Six Years Ago when we moved to the United States, I was finding my way through this country as a new immigrant fresh off the plane from India via Germany. On some days when I really struggled (which now feels trivial, though I still remember a few aspects), I told my husband that I should see a therapist. Half-jokingly he said, what a great way to integrate myself in this new culture. I began seeing a therapist in January 2021 in the pre-daycare/pre-vaccine pandemic.

Six months ago on her birthday on May 5, my grandmother died of misinformation and COVID-19, so it all made sense. I thought about cheesy email forwards (before messengers) which declared people enter your life for a reason. I had saved my life for the therapist to show up four years after I nearly died, three years after a miscarriage, nearly two years after giving birth on an isolated island (just with my husband), and almost a year after a pre-pandemic night of screaming between two underslept parents. I am not fully over that night. Or the night 31 years ago when we left home in a truck. It felt like it was time to schedule an hour to talk about things I didn’t want to talk about.

I’ve discovered a few things in the meantime:

• My flaws make me human
• I am not chill and always overthink
• Sometimes, I feel I’m not fully open with my therapist or say what she wants to hear- but she and I both know the act
• I’m constantly focused on family, and pay less attention to friendships
• Frequently, I suffer from self-doubt (a step up from low self-worth in my 20s)
• Boundaries in personal life are hard for me
• My grief shows up in many different ways: anger, hurt, pain, crying, silence, lack of motivation, constant feelings of being overwhelmed, bitterness, fear, compulsive behaviors, stress, lack of sleep, and confrontation. I keep it locked inside in hopes of using healing time and it comes out bursting through the seams. Because time doesn’t process emotions, I do.
• I grieve things, places, and people. Loss comes with many subtle or big changes.

With my grandmother, my grief feels physical, like today, when I’m unable to swallow my own spit without my throat hurting for a gargle with the bicarbonate of soda or sips of mogil chai. I’ve been told it lasts a year, and that gets me mad. Because I can’t live on a timetable with my feelings, and it feels like my feelings are being invalidated. I was listening to Doyle’s Untamed recently, and a quote really resonated with me:

“It’s okay to feel all of the stuff you’re feeling. You’re just becoming human again. You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”

I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.”

― Glennon Doyle, Untamed