I think I know (and mostly alieve) everything in this post, and I know (and mostly alieve?) everything in the Replacing Guilt sequence, and… man it sure takes awhile to internalize in a real way. I feel like I’m staring at my ruby slippers, and knowing that eventually I’ll be like “okay, yup, now I grok that I can just click these together and be okay”, and yet… not being able to skip out on the journey to kill the wicked witch, for all my genre savviness.
I became decidedly Not Okay ~2 years ago, worked my way through powergrieving for a few months, ran out of steam, and then worked on sporadically grieving when it felt right. And two years later I heard a friend reflecting on the end of the world:
“You know, I know what it’s like to successfully grieve something. I had a whole life planned out for myself with goals, and I had to basically give up all of those goals, and it was rough but by now I don’t look upon those old goals / lifeplan with any sense of longing or wishing it were still real. … So… I can tell that I haven’t really grieved the maybe-end-of-the-world yet. I have cried about it and done some stuff that felt like processing but I clearly am not actually at peace with it the way I became at peace with giving up my old lifegoals.”
And I heard that was hit with “Man, yeah, 2 years of trying to process all of these things and I just clearly haven’t finished yet. Geez.” And I’m not sure if the problem is that I’m not “doing it right”, or if it just actually takes awhile.
The things that have visibly at least helped in a significant way were something closer to “formal grieving ritual with other people.” (Two of them were small solstices-in-the-woods, with ~10 people. One of them was talking through stuff with one other person). Each time I was like “man, I am embarrassed that Raemon took this long to try solving his big emotional problems with a ritual”, but then simultaneously felt like rushing to do another one wouldn’t help much more.
I think I know (and mostly alieve) everything in this post, and I know (and mostly alieve?) everything in the Replacing Guilt sequence, and… man it sure takes awhile to internalize in a real way. I feel like I’m staring at my ruby slippers, and knowing that eventually I’ll be like “okay, yup, now I grok that I can just click these together and be okay”, and yet… not being able to skip out on the journey to kill the wicked witch, for all my genre savviness.
I became decidedly Not Okay ~2 years ago, worked my way through powergrieving for a few months, ran out of steam, and then worked on sporadically grieving when it felt right. And two years later I heard a friend reflecting on the end of the world:
“You know, I know what it’s like to successfully grieve something. I had a whole life planned out for myself with goals, and I had to basically give up all of those goals, and it was rough but by now I don’t look upon those old goals / lifeplan with any sense of longing or wishing it were still real. … So… I can tell that I haven’t really grieved the maybe-end-of-the-world yet. I have cried about it and done some stuff that felt like processing but I clearly am not actually at peace with it the way I became at peace with giving up my old lifegoals.”
And I heard that was hit with “Man, yeah, 2 years of trying to process all of these things and I just clearly haven’t finished yet. Geez.” And I’m not sure if the problem is that I’m not “doing it right”, or if it just actually takes awhile.
The things that have visibly at least helped in a significant way were something closer to “formal grieving ritual with other people.” (Two of them were small solstices-in-the-woods, with ~10 people. One of them was talking through stuff with one other person). Each time I was like “man, I am embarrassed that Raemon took this long to try solving his big emotional problems with a ritual”, but then simultaneously felt like rushing to do another one wouldn’t help much more.
for me i think it took about 3 years, but the first 50% of it only took one or two months once i got deliberate about it