Becoming Unstuck

Stuck at home in early December with a cold, I found myself too cranky and restless to just curl up with a good book and get better. When my eye fell on that overflowing underwear drawer I’d been telling myself I’d clean out one of these days, I dumped the contents on my bed and impatiently sorted through the jumble. Half of it went into a bag to go, and half went back into the drawer, which glided closed easily now. Inside my chest, a little space cracked open and I took a deep breath. My irritation only slightly diminished, I grabbed the next drawer. Then I opened my computer and with a sense of reckless abandon I deleted hundreds of emails with sales and promo-codes I had saved “just in case.” My crankiness had not yet abated but now it had a focus. All the clutter that had accumulated while I was out living life had to go. I turned my agitation to the daunting piles on my desk: a paper trail documenting a year that had come out swinging and hadn’t let up until December.

Clearing out the kind of debris left behind from a year like this one is a messy, dangerous endeavor. The contents erupt like volcanos from the tight spaces where they had been stashed. To-do lists, notes preparing for events long over, urgent tasks since passed, plane tickets from trips taken: little minefields of memories and emotions. No one likes to go there: it takes courage to face the mess. I would rather go for a walk, please. But I was sick, stuck at home and it was time to let go and clear some space on my desk and in my heart.

There at the bottom of one pile was a To-Do list that gave me pause: detailed work ideas, goals, plans I hardly recognized. Though definitely penned by my own hand, it was as if some other person had written the words. I stared at that scrap of paper a long time. I am no longer that person. The year I envisioned in that list would have molded me a certain way, yet who I am today was created by some other plan.

It seems that 2019 was the year I was going to run my first 5K in a powerful comeback from breast cancer, the year I was going to build a business and take control of my life. Instead, 2019 was bookended by the loss of two deeply loved friends, and filled with navigating the rough waters of grief, my own and others’. A year when so many people I love lost people they love. 2019 was the year I wrote a eulogy for a woman who died too young and a farewell letter to a man who taught us all to live more fiercely by his example. 2019 was a year of balancing my own persistent health challenges with showing up for last visits and finding joy and making baked macaroni and cheese to feed the body when the soul was hurting. 2019 was about doing what I could when there was really nothing anyone could do.

There was an urgency to this year that kept me focused. When that urgency was over and the time to act had passed, I stopped and there I was, home with a cold, amongst the papers and the emotional gridlock. Nowhere to hide. My energy was spent, and the armor I had donned to stay strong for battle weighed heavy, the emotions I had put aside trapped underneath. With each drawer I emptied and each pile I sorted through, I could feel some space opening up, some of the armor cracking. I began to breathe into the cracks, letting in light and air, giving room for emotions to show up.

Grief is patient. It waits until you are ready to give it room to move through. Until then it stays stuck inside, gumming up the works. The only way to get unstuck is to empty the drawers and make space. It is a messy uncomfortable process that entails falling apart before we put ourselves back together in a new way, and that’s why no one really wants to do it or talk about it. If life is a rom-com, this is the montage of scenes between the breakup and the reconciliation. If life is a book, this is the space between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. I am between the period and the paragraph.  It is where the healing and integration prepare the heroine for the next adventure. It happens on the inside so there is not much to see: just a few drawers that close more easily, and a clean desk top, but we are not the same when we emerge from the process.

While I sort through the detritus of this year, I find myself confused by the losses, not just of 2019 but of the past few years when I also lost my nephew and faced cancer. I am confused, because despite my strong belief that our spirits remain connected after death, and my determination to find joy even in darkness, sometimes I find myself shocked and wonder what happened? How is it that I am here, and they are not? The bottom line is that they have vanished and in their place is Life Without Them. And I am here still, still me but different without them. I miss my friends, I miss my nephew, I miss my breasts. I miss the way I used to feel before I felt such loss. That’s why this part is usually a montage with emotional music: it hurts to look too closely, but really it is the only way to get to the next part of the story.

This is the time of year, for some reason, people feel the need to make resolutions about how they will change in the new year and things they will strive to accomplish. Perhaps instead, we could be kinder to ourselves, accepting where we are and who we are in this very moment. Perhaps we allow ourselves the understanding that we can’t know what will come in the next year, but trust that we will know how to respond and that we will grow exactly as we are meant to grow by doing so. Perhaps, as we enter the new year, we can be content to love ourselves and our people just exactly as we are.