Have a seat, today I analyse my grief.

On a Friday night, I’m sitting on my bed drinking lemon-saturated green tea, with Scenes From a Marriage tirelessly playing on my TV for the 100th time. I think I’m my most introspective on Friday nights that I stay home. There’s something tragically beautiful in knowing that the rest of the world is outside while you’re cooped up inside, wrapped in the comfort of your night ritual, watching them from the screen of your phone (or I just simply like to glamourise the most mundane aspects of my life).

My phone lights up and it’s a text from my friend.

I’m so over him.

I get ready to start my sermon on grief.

Lately, I’ve been finding myself dishing out relationship advice to my friends, like I did not just come out of a failed relationship. Then again, my life is my muse, and I’m most inspired when I’m picking up the pieces.

Anyways, with more than one of my friends going through it, I’ve been thinking about grief- with respect to the loss of someone who is still living.

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I have this inside joke with myself, that I haven’t really moved on from anything tragic that has happened in the course of my life. Like there’re different versions of me stuck in time. When I think of it, I imagine I’m like a plant, and each event in my life is a different branch, and when a significant event ends, that branch stops growing. As a plant, I’m still alive, and I’d grow and I’d flourish, but that branch would always remain in that stage, as it is, alive, sentient, watching new branches form- still a part of me that I can feel and revisit.

Earlier this year, I fell out of a relationship with someone who was very close to me, and at that time, I knew I was going to have a long grieving process. Consciously I knew I would go through a plethora of emotions – this’s not my first rodeo- so I was prepared to analyse and validate every single thing I felt. Waves of anger, satisfaction, guilt, sadness, loneliness, inadequacy, avoidance, I welcomed each one of them, fleeting or lasting.

But the thing is,

Grief doesn’t like when it’s given consent. It likes to impose itself.

So in a way, what I was feeling were emotions I conjured myself, that I felt were deserving of my situation. In all these, there was a rolling snowball of grief, building up in me, and I felt it! but subconsciously I was suppressing it. I was reading books back to back, staying away from music, and at the same time, I was allowing myself to feel sadness in controllable measures.

It also likes to take its wonderful time.

The first time that growing pile of grief erupted, it was a Sunday night, and I was picking out outfits for the week when I had a panic attack. I’ve had panic attacks in the past, usually when I’m in crowded spaces with people I don’t know or don’t feel safe around, not when I’m in a safe space -in my bedroom- doing something so basic as trying on clothes.

Later on, when I write about this particular episode, I’d describe it as,

“I’m in a constant state of panic but I cannot stop moving, cause I don’t have the luxury to pause my life, cause it feels like I’m in a crowded place, and everyone is moving in one direction and if I stop moving, I might get trampled upon, so I keep moving and moving…”

This is how I feel about grief most of the time, like I never really have the time for it. There’d be classes and exams, and now work, and there is just never a good time to allocate to feeling something as immense as grief, so it ends up with these sudden implosions – in the middle of class, on the bus, walking home, trying out outfits.

Even now, I can go out and have the best day of my life, and when I come home, and the grief hits me, I feel like such a fraud. Almost like the act of sadness negates all the good times I had.

It’s like, are you really having a good time, or are you avoiding a bad time by having a good time? I’ve had a lot of good times this summer, but whenever grief hits me, I feel like it’s my brain feeding me dopamine so I don’t focus on the grief.

What I’ve learnt from all these is that grief can actually coexist with happiness. I’m learning to accept this, cause I don’t want to only realise I was happy in hindsight. I want to be fully cognisant and in participation of my happy days.

I’m writing this now, cause I was thinking that sometimes, you need to step out of that moving crowd and catch your breath. Without a shadow of doubt, it would move on without you, but after you’ve caught your breath, you’d follow them.

I would not be taking my own advice on that at the moment, but maybe one day I’d have the luxury to.