to be permeable
why every negative emotion is grief
every negative emotion is grief.
think of possible negative emotions: anger, anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, guilt, bitterness, disappointment. some of these emotions are more protective than others, directed outwards. some are inward-facing, punishing to the self.
but when you look more closely, you start to see that they’re all different thrashing manifestations of the same underlying feeling: the loss of something that some part of you felt you needed. anger is grief that an outcome didn’t go the way you wanted. anxiety is fear, which is, if you follow it a step further, the anticipation of grief. loneliness is grief that the human experience is fundamentally isolated, that you are the only one who will ever be inside your own head, or perhaps it’s fear that you are not loved. jealousy is grief that you are not the person you wish to be or that you do not have what you wish to have. and so on.
these experiences of grief and anticipation of grief play out constantly across our lives in big and small ways: when a friend doesn’t reply to a text, when you lose a job, when the barista gets your order wrong, when a loved one dies, when the weekend draws to a close.
in looking at my own life in earnest, i was shocked to see how many times it happens every single day. it was invisible to me because i would reflexively transmute it into its most “competent” presentations—perfectionism, self-discipline, problem-solving. but again, if you take a longer look: perfectionism is fear that you’re not good enough as you are, self-discipline is fear that what you want to do cannot be trusted to align with what you should do, problem-solving is fear that everything won’t just work out. that’s not to pathologize these responses; you cannot live a life without grief, and it is an enormously generative force. but if you never consciously realize how much you’re reacting to it, it can create huge distortions in how you understand yourself and your life.
most of the time, your responses to the micro experiences of grief don’t matter so much. you have a default shape that informs how you interact with every instance of it—you feel it for an instant and then override it or avoid it or intellectualize it, and you keep moving through your day.
occasionally, though, you have a macro experience of grief, and it throws everything else into sharp relief. you reach for the coping mechanisms that have served you every day for so long and find that they’re useless. this moment is important. it presents you with the choice to double down on what you’ve always done, reestablish your state to normalcy as quickly as possible—or to let go of the reflexive strategies that have enabled you to function your whole life and learn to trust that you can survive without them.
this part is the hard part. it requires you to release what you might see as your most fundamental values and beliefs. it requires you to keep doing it, again and again until the day you die, when your instinct is to reach for what’s kept you safe. it requires you to step into the pain of experiencing the grief that is everywhere in your life that you want to reject or disown. but to be alive is to be permeable, to the grief, to the love, to all of it. the deepest expression of love might be truly accepting the grief of what it cannot guarantee—permanence, perfection, certainty—then choosing to love anyway.