another post about grief

Recently I’ve been feeling bad, listening to “What Was I Made For?” and crying while doing the dishes, and it felt like that moment when you realize you’re about to get your period. You do the math, start recognizing the pattern for a cycle that you are incredibly cognizant of, and then it hits you all at once. Except in this case, it’s my grief month. Or my seasonal depression. (Although, I think both of those are intertwined at this point.) I’m very aware of the signs, but since the last few years have been so chaotic in my life, I kind of forgot that this is apart of my narrative.

For as long as I can remember, September has been a strange month for me. Obviously when I was growing up, it was the Back to School month, which meant lots of new routines and math notes and reading assignments. It’s difficult to cite any symptoms from my school years because I have no idea what was a result of Being in School and living with my parents and what is a normal, natural part of Me. But I remember getting my first Moleskine in the September of 2010, and everything felt very hazy. I have a lot of entries where I’m excited for fall, for school, for hanging out with my friends, but I have just as many entries of me sitting in study hall feeling lost (and depressed, but back then I didn’t call it that). In those days, I still lived up north with my parents, so fall was usually starting right around then. Now with climate change and living in the south being an adult in the real world, September is just another month of summer.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized that I’m one of the rare people who gets more depressed in the summer months than in winter. Seasonal Affective Disorder is usually thought of in February when it’s cold and dark and you’re stuck inside, and that’s a pretty common, logical thing. I, on the other hand, live like a vampire. Even though I can enjoy summer for what it is, and I love the idea of being outside and sitting on the beach, I do find that as summer drags on, my seasonal depression usually gets worse. The heat makes me lethargic and hopeless, I get bored and restless and it feels like I can’t be productive because I’m cooped up inside when it’s 90º out. (Yes, I know, it’s so tragic, play the world’s smallest violin.) It’s a cycle I’ve come to know well, and yet every year it creeps up on me. In August I usually start feeling a little off, and then I’m caught off guard when I do the math and realize it’s just my summer depression coming back around.

But what does this have to do with September?

Before the pandemic years, back when I was graduating college and working my first post-grad job as a photographer for Google Street View (no, I did not drive the car around), there were about three summers in a row that I went into crisis when September started. I’ve made multiple YouTube videos around this idea. I start getting antsy, I feel like I’m somehow too online and not online enough, not posting the right things, not creating the art I want to make. When I was 24, I was convinced it was a quarter life crisis, that I just needed to buckle down and reassess my life and figure out what I needed for a career. (This led to me going fully freelance for the year of 2020 and quitting my day job right before a global pandemic.) I spent that September visiting my parents, staying off Instagram, and reading as many books as I could. When I was 23, I took the entire month of September off social media in an attempt to detox and feel less overwhelmed by the internet. I remember spending that month working on creating my poetry collection and binge watching The Office for the first time, trying to distract myself from the crisis that was definitely happening in my brain. And while I remember this pattern, I remember it happening in real time, somehow I never connected the dots that the first September this happened was the September my grandmother passed away when I was 22.

Even though I’d dealt with seasonal depression before, and on top of that I’d already had two of my grandparents die, something about that September and the subsequent fall really messed up my brain. I spent a week with my family rallying around my grandmother as we watched her health rapidly decline without warning, and within four weeks of her cancer diagnosis, we were preparing for her funeral. When I think about her death, I don’t catalog her death day or even the funeral itself because to me the hardest day was the last day I talked to her. My family had been staggering in and out of my grandparents’ condo all week, showing up from all over the country to spend time with Sue and the rest of us, and I had driven down from Nashville to meet up with everyone. I had the week off because originally me and my parents had planned to go on vacation somewhere that I don’t even remember now. By midweek I was getting anxious. I remember one night while I was trying to fall asleep, I could hear the adults helping my grandmother do human things, and I just got so distraught at the idea of being there when she passed. In the end, I made the decision that I needed to make a formal good-bye and leave before she did. So I did.

Looking back, it was the best thing I could have done, but now that day is burned into my mind. My family was standing around in a circle in her living room. We’d spent the morning doing one last communion with her, the pastor waxing poetic about how we’ll all be together again one day for The Big Feast, my grandmother sitting in the cot we’d moved downstairs to keep her comfortable, her faith unwavering as we said the prayers together. I wasn’t the only one leaving that day, there were more and more people starting to leave for whatever reason. Even my mom was going back home to get work done. As each person left, they’d circle around, giving hugs, holding back tears, and eventually when it was my turn, I faced the horror of the unknown and said my piece. I remember being so grateful for the opportunity to speak to her this last time. To see her before she actually left, to thank her for things I can never fully express. I realized in that moment that I was her first grandchild, even if I wasn’t the oldest of my cousins. We hugged each other while we cried, and eventually I forced myself to walk away. And getting in my car was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I thought I knew death because I’d already lost people, I’d even gone to my great-grandmother’s funeral a few months before that, but something about this time was different. Maybe it was because it all happened so quickly, maybe it was because I was a few months out of post-grad and I felt unmoored, I don’t know. I bawled for at least an hour as I drove by myself up I-65.

I got home in time to go to a concert (yes, you read that right) and I found some weird comfort in my first Bleachers show. Part of why that band (and Gone Now) left such a lasting impact on me is because they supported me through that day and that fall. They were touring their grief album, with songs like “Foreign Girls” — I’ve been walking circles, lost on Sunday morning, trying to find my way back home — and “Everybody Lost Somebody” — Come on motherfucker you survived you gotta give yourself a break — and at the time of the concert, I hadn’t listened to a majority of those songs. There’s nothing like hearing a song for the first time in a live setting, and it was exactly what I needed after a day spent drowning in tears. I remember falling in love with the music, feeling seen and loved and understood, being apart of something that made me feel a little more whole. I used that show to anchor me, and that album - along with albums like Melodrama and reputation - gave me something to hold onto when it felt like my world was falling apart.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I was sitting in my cousin’s bedroom crying to my mom that I was depressed.

It was a rough fall after a weird summer, and even though I remember it getting dark for me, eventually by the time Taylor dropped her new album and tour dates were announced, I forced myself to believe I was going to be okay. I figured that I had grieved enough and when it got cold out, the depression eased just a little, and I moved on. I did not actually process my feelings, I did not actually understand grief, and I did not take the time to understand myself. And then I was surprised when the feelings came back. This continued to happen, and by the time I saw a counselor for my summer depression in the fall of 2019, she immediately clocked it for what it was: residual grief.

Since that therapist and that deep dive into grief, a lot has changed. I have a new therapist now. I moved twice. We went through a global pandemic. I helped a few friends deal with their own grief. I became an expert on the topic, and I worked through a lot of my personal stuff and believed I had things figured out. Of course, I’m only 28, so as expected, this was all just a fallacy my brain created to feel better. It took me five years to figure out that a lot of my seasonal depression probably comes from September being my grief month. I am still learning what grieving is, and I don’t think I’ll ever be an expert at it. It’s always changing and growing with you, and even while you can manage it at times, I’ve come to see it as an old friend that shows up on your door when you least expect it. Except now, I’m no longer just grieving my grandmother. The thing about one grief experience is that it usually opens the floodgates to more. Once you meet Grief, it doesn’t leave, it just multiplies.

I think a lot of times when we face difficult changes in life - whether that’s death of a loved one, loss of a serious relationship, maybe a global pandemic - we want to speed up our healing. We try to give ourselves what we need, cry a little in the moment, talk to someone, journal about it, but after a week or two we start getting antsy. Surely it shouldn’t take that long to process things? Surely we can move past this? But the truth is, healing is a lifelong exercise. There are relationships I lost a decade ago that are only now starting to fade from my mind. Sometimes we need decades to heal from things. We live such long lives, and the only way to live a full life is to grieve a lot along the way.

At twenty-two I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, and I was overwhelmed with my mortality.
At twenty-three I felt infinite, immortal, eternal, and I wanted to live in that moment forever.
At twenty-four I realized that I needed to grow up, but I didn’t know how and I really didn’t want to.
At twenty-five I tried to be happy where I was because the future was uncertain and terrifying, and the only place I found joy was in my everyday life and the past.
At twenty-six I thought I’d never be happy again.
At twenty-seven I decided to become someone new by rediscovering who I used to be.
At twenty-eight I am grieving my twenties and expectant for my thirties and grateful for where I am right now.

I’ve had a hard time getting up in the morning lately, and even though I am so incredibly happy with where I am at the moment, I still feel bad sometimes. I have always hated having a mundane schedule, and while I love the security of my 9-5, I do still miss the thrill of freelancing and being a part-time barista who gets off at noon every day. I am grieving the freedom I had in my early twenties, I am grieving the life I had before I knew grief, but life is so much fuller now. Yeah, I’ve been crying more, but I also have been laughing a lot. I’ve had some really meaningful conversations. I’ve been doing nice things for my friends. I have a really nice drive into work and I’m getting myself little iced drinks to ease the monotony and I get to photograph a cool band on Saturday. It is worth it, even if it feels like walking through soup.

Sometimes it gets so hard when you’re deep in it that you forget to zoom out. You forget that you’ve done this before, that it’s always like this which means it’ll always end eventually. When I was twenty-six I had a really difficult year, and at the time I was convinced it would always be like that. That I’d always be waking up at 4am to make lattes, that I’d always get home from work and have a good cry, that I’d always be stuck. When you’re young it’s so easy to convince yourself that now is forever and forever is such a long time. But the truth is neither of those things. Now is a blip and so is forever. And nothing lasts forever, for better or worse. And that is a great thing.

We have such short memories that sometimes it only takes a few years before you forget that, oh yes, the reason I’m sad is because six years ago my grandmother unexpectedly got sick and died! And you don’t forget that your grandmother is dead, all those memories are deep within your psyche, but also you kinda did forget that you hugged her while you cried because that’s not something you want to think about. And you also don’t want to think about how you told your mom you should maybe see a counselor because that conversation was really difficult so you forget that you spent a whole autumn being depressed. And you forget that you hit a deer and totaled your car and spent weeks being lonely in hotel rooms because your low-paying job made you travel by yourself. You forget that you spent months and years isolating. You forget that you and your roommate used to be glued to the Depression Couch, fondly named because neither of you could do much more than binge watch TV shows together and cook pasta in the microwave and eat your feelings. And yet, wasn’t that somewhat recent? Didn’t that just happen? Well, no. Life is longer than you think it is because actually that’s just one year of your twenties. Let’s not forget four years in college before that or four years out of college after that or three years in a global pandemic or the summer your roommate’s cat died or the winter your best friend’s brother committed suicide or the spring you opened a coffeeshop five days a week or or or. Eventually, all of it becomes a little too much and so the only way you can actually keep on living is by letting all of that happen to someone else, because it did.

I think the most surprising thing about my late-twenties has been the mindset shift. For so long when I was growing up I was confused by older people, people in their thirties specifically, because they seemed ancient and all-knowing, and it felt like a huge leap from being eighteen. People in their thirties somehow seemed sadder but more confident. They had definitely seen some things, but there was this joy that came from them that I never understood. And I think the truth is that by the time you reach your thirties (I’m so close and yet so far), you’ve started to develop a relationship with grief and that somehow makes you more depressed and more joyful all at once. By reaching the lows for the first time, it’s like you also start to appreciate the highs much more. And in coming face to face with grief, a lot of times it’s forces you to confront yourself in ways you didn’t before. You stop judging yourself so hard, you start trying to understand why you are the way you are, you try to make life a little easier for you and the people around you and the you that is to come. You stop being so afraid because surely nothing can be as bad as it’s been. Things stop being so serious because you realize that life is lived in seasons. In a lot of ways, I don’t recognize myself because I’m nothing like I was at thirteen or eighteen or twenty-two. But I also feel more connected with who I was at ten. It’s a strange feeling. A little sad, but happy too.

Grief for me looks a lot like freedom, actually. It has allowed me to connect with myself and the people around me in ways I was never capable of before. I’m grateful for it most days. Because it means I’m feeling things and loving people and living life to the fullest. As Hozier says, If there was anyone to ever get through this life with their heart still intact, they didn't do it right. But man, sometimes I do wish it wasn’t so complicated and I really wish it would just let me appreciate my summer in peace.