A Part of Me Died.

The grief of growth

photo credit: Unsplash - Getty Images

I walked into the orthopedist’s office one person and walked out as another.

This is a first world problem. It’s not a health scare. Or life or traditional physical death. But it is the death of the way things were and the birth of the way things will be.

This aging thing kind of sucks. I hurt myself last year in a dance class and my knee hasn’t been the same. It doesn’t need surgery. It just needs some attention, probably forever.

I was super lucky. I’ve never really been injured. Almost 40 years ago, I had surgery on my foot but it didn’t keep me from living my best physical life. In other words, dance was still a part of it.

But that might be over. Well, it is over, for now. And when I got this news, instead of being stoic in the doctor’s office, I cried. I’m not sure they knew what to do with me, but I wasn’t really looking for that. I was expressing myself in real time. I wasn’t rationalizing it, acting as if this didn’t matter to me. It did. It does. And for the first time in a long time, I felt like I was crying for myself. The grief was real. I felt it because I made a different choice.

I sat in my car for a few minutes before driving home. Just letting it be what it was.

This is a little “d” death. An inconvenience, but still something that changes my trajectory.

A big “D” death was when my father died right at the beginning of Covid. I had lost him. He was our family’s glue since my mother died. We also lost our gym to lockdown at the same time, which was scary. Everyone kept saying, “We are all in this together.” And I kept saying, “No we are not.” I had no clue what people were talking about. Today I do. Today I understand that grief isolates you but the collective can help you.

This was a big week for me, with more deaths and rebirths than in all of the past six months. Some of these events made me question the way I show up in the world, the way I’ve shown up since I was little.

Since I have been diving into this Enneagram thing and understanding myself a bit better, I’ve chalked up my quietness, my unwillingness to share or burden others, on my type structure. You see, Fives are deep introverts and there is a part of them that feels like the world just doesn’t understand them. In fairness, the world is a bit of a mystery to them too, not in an incomprehensible way, but more in the way of a lack of sense of belonging. They can easily detach. But this week, I discovered something else. This is more than just being a Five. This is about deep impressions from my family of origin and it has affected the way I show up - socially.

I’ve always said that my parents loved me, my oldest brother and sister did too. They did and do. But the brother six years older than me, not so much. I would joke about it. I have joked about it most of my life. And I’m not pointing fingers here. I’m just finally understanding this sense of not belonging. It doesn’t matter how much love you have received. These early relationships affect you. And since he and I spent a lot of time together (we were the youngest in the family), it makes sense that this relationship affected me. When you layer that on top of being a Five, you’ve got a girl, a young lady, a woman, who allowed very few people into her circle and felt like she was on an island most of her life. Because in her mind, this world just doesn’t have her back.

That is a story. A sad story. This family dynamic was my community and I transposed it onto the bigger community…..until this week.

This week that story died.

This week, I was offered up enough challenges to lean into my learning and into someone else. But it took the deep sadness of aloneness and the consciousness to choose differently.

Russ Hudson has said, “Grief is the stripping away of attachment. Grief is the arising of compassion.” I’ve been attached to the island mentality. Stripping this away gave me the necessary compassion for myself to reach out and get some support. To allow the feelings to come up, be acknowledged and felt. To allow my heart to be part of the journey. This is new to me. What a beautiful way to look at grief. The death of something, but the rebirth of something else.

As I drove home from my appointment, knowing Ernie and I would chat about this, I realized how ingrained the two of us are, not just because of our love, but also because of our patterning. His personality is my Growth Point and my personality is his Stress Point. We really see each other and this can be a really good thing, but it can also be a too-comfortable thing, slipping into our patterning without even noticing it. This week there were other challenges and we both were diving into our patterning. I learned that just because something is comfortable doesn’t mean it is healthy. At least one of us needs to be consciously choosing. And so here I am. Choosing.

In all of this observation, pattern unpacking and consciously choosing, there is grief. Grief of what was and will never be again. The little “d” deaths we experience keep us growing, in love and grace, because we can only do this with the Divine presence. Otherwise, our patterns are running the show and we are completely unconscious to life.

My teacher, James Flaherty, shared this story about his Zen teacher - “He did this experiment once, he said, ‘Well, are you different than you were 10 years ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you different than you were five years ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you different than you were a year ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you different than you were a week ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you different than you were a day ago?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you different than you were an hour ago, a minute ago, a second ago?’”

Yes.