There was anger that I was not allowing myself to feel.
And it wasn't so much that I wasn't allowing myself,
I tried really hard to tap into that anger.
I tried really hard to allow that anger to happen throughout my grieving.
Because there were so many situations that called for it,
You know?
There were so many situations that,
Around my parents' deaths,
That could have been avoided,
That felt like they were prescribed.
And there were a lot of reasons to be angry.
And yet there was something inside of me that said,
Well,
You know,
Humans,
People make mistakes,
They don't all know what they're doing.
And I gave myself grace too in my mistakes.
And I remember I tried to go into the woods to scream.
I thought,
Oh,
I just need to scream,
I just need to let it out,
I just need to get my voice moving,
I just need to feel the roar within me,
Right?
And so I went out to the woods to scream,
And I ended up sobbing into the pavement at like four in the morning,
With the trees just listening.
Not a sound,
Just tears.
It brought me back to a time when I,
The one time I saw my mother in the hospital room,
She was just dying.
In fact,
She died less than an hour after I left.
And they brought my dad in,
And he saw her,
And he said,
He held her hand and he said she was suffering,
And that he could be angry,
But he could not be sad.
And from that,
One thing he told me,
I realized my parents never allowed me to feel sadness.
They never allowed me to,
Not that they allowed me,
But they tried to shelter me from sadness.
And so after that time,
When I looked back at that,
I realized that I needed to grieve a lot,
And that's what brought me out into the woods.
I thought I could access my anger,
And I accessed my sadness,
And I cried for days.
All of the griefs in my life,
All of the losses,
All of the sadnesses all came out,
But none did the anger.
The anger stayed in,
And it was just last week that,
While I was grieving a part of myself that seemed to have gone underground when my parents died,
That I heard my anger come out.
I heard it come out at my husband,
And I was sticking up for myself,
Something I haven't done much of in my life.
And I'm more likely to say,
Oh,
It was my responsibility,
I could have changed that,
But instead it came out,
And my voice was loud.
And I didn't quite have the words,
But I was angry.
It may not have come out cohesively,
But it came out.
And I'm not sure my husband even understood what I was yelling about,
But in my own heart,
I was standing up for myself.
And so this anger,
It started to come out,
And I was so pissed.
And then I sat with it,
I sat with that feeling,
I went to sleep with that feeling,
And I woke up with that feeling,
And then the funniest thing happened.
I became proud of myself,
And when I became proud of myself for just having an expression like that,
I started talking to my husband.
And we didn't figure it out,
But I didn't let it go.
I didn't let it just simmer,
I didn't let it just disappear,
I didn't let it just vanish,
And then come back in a few days.
I didn't work in the silence.
Instead I asked him for a hug.
And I felt it,
I felt the hug,
And it was like,
It's okay to be angry,
You know?
And if I look back at that anger,
It's that anger of not being heard,
Not being witnessed,
And I can easily connect that to my parents' death.
Throughout the entire ordeal of my parents,
I wasn't heard.
The doctors,
The nurses,
My mom wasn't heard.
In fact,
She called me one day at three in the morning,
The day before she died,
And she was probably in some morphine dream,
I don't know how she managed to pick up the phone,
But she said,
They're not listening to me,
They're not listening to me.
She couldn't find her way home.
She was in some cafeteria,
So hungry.
And I think that's where my anger came from,
Not feeling supported,
Seen,
Or heard.
And I finally stuck up for myself,
So I'm proud of myself.
And for somebody who really doesn't act in anger like that,
It was a moment.
It was a moment.
