Grief Isn't the Opposite of Joy. It's the Foundation of It

I remember the feeling so well. My eight-year relationship had just come to a crashing, overwhelming end, and on the day of my big brother’s wedding, no less. The cloud that hung over me, that pervaded every crack in my being, every task I completed, every bite of food, was black and heavy and filled with rage and sadness. But most of all grief. 

I couldn’t eat properly for months. I redirected the clouds in my head to another, incredibly toxic relationship for a while (did I ever tell you he was once four hours late to a date?), before I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t wish away the pain; I had to stand my full height and embrace it. 

Grief is the loss of the future we’d hoped for. The loss of the dream we’d thought up. The painful, unending realisation that you’re not in the place or time you’d imagined for yourself.

I white knuckled this feeling in my twenties when, in a nine-month period, I held the death of my boyfriend from suicide, and the death of my step-father from cancer. 

I was too young and unsupported to know how to bear that kind of weight, so I just did what I could to get through it. Bottled my feelings until they aged and morphed and became something monstrous and self-destructing. Years later, I ran out of a perfectly reasonable barbecue with new friends embarrassed and in tears after someone mocked my university grade — it wasn’t the grade I was sensitive about, but the reason I didn’t get the grade I’d wanted. Dealing with both a suicide and a terminal cancer in a short few months will fuck up your ability to learn, it seems. (And yes, the person who mocked the grade was a massive bellend, you guessed correctly.)

Thankfully the grounded, supportive folk around me and the fact I don’t have an addictive nature (unless we’re talking about my mum’s carrot cake) meant my coping mechanisms were relatively tame. I ate my feelings, drove too fast, made shitty decisions and embarrassed myself more than once. But I’ve seen friends, the people closest to me, turn to alcohol and drugs to cope with the blanket of emotion they’ve no idea how to escape from. Understandably. There’s no road map for this.

But embracing is all we really have. Do we want to shove our heads in the sand and ignore the reality of our life’s experience?

I love the idea that there are souls, out there in the cosmos somewhere, queuing up in orderly British fashion, ready and excited to have a human experience. All of it. The highs and lows, the emotions we run scared from, the awkward conversations, the belly rolls and cellulite as well as everything brilliant and easy and kind. 

But what of grief when we’re in the depths of it? What of that black, heavy, life-draining feeling I had after I left that relationship? Embrace it, she says, as if it’s easy or simple. 

Grief is heavy and dark, so dark you don’t think the light will ever come back on. Embracing that heaviness asks us to allow ourselves to be so consumingly sad and hopeless for a time. Don’t worry, it won’t eat us alive. It’s what the person we’ve lost, the relationship that’s ended, that part of us that hoped and imagined and built a future out of nothing and nowhere deserves: our time. 

Constant optimising and optimism are demanded of us in our modernity — do more, be happier, look great. And then grief comes along and asks us to do less, be sad, and collapse in a crumb-covered heap in a corner and play hermit for a while. No wonder we resist it. We’re trained to resist it. Perhaps so we’ll buy more L’Oreal and Temu and TV subscriptions to continue avoiding the pain of it.

But showing up for what we’ve lost — for who we’ve lost, including ourselves — is how we process grief. Standing by as we crumble into a new version of ourselves. Trusting, perhaps only a tiny bit, that from that dust we’ll build a new future to hope for. 

What I didn’t know in the depths of that pain was the future I was stepping into. It’s never easy, or comfortable, or even all that inspiring to make a change. I needed to leave that relationship. He and I needed to forever dam the flow of toxic sludge we’d begun to leak. I didn’t know that it would lead to a life-wide healing, a head-fuck relearning of what it was to be me, with all my flaws and foibles, and to trust myself perhaps for the first time in my life.  

From the ending of things come the starting of things. We don’t remember that when we’re sitting beside the darkness of our grief, but it’s there all the same. A tiny glow in the darkness, perhaps reminding us of our humanity and what a fucking joy it all is, underneath it all. 

The practice of grief

Here’s the grieving toolkit I’ve created for myself. Because grief is unavoidable, but the monsters we become if we don’t allow it are.

Get support. 

A good therapist coupled with a willingness to lay the bare bones of your fucked up head on the table is life-changing. I started therapy after leaving that relationship, and I’m still seeing the same therapist, twice a month, almost five years later. Ashley hasn’t only held space for me while I dealt with Big Feelings, but she allowed me to see them, embrace them, and to heal more than I would’ve ever done alone. I understand myself more than ever and I trust myself more than ever. 

Interestingly, Ashley is a relationship therapist — she mainly sees couples and those struggling in or out of relationships. She told me in our last session that people wonder about her work: can clients bring up other things, or is it just relationship stuff? Her reply: everything is relationship stuff. And our conversations — about my work and my ponderings as well as my relationships — prove just that.

Allow it to get weird.

After the death of my partner by suicide in 2000 I remember the protective mechanisms of my brain convincing me he wasn’t dead, and it was all just an elaborate charade to stop seeing me.

After my relationship breakdown more recently, I convinced myself for a while that I could look past the toxic sludge and we’d get back together. It was how I coped.

We cope in weird ways, and sometimes you’ll feel emotions or think thoughts you don’t think are appropriate or acceptable in these circumstances. But there is no ‘appropriate’ or ‘acceptable’, there’s only what’s here.

Be gentle with yourself. 

I stopped eating properly for almost a year. I lost a lot of weight, and people commented on how wonderful I looked. Sure, the depths of despair will do that to a gal.

Clients of mine inside Joy Unplugged have joined me with grief alongside acute jaw pain the doctors can’t understand, the inability to get out of bed in a morning — more than just an aversion to the alarm clock, and a struggle to do basic tasks like brushing their teeth or cooking a meal.

When we’re going through it, our systems are in threat-protection. Mysterious, weird, and inconvenient stuff will happen in your body, the trick is to be kind to yourself. I ended up eating small, eating often, and throwing any idea of hitting my macros out the window. Over time, my appetite came back. Over time, their jaw pain went away and they found the energy for life again.

In the meantime, this isn’t a crack-on sort of situation. We must be gentle with ourselves, go slowly, and allow it to be a bit messy. 

Confliction is allowed.

My step dad was at home when he died. My mum and I listened to his laboured breathing on a baby monitor for about a week. He was on more drugs than The Stones, no longer able to communicate or engage, he wasn’t really alive but there was still a thread. We listened, and sometimes he’d stop breathing, and we’d hold ours — tensing and pausing and waiting for his next — and it would come. Over and over again, his rattle would pause then start again a moment later. Until one day the pause didn’t end. His breath didn’t return. And my mum and I felt relief. Relief that my father figure and her husband had died. 

I have similar stories about anger around death and loss. And resentment. And that enormous guilt you feel when you have fun without them. 

It’s all allowed. It’s just a sign that you’re still alive. 

Living a joyful life is impossible without allowing our grief and anger and marrow-deep sadness. The grief I felt around those I’ve lost, the relationships I’ve ended, around that which never came to be — there's a foundation of love and aliveness to it all.

Joy is the meaning and the marker and the root of all things. To be alive in our humanity, to throw our fists in the air like those souls who finally got to the end of the queue, who finally got to experience human existence, is to feel joy, even if sometimes you doubt whether the light will ever come back. 

Without loss there can be no life. Without darkness there can be no light. And without grief there can be no joy. 

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