Grieving What Never Was
Intellectualizing Feelings = Denial of Emotions
What they don't tell you about breakthroughs is that these truths were always there. It almost feels like a spiritual intervention where my shadow self has to comfort my ego so that the blow of reality doesn't do too much emotional damage.
Lately, the realization I’ve been internalizing coping with is grief.
I never considered grief an emotion I had to experience. The last time I dealt with profound loss was when my cousin died over 10 years ago. I never fully processed that experience and the wound that never healed continues to impact how I move in this world.
Last year I had a hysterectomy and in therapy, I discovered that giving up the thing that defined my identity as a woman felt like a profound loss in itself.
I know I am more than a uterus however, it was impossible to unpack 45 years of gender conditioning to suddenly feel like a hysterectomy was no big deal.
I thought I was OK with the decision, and in many ways I am consciously good with the decision. But my emotional self was on a different wavelength and having spending 7 hours in the ER for a panic attack forced me to address this life-changing procedure through a different lens because intellectualizing my grief was not working.
It got me realizing how much of my issues are related to intellectualizing grief. So much so that I built a career around storytelling which in some way is monetizing what I've used as an unhealthy coping mechanism.
Maybe it's my Pisces sun + mercury. Maybe it's because I was a latchkey kid. Maybe it was because I was often alone as a child, both physically and emotionally.
Escapism is my jam. Fantasy is my sacred space.
I love disassociating. I'm going to dig into an edible after I finish writing this. When I run out, I'm back on my anti-anxiety meds that help sedate me.
I make no apologies for how I use whatever is at my disposal to avoid confrontation especially when those reality checks are with myself about myself.
This is where I feel hella conflicted. Because while I recognize that my unhealthy habits are not conducive to my healing, they have value in my career.
I'm not a good storyteller because I trained to be a great writer.
I'm gifted at leveraging emotional triggers in my storytelling because I've spent four decades intellectualizing my feelings.
I can *speak* to those who feel small or unseen because I learned how to silence myself out of guilt for existing.
So when someone tells me they resonate a lot with my content, it's because I've perfected the craft of cognitive dissonance for myself.
It's also what drives me to pursue this path and empower likes who've felt like me. Because now I know I am magic but I didn't always believe I had the goods.
If my words can help someone come out of their own self-imposed fog and embrace their potential, then I will gladly expose my vulnerabilities (within reason) to signal that being an imperfect hot mess is ok.
What I wished someone told me about therapy and healing is that insight can come with a cost.
While I come to terms with my childhood and how my upbringing impacted the way I would interpret the world, it also comes with a grief I never knew I had.
Grieving a life I never knew.
Grieving a version of myself I never got to experience.
These aha moments are why I medicate and disconnect. Because if I keep hiding behind entrepreneurship to avoid feeling the loss of what could have been, I'll spend whatever life I have left never appreciating the lived experiences that are just as magical.