Anniversaries of grief.
When a community collapses, and our support networks are gone, how do we find ways to move on?
Today and tomorrow mark a strange double anniversary; a meeting that changed the course of my life, and its abrupt ending.
Within one calendar day, the one place and space opened up with a crackle of chemistry and ended with me, standing alone, phone in hand, by my fridge, realising that a place I loved deeply — where I’d volunteered endless hours of time, of love and commitment — was gone forever.
Grief number 7.
I started freelancing without a plan, connections, or experience. It wasn’t a smart decision, but I was 38, underemployed, broke, and burning with unused focus, writing, and, maybe a little talent.
I heard about a podcast. It sounded fun, I pitched a story and was accepted. One sweltering August day, I talked and listened, we laughed. I felt high. Something was starting.
After recording, the interviewer told me about their freelancer community. I joined their Slack. I didn’t know what Slack was.
Soon enough I was logging on every day. Messages pinged, backwards and forwards.
The community enjoyed my comments, my thoughts. As the months wore on, they supported me on dark, school-refusing days, celebrated my wins.
After years of loneliness in a miserable marriage and underemployment, I’d found my people.
I helped members with their problems, shared their joys, told countless people how I’d gone through my ADHD journey, helped others start a business. Tried to help, eventually became a host. I felt at home.
I landed my first international job through the community. The podcast host was now a friend and colleague. He coached me through the gig. Held my nerve, trusted me. Through his confidence and kindness, I started trusting myself. He professionalised the work that comes to me intuitively, helping me see that I have skills. That I have value. I’d never believed that, before1.
But, one day, someone made the decisions to fill my DMs with hate. Noxious, controlling, angry hate. Demanding my attention, furious with my requests to leave me alone.
Despite their constant rule-breaking, the bile continued, the threats increased.
And then, just like that, everything was gone.
Grief number 2.
One winter’s evening, when I was still at school, a man wasn’t allowed to say one prayer, one time, at one meeting. So he shouted at the headteacher, and at my mum, and walked out of the school.
An insular network of teachers and priests sharpened their pens, folded their arms, and complained.
A mutiny needs a ringleader, and a priest stepped into position. Under his eye teachers wrote poisonous, anonymous, hate letters to my mum, spread lies and gossip. He told my mum he didn’t know who was behind it, pretended to care.
Pulling yet another hate letter from her governor’s post tray, I watched her blanche.
With a year until my A Levels, I checked my grades, making sure my teachers weren’t downgrading my work in vengeance.
My peers gossiped, teachers leered, people sniggered.
Because one man didn’t get to say one prayer.
Grief comes in many flavours: the death of a beloved pet who comforts us through a child’s illness, the hand-embroidered scarf we dropped in a sweaty festival tent, the years we lose to bad relationships, the wrong careers.
This too shall pass.
Visible wound number 1.
When I was two, my family and I were playing on a hot, thundery Normandy beach. A glass lemonade bottle explodes, piercing the soft inner of my thin elbow.
It was such a small wound, said the doctor, it would take longer to anaesthetise me than to stitch the gaping halves of my arm back together. So, with one adult holding down one limb each, the wound was closed.
Today the scar is 2 inches long, settled around an inch away from the crook. It’s ragged and lumpy. In the summer, the white tissue pokes up, proud and pale. Distinct.
Can you see the line of it, pulling up and down, the stitch marks, as clear as if someone drew them on with a weird sharpie?
This is how I think about grief. We all experience grief and most of us carry visible wounds. Everyone carries invisible wounds.
But, how can we tend to our wounds so they don’t rip into itchy, angry scar tissue?
Running from grief number 2.
After the priest who led the mutiny apologised to me, he tried to give me a bit of The Big Host2.
But, without realising it, I shuttered myself off.
After a life of choir, drama club, wind band, wind orchestra, carol services, volunteering, music lessons, county wind bands, rehearsals and practice, I went to uni and I stopped.
I drank, partied, watched far too much daytime TV, allowed myself to be swallowed up inside the relationship I write about here. I wouldn’t let any place or group take my lunchtimes, my evenings and weekends. My attention.
But, of course, I didn’t realise I was giving everything to Jay.
Facing into griefs 7 & 8.
At the same time the community and my friend vanished, both of my kids left home (grief 8). I packed the car and their quilts, wrote them love letters, and watched them blossom.
For the first time in my life, I faced pain and grief without the blur of alcohol or busi-work, nappies or deadlines, or the delicious feeling of giving advice to other people as your world comes apart. I was determined to feel it and face it.
I lay on my sofa with the dog, so tired from years of struggle. All I could do was watch TV. ‘Mad Men’ for the eighth time, ‘The Wire’ for the fifth. ‘Judge Judy’ while I cooked, and ‘Golden Girls’ in the bath. I watched ‘Such Brave GIrls’ and felt soothed by other lives with similar cracks.
There was some work, and endless marketing posts, and terrifying money worries. And endless naps, migraines, 8pm bedtimes. And loud kickboxing workouts. I yelled. I talked, and wrote more, and started a new project, and walked and listened. I wrote and scribbled and scrawled. I made plans and talked with people.
Small pockets of people stayed together; we shared our shock, and regained the rhythms of check-ins, silliness and support.
I came to peace with the waste of the hours of volunteering, the abruptness of it all. That someone had felt it okay to harass me, and nothing was done about it.
People and communities are messy; especially those of us who find life shocking, abrasive, excruciating. These are my people, and we’re not always easy, and we don’t always make the right calls.
Hurt happens. But what do you do with it?
Moving on.
In January, I peeled off the one-of-a-kind community stickers from my laptop. They were heavy duty for freelancer laptops that move around desks and clients. I picked at the sides with my nails, easing the plastic away, hearing its hiss as the glue gave way.
The stickers left a sticky residue, one so dense only a thick paste of bicarbonate-of-soda and washing-up liquid cut through the goop. I worked slowly, rubbing circles into the dirty grey fuzz, careful to not damage my only laptop.
It took two rounds of cleaning to clear the dirt and glue. The metaphor was ridiculously fitting. My children asked if I wanted a hug. I did. They laughed a little at the obvious metaphor, and I did, too.
I slipped the thin plastic of the sticker into the folder of my diary. Just there.
The community held outsized importance in my life, representing a part of my identity; its loss was significant. My friends gave me space to talk, encouraged me to not minimise the loss of a place where I shared friendship, camaraderie, solace, advice, silly jokes and nonsense.
This time, I had the words to name the pain. And, I had people who allowed me to feel it. To see it.
A short while after the priest apologised to me, and I rejected his shallow words. My mother suggested, strongly, that I forgive. She had, so, I should. I should accept, realise how hard it was for him to apologise, should understand his reasons, and I should move on.
I didn’t. Apologising whilst justifying yourself isn’t an apology. It simply compounds and muddies the wound, rushes to a solution, ignores the hurt. Encourages scarring.
We are all capable of causing great harm. The question is: what do we do when we realise we’ve harmed someone? Do we face into it, own the responsibility, and apologise?
Or, do we turn away, and leave the wounded person to hold onto their pain alone? Do we say, “It’s not my fault”?
When we truly own the pain we cause, we allow something new to form. We clean the wound, allowing it to heal well. Like any parent, I’ve looked at my children and owned pain I’ve caused, and uttered a singular, sole, “I’m sorry”. I’ve let it hang in the air.
More is needed afterwards, in actions and words. but, as a starter, it’s powerful.
This time, there’s no scars. And, bar one person, I’d be happy to see most other people again. I learned so much, shared wonderful conversations, made real friends. In that way, the community lives — despite how it ended.
Four years on from that podcast recording, I’d do most of this again.
And that’s a success.
I do realise that this is an unhealthy level of identification; but, if you’ve been decades into your career and not known if you have skills, you may know what I mean. I see you. You’ll sort it out.
This is Catholic thing; when the priest is celebrating the Eucharist (the main bit with the hosts and all that), he uses a big, three inch-or-so host. At Communion, he then gives pieces to special parishioners. So, this was an act of contrition from him. I did not care.