As a senior in high school, I lost the two most important male figures in my life within 6 months. I was heartbroken. Shattered. Everything around me was reminding of them and the memories of them came flooding back into my head. Every. Day. So what did I do? I did my best to stay busy.
While being 8 hours away from home helped put distance between and seemingly the source of my pain helped, it was not enough. I joined every club I could think of. I was on every E-Board I felt was humanly possible while maintaining a GPA that I felt was acceptable. I needed an escape from my mind and school and school-related activities was that relief that I needed.
I thought I had finally escaped the grieving process. I thought I had overcome it. I thought that was done grieving.
It wasn’t until I went home I realized that I had been delaying my grieving process.
I wasn’t allowing myself to feel the full range of emotions that one is supposed to feel when going through a time such as this. As the oldest child of my father, I felt it was my responsibility to stay strong for my sister and my mother and that didn’t include missing a beat from our daily lives. But in reality, I was robbing all of us from experiencing our emotions in a way that would allow us to heal. I was too focused on my comfortability with the side effects with grief, so I decided for us all that we would avoid them. That was selfish of me.
I started to take each day one step at a time, treating every day as a small victory. Some days were worse than others and vice versa. Once I learned to stop fighting the waves of grief that came over me and went with them, that’s when the real healing began.