A song theme that has to do with loss, is something many of us can relate to. However from my social media feed, the feeling I get from reading a post venting about the havoc the current pandemic is creating in our lives, sometimes gives out the wrong sentiment. It usually gives the writer an aura of the complaining type, or being outright negative. But any which way you look at it, bad things happen to all of us. Optimistic people- or pessimistic alike. We will all feel loss at some point in our lives, and at this moment, many of us feel some level of grief. So why does talking about it openly give out such a feeling? Perhaps it’s the association that we have with the most devastating consequences of untreated grief, that have us “running for the hills”, as far away as possible from looking at it in the face. Maybe some of us do talk about it, but often times we gloss over it- saying, this is just how life is- picking yourself up and getting on with it, is the way to go. But is that giving these difficult emotions their right frame to be processed?

I’m not suggesting to stop everything and give up on ever being happy again. What I’d like to offer is giving sadness and grief time and place in our lives. Not letting them be aired and processed, might cause these emotions to fester and maybe cause even more damage in the long run. So setting moments aside to actively look at how we really feel during all the chaos that is going on right now, can give us some relief. For one thing, it can be used as a moment of centering yourself. Not focusing on all the other opinions and high emotions of everyone else, but giving yourself time to understand what you make of all this, how does it make you feel. We might find out that we feel something that makes us uncomfortable, or maybe something we actually don’t want to feel at all. Unfortunately denying our feeling doesn’t make them go away. Sometimes it even makes them come at us with a vengeance.