Grief & Pain

Pre script : I came across this post on Twitter  by Lauren Herchel on the Grief Ball Analogy and felt a need to share it along with my inputs in hope that it helps people overcome grief and pain. This post is an outcome of my personal experience with grief and how it affected me as a person, how it shaped my personality and more importantly, how I perceived and responded to various forms of relationships and connections due to the same.

I have always believed that love and grief are twin brothers, two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to escape grief, it comes along with love. And similarly, talking about grief is almost like talking about love - it is felt just as deeply, it changes you as a person and it persists almost as long as love.

But first, I'd like to share this post on Twitter  by Lauren Herchel on the Grief Ball Analogy

1. The Box

Imagine you are the box.

2. The Grief Ball.

Once you suffer some trauma resulting in a deep sense of loss, there is this huge weight that you feel inside your heart. Like a giant ball of grief.

3. The Pain Button

At the inception, the grief ball is gigantic. The moment you try to move the box an iota of an inch, the grief ball hits the pain button. It jumps and rattles hither and thither, at its own whims, and keeps on hitting the pain button over and over again. God, it hurts. It hurts bad. On some days, it feels like you will die of the pain or perhaps wish that you do. Just to stop the pain. But it won't stop. It hits the pain button relentlessly. 

It gets difficult to get on with daily life with this pain inside you all the time. But nobody outside of the box understands the pain. Sometimes you don't understand it yourself! In an attempt to get rid of some weight, you start to unload other people from the boat to save it from sinking due to the heavy weight of the box. Most people would not get this, they might turn hostile and blame you for leaving them. But you can either try to stay afloat and alive or take these blames onto yourself. Perhaps you can try sharing this pain with them. Sometimes, they help you by handing you a life jacket. But mostly, they will find you obnoxious, negative, intense, silent, boring, weird and unbearable. I say, leave these anchors. Clutch to the life jacket. 

Years later, the anchors still blame me. They never understood, they never will unless they go through some life-altering trauma themselves. And the life jacket? Well, I am married to my life jacket.

4. The healing touch of time

With the passage of time, the grief ball gets smaller or may be the box grows bigger, I don't know. But the pain gets better because it hits the pain button less and less. But still, it is as whimsical as ever. Sometimes, it hits the pain button randomly when you least expect it to and it hurts just as much. Sometimes, the anchors come back out of the blue and trigger it and it hurts just as much. 

I personally feel that the grief ball never goes away. It stays as long as the love inside you, it becomes a part of you. However, sometimes, if you're lucky, God sends you a cushion to put on the pain button so that when the grief ball goes awry, it doesn't hit the push button.

The takeaways from the theory  - 

1. We all have a bag but we all pack differently. Some travel light. Some, like me, are secret hoarders - unable to part away with memories. These two mutually exclusive types of people will never be able to understand each other. We can only accept each other for who we are or part ways.

2. People your age who didn't experience life-altering trauma have an absolute advantage over you because while all your efforts were towards survival and keeping yourself afloat, they were free to grow and develop. You might often feel you are not able to relate to them. It's okay!

3. Trust issues become internalized if you did not receive support during your traumatic phase. Ever felt like - "I don't need anyone and I can handle on my own"

It's a survival tactic to shield yourself from  neglect, betrayal and disappointment from those who could not and would not be there for you when they ought to have been there. Such people really have a hard time making connections with people.

4. Trauma survivors often tend to oscillate between past and the future. Basis their experiences in the past, they try to safeguard themselves from similar pain in the future by trying to control everything possible in their hands. It's their way of responding to the uncertainty that the trauma gave them and they do not ever want themselves in the same situation of weakness and pain. 

   

I am not here to judge anyone on how they dealt with their grief and pain. I am not here to preach on ways of dealing with the same. Nor am I here to blame the anchors out there. Because everyone has their own journey and baggage, I just wish we were a more emphatic specie! My learning so far from all of this is that keep your focus on the life jacket and the cushion. The Universe sent them for a reason. Treasure them. Be grateful for them.

P.S. This post is dedicated to my life jacket and also to two most important people of my life- I hope that I make you proud everyday. 

The Lightening Bolt Scar

Harry Potter's lightening bolt shaped scar has always caught my attention in the entire series. I have always wondered why represent a failed curse with a scar? Even Dumbledore refused to wipe it off stating scars come in handy!

The curiosity behind the metaphorical meaning of the scar has led to this blog post. Remember how everybody recognizes Harry Potter in the first book with his scar? How the scar arose Mrs. Weasley's maternal instincts stating the poor boy was all on his own entering the Wizarding World without anybody to help him out? It's because the scar is a souvenir of the pain he had undergone as a child and everybody knew of his childhood tragedy because the scar enunciates his story.

What if we had something similar in our lives? Before you judge me as insane, let me clarify my thought process.

Not every person is good with communicating what he/she is going through. For some, the grief or the pain itself is self-consuming while some people shut down because that's the only way they know how to survive. Some do not want to appear weak and some people have history of trust issues to deal with. In the whole process, the suffering sometimes takes toll on the person and yet people who might care about you really have no idea about what you are dealing with alone. No wonder, we are a generation grappling with depression and insomnia.

For long, I have believed that uttering things out would make me emotionally weak. So when I write that people find it difficult to communicate their pain, I speak out of experience. What if there was a way out?

For every pain that we undergo, a physical manifestation of the pain appears in form of a scar on our body. Had a breakup - a gash appears on your cheek. Your pet dies - a deep cut appears on your neck. Your best friend left you forever - a cross appears on your arm. A deep red wound appears right on your forehead for loss of a parent.

So when you walk through a mall, instead of noticing somebody for her fat nose you notice her deep red wound on the forehead and feel your empathy rising towards her when you touch your own forehead and notice a similar wound. In place of giving out idiotic and unwanted advice to a relative you met at a wedding, you'd give him a hug on noticing a deep cut around his neck and tell him that you know that it hurts but it will get better. When you see such cuts and scars on X's body while he works out in a gym, you feel the pain of troubled childhood emanating from him and his corpulence would be overlooked.

So my point is that the sound of scars on our bodies is ugly as long as we link it to looks and beauty. For example, we judge a lot of people even for their acne problem and I am campaigning here for having scars! Let me enumerate a few benefits of the theory -

1. Each one of us has some trauma or the other so each one is going to have a scar and so it would be as normal as having a mole. Having said that, if you can SEE somebody's pain written right on their faces, you are likely not to be judgmental on basis of their looks.

2. People are less likely to slip into depression and commit suicides because they would be spelling out their pain on their faces and help would always be available for them in form of people having similar scars.

3. It would lead to meaningful bonds between people if they share the stories behind their scars and experiences of coping up with the pain associated with it.

4. Two people might come closer and realise they have the remedies for each other's scars and it might wipe off their scars completely!

To be precise, दाग़ लगने  से कुछ  अच्छा  होता है, तो  दाग़ अच्छे हैं !

Just a little something to ponder upon to make us a better person, more lovable friend, more understanding partner and most importantly a more emphatic human being.