As we continue to move forward into fall, we’re seeing the trees shedding old leaves all around us. Of course, in a few more months, the trees will grow new leaves. Something new will grow in place of what was released.
This season always makes me think deeply – not just about what I’m shedding, but also about what I’m allowing to grow in its place. In other words, I start considering how I’m rewriting my story.
We all have many different stories that we tell ourselves about the way that we are, as well as about the world and the way that we move through it. A major story that I’ve recently rewritten is my story about grief. Today, I’d like to share more about my old grief story, how and why I’ve rewritten it, and the gifts that this brought me.
This will be a very personal blog. I’ve been through quite a bit of loss. I’ve shared a little of this story before, but I’m ready to share more fully now. I hope that this will be helpful for anyone who has lost someone important to them.
My old story around grief
Nine years ago, while I was in my medical residency, both of my nephews (Micha and Tyrin, my sister’s sons) were killed in a car crash.
Of course, this was a hugely traumatic event. I loved my nephews, and their loss was devastating. I really needed to take time to grieve their loss properly. But because I was in residency, I was already overwhelmed with work. I didn’t feel like I had time to grieve. So I learned to simply stuff my grief down and ignore it.
The story I wrote about grief at that time was, “The best thing to do is to distract yourself from grief.” Instead of learning how to feel my grief and move through it, what I did was to simply pretend that I wasn’t feeling it. Whenever I was hit by a wave of grief, I’d just find something else to do to distract myself. Because I was in the midst of my residency, there was always plenty of work to keep me occupied.
I carried that pain for years. I didn’t even realize that I was doing this. I never really processed what had happened, so the pain just stayed inside of me. Occasionally, it would surface, but I’d always find a way to stuff it down again.
My season of grief
Fast forward to last fall. That season, my family was hit with a series of losses very quickly.
First, my father was diagnosed with cancer. My father is my hero. I was terrified of losing him.
Then my beloved grandmother passed away. My grandmother was my heart, and the heart of my whole family. Truly, she was our emotional center. Her loss was devastating.
And then my aunt was also diagnosed with cancer. All of this happened in the same season.
By this point, I had been on my transformational journey for a few years, and I’d learned about the importance of truly processing your feelings. I knew that it wasn’t healthy to simply stuff my grief down – instead, I needed to feel it fully. At the same time, I had to stay strong for my dad and my aunt as they were each going through a difficult treatment journey. I needed to fully feel my grief, and not to fall apart completely while doing that.
As I processed my grief around my grandma’s death as well as my dad’s and aunt’s illnesses, I started to feel the grief of my nephews’ deaths as well. Because I’d never properly grieved for them, all of that pain was still inside me, just waiting to come up. Even though their deaths happened almost a decade earlier, I found that my grief for them was still fresh.
I hadn’t expected this, but it certainly does make sense. Grief needs to be processed. If we simply stuff it down and ignore it (as I had), it will simply stay inside of us, unchanged. Eventually, we will need to face that grief and feel it fully. There’s no avoiding this.
Rewriting my story around grief
I can truly say that, during this period of my life, I learned how to grieve properly.
One helpful tool was journaling. I used this to help me explore the waves of emotions that came as I was moving through my grief. It was important to look inward and to explore deeply to discover what I was feeling. Emotions can be complicated, and I had to dedicate time and attention to untangling everything that was going on inside of me.
Talking with my therapist was also helpful. Through insightful reflection and asking questions, she was able to help me explore more deeply. Self-reflection is powerful, but it also really helps to talk to someone else to get a fresh perspective.
It was very important to give myself time to grieve. Instead of trying to distract myself with work (as I had before), I did the opposite – I took things off my plate as much as possible. I gave myself the time and space that I needed to process what I was feeling. I spent a lot of time in nature during this period, which I found helped me to stay grounded and also to gain insights.
At times, my journey of grief was very challenging. As anyone who has lost someone knows, grief really hurts. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to feel any of this. But I knew that I had to allow myself to feel it fully in order to finish processing it and move forward in a healthy way.
I also shared openly with my family during my grief process. All of us were processing the loss of my grandmother together, and I knew that sharing what we were going through would be healing. Instead of pretending to my family that I was “fine” (as I had done in the past), I told them what I was going through, and I listened openly as they told me what they were feeling.
The gifts of grief
Now that the most intense part of my grief journey is over, I can see the gifts that grief brought to me.
One of the biggest ones was that it brought me and my family closer together. By sharing our grief journeys, we were able to become closer than ever before. This is what generally happens when we share grief with someone – but it will only happen if we’re truly open about our experiences with each other. If we stuff down our grief the way I did with my nephews years ago, then we don’t get this beautiful gift of becoming closer to those around us. We have to feel it fully and talk about what we’re truly experiencing in order to receive this gift.
Another gift of grief has been that I now recognize and appreciate contentment. I can honestly say that I’m now truly happy with my situation. We all miss my grandmother, but we feel very blessed to have been loved and cared for by her, and we laugh as we remember the many good times we had with her. I feel at peace with the way that things are now.
Before, I never truly understood that contentment is a gift. Now, I see how satisfying it is to simply accept and appreciate the present. Is this the way I would have chosen for things to be? Of course not. But going through my grief journey brought me contentment and peace, and this is a beautiful gift.
The effect of grief on skin health
It’s essential to ensure that you’re processing your grief. Unprocessed grief – like what I was experiencing for many years – can impact many aspects of your health, including your skin health.
When you’re experiencing strong emotions like grief, your body’s secretion of cortisol is very high. This impacts your immune system, as well as directly affecting your skin – so it’s no surprise that grief can trigger flare-ups. In addition, people may deal with grief in unhealthy ways (such as by eating sweets or other unhealthy foods), and this can also impact gut health and skin health.
There’s really no way to completely avoid this. A strong emotion like grief will always impact your cortisol secretion, and virtually no one is able to avoid loss in their lives. However, if you fully feel and process your grief, then you’ll be able to move through it and return to a healthier state with lower cortisol levels.
If you try to stuff your grief down the way I did, then it will continue to affect you until you finally address it. This is one reason why some people experience skin flares – they’re affected by a strong emotion that they haven’t processed. We don’t even always realize exactly what it is that we’re feeling, especially if we’ve spent years deliberately ignoring it. Taking time to look deeply inward (through journaling, therapy, and/or time spent alone, preferably in nature) can help you to untangle your emotions so that you can determine what it is that you need to process so that you can return to better health.
How are you rewriting your story?
Now, I’d like to invite you to contemplate whether there are any stories you’d like to rewrite in your own life. These could be related to how you process the things that happen to you, like my grief story. They could also be related to who you are and what you’re capable of – for example, many people have a story that says that their skin health isn’t under their control, that they’ll never be able to attract a compatible partner, or that they aren’t capable of accomplishing their goals.
There are lots of stories that we tell ourselves – and most of them aren’t true. Remember that you can choose to rewrite any of your stories at any time.
As we often do in this community, we’ll use journaling to explore this idea. Get out your journal, and freely write whatever comes when you consider the following questions.
Is there a story you’re telling yourself that isn’t serving you?
Is this story actually true?
If not, what would be a more accurate and helpful story to tell?
What steps can you take towards rewriting your story?
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