The Road of Grief

The speaker discusses their personal journey of grief and how societal programming and criticism affected their self-perception. They reflect on the loss of their spouse and the struggles they faced in navigating life alone. They share how they learned to love and accept themselves again, and the importance of self-expression and self-acceptance. The speaker emphasizes the need for empathy and understanding towards others' choices and experiences, and the societal need to reframe the concept of perfection. They conclude with a message of hope and encouragement. Hi there, welcome to Pivot to Passion. My name is Deanna Byrne with Meditate with Deanna. Thank you so much for joining me for today's commentary. Today we are going to talk a little bit about perception and grief and societal programming. I know, it seems like a lot, doesn't it? It's okay, it's going to be light. Yesterday for me was a very difficult day. It all started when I had somebody make a comment to me making fun of the fact that I chose to use filters on some of my TikTok videos that I create for my coaching practice. Let me back up a little bit. In January 2020, my husband died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. The following two years after his death were nothing short of crawling out of the pits of dark hell. Being a widow at 55 was not ever something that had been on my radar. It was something that I did not know how to navigate, that I did not understand. All of a sudden, my person was gone. I was trying to navigate and understand this crazy thing we called life all by myself. The future that we had envisioned was gone. The plans that we had made were gone. My confidant, my person who would encourage me, gone. When I would look in the mirror, I absolutely loathed the person looking back at me. I really cannot stress that enough because I blamed myself for the longest time. I should have been able to save him. I should have known the signs. I should have, should have, should have. Those should haves haunted me for over two years when I finally came to terms with the fact that there is no way that I could have. God was ready to bring him home and it was something that was completely out of my control. But for two years, I struggled with that. I struggled with the grief. I struggled with the anger. I struggled with the not knowing who I was as a human being anymore. I hated who was looking back at me in the mirror. I hated her. I wore my hair in a ponytail. I threw out all my makeup. I kept my clothes bagged up. I lived in sweatpants and sweatshirts. I really stopped giving a shit about who I was and what I looked like and would pray to God every single night to, God, please take me because the absolute energy that it was taking to try to survive every single day as a broken widow was beyond anything that I thought I could handle. And then in January 2022, she woke up. She saw a glimmer of light, a glimmer of hope. And it all started with a photograph and I had done a couple of commentaries on this before but I'll just touch on it here. I had taken a photograph to update some of my professional shots for my business and I took one for somebody else. And I looked at that photo and I literally did not recognize that woman in the photo at all. I did not and I mean that from the depths of my soul. I did not know who she was. I did not, my brain literally did not recognize the woman in that photo. I began to sit with her for the next couple of weeks and I talked to her and I got to know her and I learned to love her and I learned she carried me through two years, the darkest two years of my entire life. She carried me, she held me up, she wiped my tears, she took my heart in the palm of her beautiful hands and cocooned it until I was ready to look at it again. She was an amazing rock star. So then I started doing my hair. I went out and I bought all new makeup. I bought some new clothes and I started talking to her every single day. I started to learn to love her and I'm not saying that this is an overnight success because every single human being on this planet struggles with insecurities and they struggle with not knowing and they struggle with who they are as an individual. On the good days you learn to love that person, you honor that person, you embrace that person and you are grateful for that person. But on the bad days, on those bad days you have to cradle that person, you have to talk to that person, you have to give that person guidance, wisdom, caring, strength. Yesterday was one of those days for me because as I have continued to step into my own light, step into my own self, to learn to look at myself in the mirror with love and compassion, there are still people out there that criticize. They criticize if you change the photo on your Facebook too much you're being vain. If you use filters on TikTok or other platforms you're catfishing. You know what, let's keep it simple. If it doesn't affect you it's actually none of your business. How someone chooses to handle their own life is their own business. If somebody uses a filter because they like the way it makes them look, that is their business. They are doing that for them. They are not doing that for you. They are doing that for them. If they want to change their Facebook photo every single day, again not your business. If something bothers you that somebody else is doing, you need to step back and ask yourself a couple of very simple questions. Why? What did that particular thing that that person do set off in you? What emotion did that activate within you? Where did you feel that in the body? Was there a certain trauma or memory that was triggered because of what you just saw or felt? Then you need to step back and fully understand that it's not the person who did it. It is not their fault. They are simply living their true authentic self. They are simply dancing to the beat of their own drum. They are simply trying to figure life out every single day. They are trying so hard to navigate their new world on a tightrope. I'm not saying other people are not as well. There are so many people within the world right now that are struggling, absolutely. The comment that triggered me yesterday was somebody had actually sent me a private message making fun of the fact that some of the videos that I was doing were using filters. It was meant to be light and it was meant to be a bit of a tease. At first that is how I took it, but as the day continued to unravel, as did I. I got thinking about how that comment affected me and what it did. The person that did it certainly was not at all being mean, but I have to sit back and process all of that myself. I have to sit back and try to figure out why it affected me the way that it did. It affected me because the particular filter that I was using enhances natural highlights in my hair. I absolutely love that. I love the look of it. I love all that. I stopped dyeing my hair a few years ago and I just wanted it to become natural. This particular filter really pulls out the gray highlights in my hair and I absolutely love the way that it looks. The other thing is that it made me realize how incredibly far she has come this year, how much she has been through to try to navigate and figure out who she is, to try to understand that so many people that were within her life at the beginning of the year are no longer in her life at this point in the year because our life's journey no longer aligns with each other and that is completely okay. I did a video on TikTok last night. It was raw and it was real. During my whole grief journey, I was very vocal about the process, but I did it and I was writing. It wasn't until I discovered the whole TikTok platform and how powerful it is and how much of a tool it can be to absolutely have self-expression, to tap into your creative side, to do all of these amazing things. It wasn't until I discovered that just a couple of months ago, the power of watching yourself in a video after you have literally placed your pain and heart on a platter in front of the world to see. It is probably one of the most profound, gut-wrenchingly healing life experiences you will ever encounter. So I did that and I got up this morning to so many amazing messages from people all over the world, messages of encouragement, messages of love and light, messages to keep going and there was one message that really stood out to me, which made me want to do this podcast today. Part of the message said, the world has lost the capacity to grieve. People are in our lives to help us experience life's journey. That resonated so deeply to my core because the reality is as a society, we have forgotten what it is like. We have lost the capacity to grieve. We have become so desensitized because of a constant message being bombarded to us. Societal norms, societal programming, cultural programming, educational programming, I could go on and on and on. If we want to start talking about reframing the mind and neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis and all of those wonderful sorts of things. But let's just keep it real. When the human brain is exposed to a certain message for a specific period of time, it converts that message into fact. It then converts that message into habit and many times converts that message into trauma. Certain things that we are exposed to within our life create what is known as a trauma response. Because the world has lost its capacity to grieve, we have left so many millions of people walking the tightrope alone, scared, vulnerable, empty and full on trauma response. That is so incredibly sad to me because the assumption that you lose a part of your life, whether it be a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend, your neighbor, it doesn't really matter. If that person had a profound impact on your life, that loss is substantial. And society tells us we have a couple of weeks to get over that shit. It's not how it works, people. It's not how it works. You try. You can either choose to avoid it and then I can tell you right now that that's going to come down like a whole bag of hammers on your head at some point and make you realize avoiding it wasn't the right way to go. You can try feeling it in the moment and allowing the process to go through your body and peel away each of those layers as they come or you can try to honor it. And what I mean by honoring it is understanding that every experience that we have in our life, whether it be good, whether it be bad, whether it be a simple gesture or a very profound part of our life, molds us into who we are, who we are becoming and what our soul's purpose and journey is. Another part of that comment was people are in our lives to help us experience life's journey. That really hit me to my core because we forget that, we forget that every single person brought into our life is brought in for a purpose, to teach us, to heal us, to love us, to grow us. Every single person, every single encounter in our day is aligned to mold us, to guide us, to teach us. Our brains are so full from the heaviness of societal programming that we have forgotten to stop and smell the roses, that we have forgotten to honor who we are as a human being. We have forgotten we are neighbors. We have forgotten we are a society of humans, a village. We have forgotten that part of life's journey is to at times carry someone else. Right now in the world as it sits, so many people are completely exhausted from the last couple of years and they don't have the energy to carry themselves, let alone anyone else. And that is okay. But we need to recognize when that becomes too far into solitude, too far into avoidance, too far into beating yourself up as a human being because you do not feel you deserve or are worthy of what the world has to give you. The last 24 hours for me has been pretty amazing. It has allowed me to again peel away another layer of grief that I didn't know was still there. It allowed me again to see the goodness in people, the kindness in people. It allowed me to tap into that human, broken part of me that every now and then needs a gentle kiss on the forehead and someone to just simply wipe the tear away and tell them it's going to be okay. So many of us struggle with that every single day. And it doesn't matter who you are or what you are going through in your life, how strong you are, how rich you are, how poor you are, how beautiful you are, how fit you are. None of that really matters. Society has defined perfection. And that is so incredibly wrong. We as a society have to reframe that thinking. We have to reframe what perfection is. To me, perfection is somebody who can take a moment out of their day to make you feel better. Perfection is seeing a glimmer of hope or sparkle in someone's eye. Perfection to me is hearing the laughter and innocence of a child running through the forest or a playground. Perfection to me is a group of people listening to somebody's story and laughing and crying together. Perfection to me is a world where we all together as one hold each other up and motivate each other, encourage each other and help each other to grow as we all in parallel universes experience our own life journey as well as those around us. Thank you so much for joining me for the podcast today. As always, I appreciate your time. Have a great day and keep smiling.