We should be in Paris right now.
One of my best friends is turning 70 on Saturday and we were going to Paris to celebrate. We’ve been soul sisters, mentor and mentee, confidants and counselors to each other for over 20 years, and have always dreamed of one day being in our beloved city together. I insisted her 70th was the best possible excuse for such a decadent indulgence. We started planning it a year ago.
The loss of high school plays, sport seasons, graduation ceremonies, weddings, big birthday parties, annual summer vacations, concerts, shows, hugs from friends, our once-regular workout routines, favorite pastimes, and beloved restaurants, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, has many of us in a perpetual state of low-grade grief. And that grief has another facet that threatens to sap what’s left of our joie de vivre: Guilt.
By now, every human on the planet has suffered very real, albeit perhaps micro, losses due to the global pandemic. Many of these micro-losses have awakened us to how fortunate we have been all these years. Yet the disappointments are still unsettling. In part because we feel bad about even acknowledging our upset around the loss of a trip, or favorite summer ice cream parlor, when so many people are losing so much more.
At a time when the pain of families and communities, devastated by the loss of loved ones—from COVID or not—is augmented by the inability to gather, grieve, and celebrate the life of the deceased the way they’d like to, it can feel wrong to mourn our relatively minor losses.
However, shutting down our sadness because there are “much worse problems out there” minimizes our feelings. Pretending that only the really big losses matter, that only the permanent or life-altering losses affect our moods, can dull our overall experience of what is good. We are still going to feel bad about what we’re missing, and if we don’t allow ourselves a moment to acknowledge the loss, no matter how small, we add compost on the weeds and make what could just be a passing sadness much ranker.
It’s not healthy to block our emotions–much less shame ourselves for having them. If we think of all human emotions as flowing through one tube, crimping that tube in order to feel less sadness blocks the flow of the other emotions as well. To feel joy again, or even just peace, we have to ride the emotion rollercoaster as bravely and honestly as possible.
One thing that can help people with their grief is talking or writing about it. Witnessing the grief of others can also make a difference. Recognizing our own pain in the words and experiences of others can help us feel less alone. Guilt or shame about our relatively minor letdowns—clothes that don’t fit, friends and relatives we can’t visit, the increasing inability to plan for the future—keeps us from acknowledging our genuine sadness and moving past it.
Through the healthy process of grieving, grief can eventually morph into gratitude.
Smiles at the happy memories. Gratitude for the good times.
Think about it. We know the appreciation of little things can make a day more joyful. Likewise, lots of little losses over a period of time can erode our sense of well-being and foster a general malaise we can’t even put our finger on.
So, let yourself grieve those many little and larger losses the pandemic has dealt you. And don’t feel guilty about it. Mourning letdowns is not selfish or myopic. It’s honest and healthy. Feel those feelings, name those heartaches and thousand natural shocks your flesh is heir to, acknowledge the major bummers, and then move on. Only after giving those disappointments their due can we approach with gratitude all the blessings we still have, and enthusiastically create moments of joy whenever and wherever we can. Gratitude and Joy are contagious, too.
Plus, pretending we aren’t upset can cause stress and sickness. If my friend and I thought our little loss of a trip to Paris didn’t merit a moment’s pause, we would have unnecessarily repressed a sadness that was, in the scheme of things, no big deal. Once we gave it a moment. So, we met for socially distant French bubbly and cheese on the night before her birthday. We had our legitimate boo-hoos, and felt damn fine afterwards.
We always knew a canceled trip to Paris wasn’t the end of the world, but once we took a couple hours to acknowledge our genuine disappointment about it, we were able to let it go without remorse. And we still celebrated together. Which in the end is all that really matters.
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