“Allow the grief of the passing of who I was to go through me,” Ashmi Pathela.  We spoke last week about letting go of the people we were when we needed to get through something. There is an honoring of the past and a welcoming of the future.  There is a need for safety and we learn that we provide safety by remembering that we made it through everything so far.  We learned and we became the people we are because of what we went through.  It’s ok to feel the comfort in who we were—that version has been through all of this and knows how to react.  But to move forward, we need to adapt and learn new things.  Like I said earlier, the person we were can’t come with us into the future.  That adaptation was and is wonderful and holds a plethora of information so there is going to be a transition with the loss of the familiar.

Growth is painful on several fronts.  The first that we are expanding beyond what we know.  There is bound to be a certain level of discomfort in the unknow and the learning curve can be steep for certain things.  The second is that we enter this new territory alone.  Our respective journeys are for us alone so the people and things that brought us comfort will not come with us.  The third is a loss of identity.  We knew who we were prior to the moment we decide to move forward—without familiarity to what we know or the people we had around us, we question who we are.  That is a loss, and a painful one at that.  Once we acknowledge that we are grieving what we knew it becomes easier to process and become what we are meant to be.

Growth and grieving can be a simultaneous action—and sometimes one is required of the other.  Sometimes in order to grow we have to pass through grief.  We have to mourn what we won’t be and who we thought we were.  We have to honor the pieces of us that we know are no longer necessary but that often carried us through the hardest times of our lives.  Grief is natural in many stages of life.  We are no longer children, then no longer teens, then no longer young adults, and then we find ourselves the adults, then we lose our parents, and suddenly we are facing the natural end of our time.  This isn’t about morbidity, it is about the common ground we all share in our humanity.  Love who we were and welcome who we are meant to be.