Learning How To Be Not Okay
1. It's better to acknowledge the hurt than to ignore it.
One of the biggest mistakes I made when I was grieving my grandma’s decline in health and death was not letting myself process my emotions. I would go to school, pretend like all of the hard parts of life outside of school didn’t exist, then go home and be hit with reality. It resulted in many restless nights of crying to sleep. I didn’t want to recognize the hurt. I wanted to feel normal and I wanted life to go back to normal. What I failed to acknowledge was that it is normal to hurt and sometimes you have to be sad in order to get back to happy. Once I was able to acknowledge that, yes, I was hurting I was able to take another step toward healing.
2. There’s nothing bad about hurting.
Why is it that I feel it’s bad to show that I’m hurting? Probably because I have an ego that sometimes won’t even let me admit to myself that certain things hurt. And who wants to look weak by showing their emotions? But sometimes showing emotion doesn't equate to being weak. It just depicts your truth. And while the truth might feel terrible to us, often times those terrible moments keep us grounded in God. I couldn't have gotten through the initial grieving process of my grandma's illness if it wasn't for the fact that I spent many a night crying out in prayer. And I know I'm not the only one. There are countless stories in the Bible of people who cried out to Jesus because they were hurting. And how did Jesus respond to those who cried out to Him? He loved them. What did Jesus do right before he died? He cried out to His Dad. So how does God, the Father of Jesus, respond to our cries? You guessed it, he loves the ever living heck out of us. I find that to be so encouraging.
3. Let yourself hurt.
“I sound like a dying hippo when I loud-cry. I can’t get the sound out of my head. It was honestly kind of horrifying.”
This was how I described my grief after learning my Grandpa passed. Hurting doesn’t look or sound pretty. We want to be like the girls in the movies who look into a mirror with tears streaming down their face and makeup somehow staying perfectly in place. Instead, it’s looking into a mirror to see the pain etched into your face only to cry more because actually seeing the pain (somehow) makes you just feel it even more. If you don’t let yourself hurt when you need to then it’s going to build until you can’t ignore it anymore. What is true will be revealed and it will hurt even more than if you had just let it out when it first needed to be let out.
4. Know when to let go.
The first thing that I realized towards the end of initially grieving Grandma was that the grief will never end. It felt hopeless at first. I thought I would never be able to think of her laugh without crying. But then I realized that grief isn’t all sad. Grief is bittersweet. It was when I met one of my grandma’s friends. Something about the way she talked made me feel like I was with Grandma again. I started to cry and she apologized for making me emotional. I wanted to say, “It feels like I’m talking to her again and that makes me feel so happy.” Once I realized that grief wasn’t all sadness I was able to let go. And the important part was that I did it all at my pace. Not at my sister’s pace, or my dad’s pace. We all dealt with it our own way and that was how it was meant to be.
As much as I’ve learned from living life and living through pain I still haven’t gotten this whole “learning how to be not okay” thing figured out. I still catch myself holding back tears during times when I know I just need to let go. It’s especially difficult when I’m around people. It’s one thing to talk about my vulnerabilities and it’s another to show them. So, I’m challenging myself to be more intentional about process emotions rather than blocking them out until it turns into a bigger mess. I also know I'll never stop struggling with my emotions. And that's okay.