Uncomfortably Numb

In the months after my sister, Cathy, died, when I had returned home to the US and was living with my parents, when I was struggling to avoid my anger – a simmering rage really – and my sadness and my desperate loneliness in the face of the loss, I used the analogy of a closet to describe to my therapist how I was dealing with my grief. To cope with Cathy’s sudden death, I had shoved many of my feelings away, kind of like how I used to clean my room as a teenager: shoving all of the things I wasn’t ready to sort through into my already crammed closet and quickly slamming the door shut before any of those things could come toppling out. Floor cleared, I could forget about the mess in my closet until the next time I tried to open the door to get something out or put something else in. The problem with shoving the emotions I felt around Cathy’s death into my “closet” is that it pretty much guaranteed that I couldn’t deal with ANY of the feelings, even the easier ones, even the helpful ones, because I worried that if I opened the door – even just an inch – ALL of the feelings shoved inside would come toppling down and crush me beneath their weight. And the feelings shoved in there weren’t just from her death. It held the grief of a thousand small traumas and big losses and lasting hurts from before that, and even if I was ready to start looking at my emotions surrounding her death, I certainly wasn’t ready to unpack all of my unresolved grief and guilt from the past 24 years of living. So I left the closet shut for a very long time, and I spent the next several years looking for things to distract me, to numb me, to avoid dealing with all of those feelings. 

I think a lot of us find ourselves in this spiral at some point in our lives. We have packed away our darker feelings, the ones that feel too messy, too embarrassing, or too shameful to let out in the open, and that seems to serve us for a time. It allows us to feel like we’ve cleaned house, like we’ve got our stuff together, until something forces us to open that door again. Maybe a new grief emerges, and we need to do something with the feelings it brings up. The new grief opens the door of the closet and all of those old feelings come cascading down upon us. We are left with an overwhelming mound of emotions scattered about us, on top of us. We don’t even know where to begin, how to even start unpacking and unraveling these emotions that may be from a hundred different hurts but really all feel the same. So what do we do? We numb ourselves in some way to take the edge off the pain, something to soften the lines so that we don’t have to look at these starkly painful, difficult feelings head on. Numb ourselves while we safely put the feelings back in the closet or sweep them into a corner where we can cover them up with something more beautiful, more attractive, more acceptable. 

Or, perhaps, instead of struggling with the emotions toppling out of your closet like I do, you’ve become really adept at keeping the door to that closet tightly shut. Maybe you’ve even figured out how to lock it, to shut yourself off from those feelings entirely. Your coping mechanisms may have created what feels like an impenetrable barrier to those thoughts and emotions, making you feel safe, invulnerable. Or maybe you’ve created multiple closets, compartmentalizing your feelings and emotions so as to never have to reopen the closets that hold your pain, your shame, your anguish. Maybe you’ve mastered tools that provide detours to keep you from ever getting too close to those closet doors at all, by keeping yourself distracted, lost, or just desensitized to the feelings that threaten to take you there. Perhaps, in these ways, you feel you have protected yourself from the enormity of your pain, the cumulative effects of your grief.

And so I’ve begun to explore this question for myself: how many ways have I attempted to numb the pain of my grief throughout the years? Countless, I think. I have used alcohol, recreational drugs, sleeping aids, food, exercise, and even relationships in an attempt to turn my attention to something else and soften the edges of my pain. I have thrown myself into international travel and moved to new cities and reinvented myself in a million ways to try to avoid dealing with my emotions. I have spent hours scrolling through social media or binge-watching The Real Housewives on TV as an escape from what I was feeling. I have sat judging others and engaged in petty gossip and projected my flaws and my fears onto others in order to avoid my own deep pain. But what I am beginning to realize, even as I write this, is that the pain of grief can only be alleviated by experiencing it. It can’t be sidestepped or avoided or even just partially dealt with. It has to be felt. Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, wrote: 

“The cure for the pain is in the pain.” 

The only way through your grief is THROUGH YOUR GRIEF – straight through, head on, fully, without distractions, with all of your being. My coping mechanisms had the ability to make it feel as if it was possible to rise above the pain, sink below it, or move it aside. But they didn’t really work. I was trying to get through my grief half-way, numbed by any number of habits, substances, and coping mechanisms I had discovered to self-soothe throughout my life. Not only was I not actually dealing with my grief that way, I was essentially ensuring that the pain of my grief would be that much worse when I finally tried to examine it, feel it, move through it. It would, as I had always feared, topple out of the closet and crush me under its weight. 

What I’ve also begun to discover on this journey through grief is that the problem with numbing my pain, or any of my darker emotions, is that eventually those barriers I’ve created end up keeping me from feeling the good stuff, too. They become barriers to honesty and vulnerability, to connection and gratitude, and – ultimately – they became barriers to joy. Just as they keep me from feeling the weight of pain that can threaten to drag me low, they tend to keep me from feeling the heights of joy and happiness. They end up insulating me in a way that, though at one time felt protective, can begin to feel stifling and constrictive. I think that, for many of us, our coping mechanisms, our myriad ways of numbing ourselves, become the very obstacles to the joy we seek. As I am slowly coming to understand, fully experiencing our grief is the only way we can truly experience our fullest joy. 

A few years after Cathy died, I found myself feeling stuck. I wasn’t particularly sad at the time – I mean, I had built a life that should have felt good. I was living on my own in an apartment within walking distance to the beach, where I could hear the faint sound of the ocean waves crashing at night through my open window. I had my parents and two of my sisters nearby, and I spent a lot of time with them and with my niece and nephews. I had some good, strong friendships with people who really knew me and supported me, and I had a pretty full social life. I had even found a spiritual community that I was active in. I had a job that I genuinely enjoyed, teaching and advising high school students, and I was doing well in the classes I was taking at night to earn my teaching credential. Things were, on the surface, good. And yet, I wasn’t particularly happy either. I wasn’t feeling very fulfilled, and I was struggling to find purpose and meaning in my life despite all that was good around me. I kept making plans for the future, but then convincing myself that there were too many roadblocks that were keeping me from moving forward. I was struggling to keep my feelings about the past – my sense of loss, my feelings of guilt, my overwhelming grief and shame – out of my mind. 

And so, in an attempt to move forward, I employed one of my tried and true coping mechanisms: diving into a big experience in a foreign country. I ended up planning a 5-week trip to Guatemala to study Spanish. The trip involved me flying alone to Guatemala City where I caught an early morning taxi from the airport in the country’s capitol to the tourist town of Antigua where I would spend a few days before taking a bus out to the central highlands, to a little town nestled next Lago Atitlán. There, I spent a couple of weeks living with a lovely Mayan family and spending my mornings in private Spanish language lessons with a sweet, young teacher named Florinda in our outdoor classroom. Since the native language of my teacher and my host family was K’iche and they didn’t speak any English, my time in San Pedro la Laguna was the perfect opportunity to learn and practice Spanish. After my daily instruction with Florinda, I’d spend my afternoons exploring the small town, basking in the warm sun on the rocks that lined the beach just down the road from my school, drinking the most delicious coffee to ever pass my lips, occasionally volunteering at a local center for children with disabilities, eating handmade corn tortillas that my host-mother spent hours clapping into existence in the upstairs kitchen, or horseback riding with some fellow American travelers on rented horses that raced up steep trails along the lake’s shore at a speed that left me convinced those moments would be my last. I spent my evenings watching English-language movies at a secluded little garden restaurant/bar run by an Australian nomad and his Czech girlfriend who would let me practice my rudimentary Czech in conversation with her, and my weekends at a hostel across the lake that specialized in daily scuba lessons and nightly “drag” parties that lasted into the wee hours of morning.

When my study program there ended, I chose to try another town and another teacher, this time in the mountain town of Quetzaltenango (locally known as Xela – pronounced “shay-lah”). After a much colder and lonelier couple of weeks there, I signed up to participate in a 3-day trek from the mountains back to Lake Atitlan, roughly 30 miles away. In the midst of the hike, I found myself physically destroyed. I was exhausted, in pain from blisters that covered by feet and legs (which the hike guides had convinced me to bandage with strips of duct tape that took off layers of skin when removed at night), and sure there was no way I could actually walk all the way back to the lake. To make it through, I kept telling myself that I didn’t have to make it all the way to the lake right then; I just needed to make it one more step. And then one more step after that. Soon, I was repeating to myself, “One foot in front of the other. Nothing more, nothing less.” It became my mantra as I made a conscious effort to feel the pressure of my heel stepping down, the weight distributing through my sole as I rolled onto the ball of my foot, stretching my toes and pressing them into the earth. As I kept on, I found myself in meditation, even as I moved slowly, laboriously along the path. I had an epiphany while slogging along, the sign I had been waiting for the previous 4 weeks I’d been in Guatemala. I had embarked on that adventure believing the universe would send me a sign about what to do with my life, how to move forward from the rut I had been feeling I was in for so long. I had spent the entire trip up until that point imagining how I was going to meet “the one” while traveling. Or if not a man, surely I’d have a life-changing experience that would point me directly towards my life’s calling. God was going to speak to me on that trip, He just had to. And so, for the majority of my time there, I sat wallowing in my past, analyzing every past relationship, dissecting every major decision I’d made up to that point. When I wasn’t bogging myself down in past reflection, I was conjuring images of my ideal relationship or doing what I always did best when I was unhappy in my current circumstances – dreaming of how I would change everything, go to a new place, start all over. I spent almost a month not even really experiencing all that was right in front of me in Guatemala. I didn’t fully savor the joy that was in all of those beautiful moments there because all the ways I had tried to numb the painful feelings had also numbed me to the good. So instead of reveling in my experiences there, Guatemala was serving as just another backdrop for my internal journeys backwards and forwards. Until that day on the mountainous path. Until I started saying to myself, “One foot in front of the other. Nothing more, nothing less.” In that moment, as the hike forced me to be completely present in my physical body, in that exact moment in time, there were no thoughts of the past, no images of the future. There was just me, my aching body, the hard earth below my feet, and the beauty of the present swirling around me. And that’s when God spoke to me saying, “Ahhh, there you are. You finally arrived.”

And I think that moment was my first inkling into an understanding of how to sit with pain, how to stop avoiding and numbing and distracting myself and just move through the hard feelings instead trying to find a way around them. In that hike, I really saw, for the first time, what it meant to be truly present in my discomfort. I had nowhere to run. The physical pain, coupled with my mounting awareness of the surrounding natural beauty of the coffee farms and cloud forests we passed through without anything to distract me, kept me rooted in the present moment, preventing me from getting mired in the past or lost in thoughts of the future as I so often tended to do. My footsteps along the steep, dirt paths through the Sierra Madre mountains kept me mindful of the progress I was making, one step at a time. They served as a reminder that healing doesn’t happen over night, and it certainly doesn’t happen if we are determined to avoid and distract from and numb our feelings. I think that, when we can allow ourselves to really sit with our uncomfortable feelings and not look for ways to distract ourselves or numb ourselves to the pain of those feelings, when we can allow ourselves to be present and aware and grateful for it all, then we can move through our grief in a meaningful way. 

I certainly haven’t figured out all of the answers, but I do find myself coming back to that lesson from Guatemala a lot, especially this year as I try to grapple with all of the anxiety, uncertainty, and collective grief from facing nearly a year of this global pandemic. It reminds me to re-examine the coping mechanisms I have been trying to use in this year filled with loss and fear, to look for the ways I might be trying to shove those feelings into the closet again. And as I do that, I can almost feel Cathy nudging me a little, reminding me of what I already know deep inside: that although this year has been filled with more than its fair share of dark, difficult moments, I have been through darkness before and have come out on the other side. It feels like yet another gift Cathy has given me since she died – a reminder that I already have the tools I need. I can sit with my discomfort, with my pain. I do not have to run from it or soften it or shove it aside. I can sit with it, walk with it, allow it to wash over me. If I am willing to do that, I can move through my grief – steadily, one foot in front of the other – instead of being crushed under its weight. And, I believe, if you give yourself the opportunity, you can, too.