As I contemplate self-flagellation at this new year’s dawning, I think of all of the things I didn’t accomplish, of those the things I dared myself to dream, and I actually find myself quite content with my journey over the past year. However, I recognize that I did not hold up my end of the bargain as a writer in 2024 and I want to continue to challenge that.
To that end, I have discovered that I’m an expert in loss. Not at the psychology of grief (there are far more experts in that), but rather in the actual experience of losing things and people. As I have become more accustom to the constant state of loss, I am finally able to give it space both in my heart and mind.
People have become so used to losing that we stop even acknowledging it and often ignore its impact on our world. So I want it to give it the space it deserves, and therefore 2025 will be my year of loss. And while I will hope to have LESS loss in the year, I want to walk through the types of loss we experience, why they matter, and share stories of how we might process some of it together. Each week I want to explore a different loss, some grand and difficult, some small and seemly insignificant, some hard to process, and some even funny.
Loss is everywhere.
We lose jobs to under-qualified people, we lose money in the markets, we lose our homes to natural disasters, we lose our health to diseases and age, and we lose people we love.
And then there is grief.
That unspoken journey that we keep in the confines of the therapist’s office, support groups, and alone in our pillows. Grief is the emotional suffering that we each go through when we have loss. More often than not, we suffer alone. But we don’t have shared language or understanding of how to grieve, or even how to explain how the sense of loss impacts us.
So, I’m taking a stab at at exploring this thing we call “loss.” In my own little way, to the few people who might see this, maybe they will share with more so that if just one person sees that they are not alone in their loss, in their grief, than my writing will not be in vain. If I can process through this, and make a bit more sense of it all, then maybe you can too.
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