On Grief
Oh my little sweet pea,
Relationships are going to end. A lot of them. All of them, in fact, at one time or another, for one reason or another. And they end for a lot of reasons, but there is one in particular: we are human. And being human means a lot of things. We are broken and afraid. We make mistakes and hurt each other’s feelings. We struggle to tell the truth of our experience. We struggle to hold other people’s truth about us. We can be selfish and needy babies, masquerading as adults, playing out our mother and father wounds in real time with the people we care about. We align with people in certain moments of time, and then we outgrow them, noticing a shift in values within our own selves. We become exhausted by the people who need too much, and we are made lonely or hurt by the ones who give too little. We fail to tease out what is ours and what is theirs, holding tight to our egos, blame shifting because the shame is too powerful to be with, or over-blaming ourselves because, well, old patterns. Accountability is a razor-thin line that requires tremendous courage, integrity and humility. It also requires the other to show up with the same courage, integrity and humility. This is rare. Thus, relationships end.
Some relationships will end in a quiet fade, and some will end in an explosion, the aftershocks leaving you (and them) in violent grief. It is the way of endings, they are painful.
And yet each relationship will reveal a (or many) lessons:
• The parts of you still in need of healing; the ones capable of acting outside your values.
• How to know and speak your truth.
• Allowing others to carry an untrue story about you.
• Compassion and forgiveness.
• Boundaries and how to have other hard conversations.
• Not taking things personally that aren’t yours to carry.
• When to stay and when to walk away, and how to either stay or walk away with integrity.
• What love is and what love is not.
• What abuse is and what it is not.
• How to love well, how to listen, how to show up.
• How to know and love yourself. Because that is all there is, that is your whole job, baby cakes.
And from those lessons you will learn to choose people who will stay. The ones you can trust. The ones who will see the deepest and most beautiful parts of you: your courage, your love. The ones growing alongside you. The ones you feel safe enough to be honest and flawed and broken alongside. The ones who are full of gratitude to be in your life.
I do not want you to experience these ended relationships as something inherently flawed, unworthy or unlovable inside you. You are human, just like everybody else. Worthy because. Worthy because my love, do you hear that? Do you feel that?
Have you made mistakes? Yes. Have you learned from these mistakes? Yes. Has it taken several tries to learn some of these lessons? Yes, yes, yes. Will you make new and more mistakes? I would assume so.
It is why you are here, my most beautiful, sweet pea. Your spirit is in the “School of Being Human,” and relationships are one of the mechanisms by which we transcend.
Let yourself grieve them, let yourself learn from them, then let them go.
Your story is today, and it is a sparkling one.
I love you,
Christina Michelle
Love letters are letters of self-compassion written to me, by me, born of hardships I have experienced. I often find people struggle with how to speak compassionately towards themselves.
These letters are meant to be an example of how you can begin.
With love, Christina
