When Grief and Joy Mingle

It's been two weeks since my second dose of Moderna, and I am now looking at the world with a renewed sense of hope! It's an immense blessing to be fully vaccinated. I can be outside, be with friends, and travel to see family without the constant fear of catching and/or sharing a deadly virus. Huzzah!

But as my thoughts turn towards all these fun plans, I'm also aware that amidst all the relief and happiness there are also strange feelings of sadness, and a new kind of fear and anxiety creeping in. The "new normal" I worked so hard to establish during quarantine is changing again. How will it feel to leave my house every day? To go back into the office? To have a packed social calendar again? What will happen to all the healthy practices of sleep, rest, hydration, and meditation that I've established, how will they fit into the Aftertimes?

I realized I'm experiencing the very real, very normal experience of Grief - the strange intermingling of both sadness and happiness that go hand-in-hand with any big change, no matter how positive it may be.

As a certified Grief Recovery Specialist, I've learned that the definition of Grief is actually much different that what people might suspect. Grief is not just "how we feel when someone dies" or even "how we feel when something bad happens."

According to The Grief Recovery Institute, grief is defined as "the conflicting feelings caused by the end or change in a familiar pattern of behavior."

I love this definition, because it's both profoundly simple and profoundly complex. Grief is a cocktail of emotions that accompanies any change, simply put. And life is full of changes - good changes, bad changes, and everything in between. Grief is acknowledging and holding the full range of human emotions as the wheel turns on and on. It's complicated and messy, but ultimately it's what reminds us that we're alive.