Loss can be a hard and painful thing to talk about, not only for the person going through it, but also for the people listening.
Take my most recent experience. I broke my ankle. When I told a few friends, some simply disappeared. They didn’t check in and plans we had made were never rescheduled. In some conversations, I could almost hear the discomfort in their voices.
It made me think about how uncomfortable we can become when someone is hurting and we don’t know what to say.
Loss and Depression
Since 2018, I’ve experienced some kind of loss almost every year, whether big or small.
It started with the loss of my health. Then came the loss of my aunt, a job I loved, and friendships I thought would last. For three years in a row, I lost one of my fur babies, each about a year apart.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, COVID happened.
I lost a friend to cancer. A year later, I lost my grandmother. The following year brought the loss of a tooth, another job, and another beloved fur baby. This year, I’ve lost some odd jobs and, for the first time in my life, broken a bone, my ankle.
When I talk about everything that has happened, I sometimes hear, “Things will get better.” Other times, people respond as though I’m trying to compete over who has suffered more.
But I’m not trying to compete.
I’m trying to connect.
Sometimes talking about what we’ve lost is part of how we process it. It is part of how we heal.
And I know I’m not the only person who has experienced this.
People often become uncomfortable when someone talks about the hard things, loss, fear, grief, depression, pain. When they don’t know what to say, sometimes they pull away entirely. The person who is already struggling can then become even more isolated.
I think society as a whole needs a reset in the way we talk to one another.
We need more empathy.
Not just empathy for people whose experiences look like ours, but for one another and for the world around us. Sometimes empathy doesn’t require advice or an attempt to fix what happened. Sometimes it simply means staying. Listening. Checking in. Rescheduling the plans that had to be canceled.
Sometimes it means allowing someone to say, “This hurts,” without immediately trying to make the hurt disappear.
How Loss Affected My Writing
Loss after loss over the span of eight years takes a toll.
The body and mind can begin to feel as though they are in a state of never-ending mourning. Just when the grief starts to ease, something else happens. Then something else.
It becomes a cycle that is difficult to break.
Eventually, grief begins touching the things we love. Our relationships. Our creativity. Our routines. The things that once made us feel like ourselves.
For me, that included writing.
And that is also why so many of my stories revolve around depression. I know what it feels like, and I want my readers to know they are not alone.
If someone can connect with one of my characters, in some small way, hold their hand through the pages and offer them a source of comfort, then I have accomplished one of my biggest goals as a writer.
Sometimes we find pieces of ourselves in fictional people. Sometimes a character understands something we haven’t been able to explain to anyone else. If my stories can give someone that feeling of being understood, even for a little while, then writing about these difficult emotions is worth it.
It can be difficult to create when so much of your energy is being spent simply trying to recover. And after enough loss, there can come a point when you look around and realize that somewhere along the way, you lost pieces of yourself too.
So how do you come back from that?
I don’t think it happens all at once.
I think you come back one small thing at a time.
Cook one of your favorite meals.
Go for a walk.
Read one page of the book that has been sitting on your TBR.
Write one paragraph.
Do something you used to enjoy, even if you can only enjoy it for five minutes.
No major steps. Not yet.
Just small ones.
Eventually, those small things can become everyday things again. And those everyday things can slowly become something larger as hope begins to return.
Because when you’ve been living in a state of loss for a long time, hope can be incredibly difficult to find.
Sometimes you don’t find it all at once.
Sometimes you build it.
One small thing at a time.
