Grief & saying goodbye

This weekend I’m leaving my apartment that I’ve lived in for 7 years.

It’s hard.  Harder than I expected it to be.

The reasons I’m leaving are all so expansive and good.  In the past several months I’ve bought a house, I got engaged, and I’m moving on to a whole new phase of life.  I’m deeply excited about the future, but as the move gets close I’m also discovering more and more sadness around saying goodbye.  Not just to my apartment, but to a whole phase of life.

In 2011, I always felt stuck.  I always felt helpless, like the world was just conspiring against me all the time.  I fell into a deep depression.  I feared myself, and being alone with myself.  Work was stuck, money was stuck, relationships were stuck, *I* was stuck.  I didn’t feel like I had any friends, and the ones I had were abandoning me.  When the paranoia set in, I started therapy.  I’ve been privileged to not have any mental health concerns in my life, so this all was foreign territory for me, and fairly scary.

Around then, I started a relationship that in retrospect was not so good for me – he broke up with me and then we got back together repeatedly for the next 2 years.  He moved to another city, we did long distance.  My dog kept me company.  Then she got sick and I lost her.  Then he broke up with me for the last time, right after christmas, right before we had a trip planned together with my family.   I was embarrassed and devastated and felt like I had truly hit the rockiest of rock bottoms.  I looked around and had few friends left.  My job was not a comfort, and money was so tight. I truly felt like I had nothing – I made art.  I cocooned.  I grieved, but grief wasn’t what it felt like.  It felt like emptiness, a nothing.

 

I became the Hanged Man card, it didn’t really seem like anything was happening, but deep under the surface – big growth and change was taking root.  It was deep in this place of not having anything, that I gained everything.

Like many, I came to meditation then, in this darkest of times – to help emotionally regulate my experience. Meditation (and therapy) saved my life.  I made a conscious resolution to make decisions, to find my agency and my voice.  To actually peer inside and identify what I wanted and needed and then go after it.  My life transformed.

When I made the decision to take back control of my life, and to get back in touch with my true self, it was like a snowball rolling down a hill – and all the good started snapping in so quickly I got whiplash. I started dating.  I was online for 24 hours when I met the amazing man who is now my fiancee. I got a significant raise and new position at work.  I attracted new friends.  I got a second amazing job teaching.  My art blossomed.  My intuition blossomed.  I bought a house.  I got yet another job as an actual full time artist that pays even better. My creativity soared. I dove deep into my meditation practice, and even got a little classically enlightened to boot.

And here I sit in review.  Since 2011 I lost everything I thought were the most important things to me in life.  And here I sit with everything I always thought I wanted beyond my wildest dreams.  My dream job. My dream house. My dream partner.  There was a time I was convinced the universe was conspiring against me to get these things.  As it turns out – I was the only one in my way all along.

Everything in my life has been stripped down and changed since my transformation  The only thing that has remained with this physical space.  The cocoon I’ve called home. As I sit here this morning with the rising sun, it’s time to say goodbye to that last remnant of who I used to be.

The hardest part about grief isn’t losing something. If I’ve learned anything the past several years, its that the actual loss often comes as a bit of a relief. I’ve found that the truly hardest part is the anticipation of the loss, the lead up to the goodbye. That inevitable feeling that these are your final moments with whatever experience or person (or dog) you’re saying goodbye to. In that anticipation we feel the true and deep fleeting nature of time, we most deeply experience that nothing can be held on to, that nothing is permanent – and we see the mirror held up to our own mortality.

The anticipation of loss or change triggers everything we try and push away as humans – the inevitability of evolution, the true impermanent nature of all things. It can bring up a deep primal anxiety that is hard to place.

But then, like a exhaled breath, the loss happens.  And we find an odd relief. A relief from that tension. A relief from that anxiety built by the anticipation of the loss.

Then we let go. Then we grieve.
We let go, we grieve, we let go, we grieve.

over, and over, and over again.

And we realize that the weight around the loss wasn’t the person or item or memory that we were carrying, but the anxiety around losing it. The anxiety around putting it down, and what that means. The fear of leaving parts of ourselves behind.  Memories are light, but the clinging is what is restrictive. So we allow ourselves the memories of things that have passed without clinging to them with sadness or anxiety or fear, with a lightness that makes room for all of the possibility of the universe.  And weeks or months or years later, when we find ourselves restricting around the same loss, we remember to put down the restriction again and allow the memory to remain.

We grieve, and then we let go.
We allow the grief to come and go on it’s own schedule.
We let go again.

over and over.

We make room for life, and growth, and magic happen.
Every. damn. day.