didn’t want to play the birthday text game anymore. Even though we weren’t speaking, he still texted me every year on my birthday. And this year, even surrounded by love and beautiful messages, I missed his.

Now I’m sitting here wishing I had known it would be his last birthday. Wishing I had just sent the text instead of holding so tightly to a lifetime of anger. Like I was finally taking a stand—“screw it, I’m not texting him, that’ll teach him.” It feels so small now. I didn’t talk to him before he died. I didn’t get to say I was sorry.

But we live and we learn, right?

If I knew then what I know now, would I change it? Yeah—probably. If I knew it would have made him smile. But I didn’t know. I was still angry. And now I’m just…sad. I’ll be okay. It’s another lesson, and I’ll take it with me and try to do better.

I recently went for a soul reading, and my dad showed up. I know not everyone believes in that, but I do. And it brought me a kind of comfort I didn’t realize I needed. I missed my dad for a long time while he was still here. And strangely, since he’s passed, I feel his presence more.

Grief is layered like that. Complicated. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the right to grieve because we were on such different paths when he died. But the truth is, we were more alike than I ever allowed myself to see. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I let go of the anger and realized our inner blueprints were similar. At the core, it was always about love. About worth. And somewhere along this journey, I’ve learned that your worth isn’t tied to your usefulness in other people’s lives. I hope he knows that now. I hope he’s at peace with it.

I could tell you that if you’re on the outs with a parent, you should send the birthday text. But I’m not going to do that. And I’m not going to sit here and spiral in regret over not sending mine. I didn’t know better then. I do now.

My father was a good man. And today, I’ll do my best to celebrate that.

oh, take my love, take it down, climb a mountain and turn around, and if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills, well the landslide will bring it down…

Song name: LANDSLIDE/ Artist: FLEETWOOD MAC/ Year: 1975

a squarciagola (parte II)

e non vado fino in fondo nelle cose da un po’, come un palombaro, che faccio tutto a caso, un po’ ci riesco, un po’ no, che maleducato, maledetto me che lascio caos dove metto le mani (come?), come gli americani (chi?), gli incendi e gli uragani, volevo questa vita che però non sento mia, mi sento un elefante dentro una cristalleria… alzo il volume della radio, abbasso il finestrino e cambio l’aria, la mano controvento fa un elettrocardiogramma, che, detto proprio chiaro, ho il timore che sia piatto…

It seems the urge to write always strikes when I’m in a hotel somewhere. This time it’s in Sicily. And I’m writing today because as the queen of pattern recognition, I’ve noticed a pattern and I’m doing my damnedest to fight against myself and not repeat it. And I’m literally sobbing as I write this because I am so tired of disappointing myself. So tired of giving up when things are difficult. The truth is that I need to face myself, and I fucking hate that so much.

Yesterday was a very long day. And I felt the spiral coming despite all of my efforts to fight it. I went for a walk to clear my head and I sat by the sea and felt better. But the sun was setting and I headed back to my hotel before it got too dark out. And the spiral continued. A million thoughts were running through my head. I called my husband crying, telling him that I wanted to come home. He talked me off the ledge as usual. We both discussed how I was hungry and hadn’t slept yet in 30 hours and that tomorrow would be better. It was my godson’s birthday and I FaceTimed with him. And I got to speak to my cousin who is also a pro at this and helped talk me down. I drove around a little bit, came back, called my husband. Back and forth with feeling like I made the right decision coming here while also feeling sheer panic, complete with hot face and ears. I don’t know what time I fell asleep because I guess my body finally rationalized that exhaustion was going to win the battle. The only way to describe the feeling is complete terror. And I know that sounds absolutely absurd because I booked this trip and was excited about it, so what the fuck?

The last few years of my life, if you haven’t been reading along, have been really hard for me to navigate. Somewhere along the line I completely lost control of my nervous system. Irrationality is my go-to feeling for everything. It’s exhausting. But mostly, it’s not living. And so when I booked this trip, I was really excited. And about a week ago I started to feel really unsure. I questioned myself on everything. I could feel the anxiety slowly starting to take over. I wrote about it in my journal and tried to get myself back to neutral. But at this point, I don’t even know what neutral looks like. I have no baseline for emotions, it’s just pure fucking chaos. I listened to people ask me why I was going again; why my husband wasn’t going with me; what is the point of all this? And the truth is that I really can’t explain it to you. Because you’re not me. When I am sitting on my couch, the ache and pull I feel to come back here is completely overwhelming. It’s like a homesickness and it is relentless.

Last time I came to Sicily, it was everything that my first trip should have been. I did not allow myself to spiral. I enjoyed it so much that I was so sad to leave. And so I don’t know where the fuck all of this is coming from. And I refuse to let myself do what I did on the first trip. And bail when feelings get too overwhelming. I shit you not, I was looking at flights to get the hell out of here as soon as possible. And then got dressed and took a drive. I blasted All Time Low and sang at the top of my lungs. And then a friend sent me a video that made me sit and think for a bit. I am so afraid of everything, to the point where I am taking literal years off of my life with the amount of self imposed stress. But the choices we make are the choices we make. And it’s better to choose than not. And I can spend my life stressing about every little goddamn thing, or I can try, every once and a while, to just go with the flow. I can carry a bag full of things for any situation and just live my life. And not bail when it’s too overwhelming.

I am here for a reason. And it sounds weird to anyone I explain it to, but every time I come across a new piece of information regarding my lineage here, my heart explodes with anticipation to come back. So that’s why it really bothers me that my first instinct on a really exhausting day was to fucking leave. I work really hard and make sure everything is nice for everyone but me. I make myself smaller to make sure everyone else is okay. And so yea, maybe it doesn’t have to be this drastic, maybe I don’t need to flee the country solo, but I’m telling you that there is something here for me. And if I would just calm the fuck down and get out of my head, I would hear it. I heard it the last time I was here, and if I just give myself some time, I know I’ll hear it again.

A little over two years ago, no one even knew we were from Sicily. And I remember feeling betrayed when I found out. Not really sure why it mattered to me so much, but at that time I was deep in the throes of this spiritual awakening and it hit me like a ton of bricks. And now this is the third time I’ve been here. And some people think I’m batshit crazy, and others just get it and know that giving me a sideways comment won’t change whatever it is I’m doing. I know that I’ve grown and changed a lot, as much as it sometimes feels like I haven’t changed at all. But the fact is that I’ve been to Sicily THRICE. Things that I imagined have come to fruition. And maybe the situation always seems like total chaos, but when I step back and look at the bigger picture, there’s a lot that’s changed.

So, don’t ask me what I’m doing here. I don’t know yet. I finally stopped crying and decided to give myself a chance. The only flight I can change to involves me taking a 9:30 PM flight out of here tomorrow followed by 11 hours in the Rome airport before the flight home. So, no. We aren’t doing that. Take it day by day, breathe, and know that you can do hard things. You don’t need to be making things more difficult than they are. I am a functioning human being out in the world and I just need to keep reminding myself of that.

One last thing I want to touch on, because I feel like it’s important, and then I’ll stop making you read more things. My cousin reminded me yesterday that I carried something new with me on this trip: Grief. It is my father’s family that led me here, and he just passed away in August. His death made me feel peace for him, not overwhelming grief, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I discovered after he passed that he and I were way more alike in terms of our internal blueprint. We both always felt like we didn’t deserve to be loved. And how we chose to be out in the world is where we were different. My father was a man of very few words and if he saw tears, he told you to rub some dirt in it and knock it off. Where I would go in the complete opposite direction and give all the love I could give to make someone feel better. And I hope that now, wherever he is, he knows that he was loved despite all of his efforts to deflect, and that he finally is able to accept it.

So for now, I will stop crying, rub some dirt in it and knock it off. You don’t get this many chances to figure it out and maybe it’s time for me to leap even if I’m terrified. Most importantly, I can’t give up on myself.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m always here if you need me…

e anche se dentro a me c’è questa baraonda, qui c’è un silenzio che mi ride a squarciagola, che quelli come me fanno finta, che non sia dura, non sia in salita, che sia tutta vita…

Song name: A SQUARCIAGOLA/ Artist: OLLY/ Year: 2024