Learning to Reframe: Loss
It’s not always a hand-in-hand agreement with grief.
Remember losing your front teeth when you were little? It was a sort of right-of-passage, and though we all looked ridiculous in our third-grade pictures...no one mourned the loss, despite those big toothless grins. It was just part of growing up. Just like our tongue’s incessant jabbing at the gumline where the teeth once stood and finding out how far you could spit a mouthful of water through the hole. There was a loss, and you felt it, but it wasn’t a big deal.
People who lose immense amounts of weight frequently continue to buy clothes in sizes far larger than actually fits them. Because that person has an ingrained idea of themselves as “this person over here,” and often has a difficult time reconciling just what they actually look like now. The daily acceptance of that change can sometimes be just as jarring to them -- no matter how long it took to accomplish -- as to someone who hasn’t seen them in several years. They certainly don’t “miss” the weight, but there is often a momentary loss of their former truth, from years of self-conditioning to see themselves in a particular light.
Very rich people can be the tightest penny pitchers...not necessarily because they are stingy, but because they were once poor and that truth and fear of returning to that state again, is ingrained in their psyche. Their loss is their poverty--not a bad thing, but the haunting of which continues to stay with them.
Regardless of how the sense of loss has come to you, there is very real truth to the fact that it often leaves a long shadow casting from it. The millionaire who grew up in poverty might never be able to shake the need to bargain shop. The cancer patient in remission might emotionally mourn the loss of visiting their team of allies they made while undergoing treatment every week. The years-long weight of your now-paid student loan debt will frequently charge you with a pulse of adrenaline that you forgot to make your payment this month before you remember -- it is in fact all done.
Giving yourself the grace to feel and experience even what might seem the oddest of losses, can help even more in moments when the losses are actual gut-hits. We experience it in so many ways, and especially now, so many of them seemingly minute and at the same time glaring. From the loss of being with our families this holiday, to the loss of sleep because of the new baby. Be patient with yourselves, as we near step by step closer to a fresh, new year. We are in the home stretch now, friends!
What do you look forward to missing the most, in 2021?