Reflections on grief, healing and transformation
#14 And sometimes there’ll be sorrow
There is a game people are playing on Social Media. Say something nice about yourself beginning with I am. I consider typing a dozen half-serious joke answers.
I am unhinged but in a funny way.
I am no longer in debt.
I am always fashionably late.
I am lazy, but it’s political.
Then from an earnest, sincere place, a word rises to the surface, at once a shout and a persistent whisper. I consider it in surprise. I am…Brave? Surely not. I live in a fog of mild to abject terror every day. When I book an uber, I plan the details of my escape in case the driver abandons me on the road or leaps into the backseat and attacks me. I can’t take a flight without sweating and trembling. Immigration officials, police officers and official paperwork scare me. I am terrified of being arrested, deported; I am scared of loud noises and angry people. I had nightmares for about a month after I watched the first minute of the trailer of Us. I only feel truly safe in my house, with the doors locked, my scented candle lit, and my quilt inviting sleep. How can I be brave? I want nothing more than to float through the world wrapped very gently, like a precious parcel, in feathers and cotton wool.
Bravery comes from circumstances and necessity. I was scared of childbirth, but what was I going to do, not give birth to the 2.9 kg creature inside me? I was scared of going to the dentist, but what was I going to do, suffer the toothache? My life has been a map of brave things I’ve had to do. I’m brave because being brave sucks so hard and I really shouldn’t have to do it, but I do it anyway. I read that grief births a lot of things — possibility, the unknown, strength, endurance. My shining spiral of grief which still spins around me like a halo birthed bravery. I live through a constellation of separation, parental estrangement, low self-esteem, fear of abandonment, anxiety, fear of rejection, and fear of failure which manifests in small and large ways and I choose not to cower. And there’s the other thing. Every day, I get up, dig through the emotions of the past year and indeed my whole life, confront things about myself that are painful, sharp and ugly and write about them from a place of deep sincerity and vulnerability. Then I post what I’ve written, throwing my trauma out into the winds of the internet (for free, thank you very much) and to my utter humiliation, I get only a handful of views. My confidence and grandiose ideas of talent are duly beaten down and I go to bed. Then I get up the next day and I do it again. I am Brave! How has this escaped me so long?
Joni Mitchel wrote the song Little Green when she gave her daughter up for adoption because she was too poor and too unhappy to be a good mother. The song is a love letter, a prayer of hope and fortune. She wishes her daughter a life of flowers, beginnings and birthday clothes, and she also forgives herself. The last line is a gentle “And sometimes there’ll be sorrow”. I imagine Joni Mitchell singing this line to me in December 1995, as I boarded a significant flight, just shy of 9 years old. There was sorrow. And there will be sorrow again. But I am brave now.
