When You Google, “What Are The Stages Of Grief”

This past Thursday I discovered that I have moved from the anger stage of grief to the grief stage of grief. It had been a while since I had looked into the stages and my mind being the steel, albeit rusted, trap that it is…

The five stages of grief are:

• denial
• anger
• bargaining
• depression
• acceptance

This according to Healthline, Wikipedia, et al. You can move through them in any order. You can repeat some of them without moving on to a new one. You can also do what I’ve done, which is get stuck.

Parking Brake Set in Anger

Until the last few months, I had been so pissed off for so long at everything that I had accepted it as my new normal. It was just the way that it was. I had become a rage-filled product of my lifetime of experiences. I didn’t think about it. It just was what it was. It was logical, predictable, understandable

… and exhausting.

Rage Didn’t Always Work

Unfortunately for me, rage worked too well for too long. And when I say “worked” I mean I got the desired results I was after. That means getting people to shut the hell up that had no business blowing their hole in the first place to getting other people’s heads (almost literally- personal space people, personal space) out of my ass.

There were however the rare occasions where sometime later I would, for a splitting second, feel bad about lashing out. I quickly swept it away with an excuse. That just meant more emotions being pounded to the bottom of the ocean of emotions to be dealt with on another day. If you’ve ever lived by an ocean, you know- when a hurricane passes through all the crap that had settled to the bottom comes rising to the top.

Looking Over The List, OMG

I think I flitted on denial like a butterfly in spring. I’ve bargained a couple of times. Some with success, some not. Acceptance is so far away that I’m going to need a new set of luggage and a passport to visit it. But anger and depression? Those two have been freeloading for years and not even tried to pay a penny for the rent they owe me for being in my head.

Eviction Papers In The Works

At this moment, I am taking a break from my “crafting”. Yeah. I know. I don’t strike either of us as the crafting type. A year and a half ago, which only reiterates what I just said, I bought a ton of stuff to create junk journals. What can I say? I had been down the YouTube rabbit hole.

Some creators had their own ways of making niche-specific journals. Others, who I admired and was going to copy, and found shortcuts to making the project less daunting for us non-crafty types. Then there were those, and there are always “those”, who would make Martha Stewart cuss and drop her blunt (head nod to her Snoop Dog kinship).

But I became so overwhelmed by the project that I shoved the supplies in an under-the-bed storage container, and there it has all been since. Yesterday, I pulled some of it out. Today I pulled the rest. I’ve begun a totally different project that I may or may not share with you in the future.

Conclusion

We’re all works in progress. Just when we think we have ourselves figured out, we find out we don’t. Nor do we have humans figured out in general. We all process grief and all that comes with it at our own pace in our own time. We can’t predict which cycle will come next. Our walk is our walk. Our journey is our journey. Thinking, overthinking, labeling- none of it does any good and only expends energy we don’t have. Thus the need for naps and Red Bull.

We should all learn to be more like rivers. Just learn to go with the flow.

I need to learn this too.