The Grief of Transformation
TW: Suicidal ideation. If you or a loved one are struggling with thoughts of self harm, please know there is help for you.
The year is 2010, I am eighteen years old, it is snowing heavily on my University campus, and I am contemplating suicide. After an abusive relationship and an assault by a long time friend, I had spent the entirety of my freshman first semester praying to be made straight. I had a large circle of religious friends who were cheering me on. I knew many men with girlfriends and fiances and secret shames that they kept under wraps. The information that had been drip-fed to me for my entire eighteen years on this earth was that I should fall in love with and marry a woman. Months of concerted prayer and study had only left me with the knowledge that this would never change. The grief of seeing who I would become was too much. I wanted to set it down.
Gratefully, I’m still present and accounted for and, in many ways, thriving. A friend of mine called me in the midst of my preparations and it felt like a sign to hold on. I got into therapy the next week. The clinician that the University provided for me saved my life. I continued praying, but found that the answer to my prayers was a call to life and a call to surrender. I would, indeed, be transforming, but not in the way I had hoped. The calling was to embrace my queerness, discover more authentic ways of being, and to live quite loudly in the face of discrimination and shame.
I have now experienced these “dark night of the soul” moments at multiple occasions in my life, tho luckily any ideation of self-harm has been minimized with medication, therapy, and a commitment to sharing my struggles with the many loved ones I’ve been blessed with. However, each time I get to a transformative crossroads, I am greeted again with my old friend grief who asks, “Are you sure you want to become something new? Won’t you miss who you were?”
The answer is a resounding, “Yes!” to both questions. Of course I want to become something new, tho I don’t always know what that newness will be. I have experienced life in my current state of being and it has continued to leave me wanting, hurting, and stifled. And also, of course I will miss who I was. That person provided for me, honored me, and carried me through the last however many years of experiences with as much grace and compassion as they could muster.
To transform, to surrender to the momentum of your spirit, is a terrifying thing. I often describe it as realizing suddenly that you’re strapped into a rollercoaster but you only know that next is the freefall and the plateau after is nowhere in sight. In these moments, so much of me wants to stay safe and comfy–wants to crawl backwards away from the current of life and towards where I have been–not because it is good but because it is known.
Once I surrender to that freefall, no matter how much I may intellectually know that what is next will be good for me, I must experience the gut wrenching grief of jumping into the unknown. I must walk through days, weeks, months, of what I like to call Biblical grief: gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair, the tearing of my garments. More often than not, the overwhelming feeling of that grief is so scary that it feels safer to stay where I was. What if I lash out? What if someone sees me in my grief and I am judged? Or ashamed? What if becoming what is next means I lose things I cherish?
Grief is a natural part of this cycle. A consequence of transformation. As I type this, the plants in the flowerbeds in front of my house are dead. Most of the birds I love have flown South for the winter. A blanket of snow covers everything I can see. Do you think the trees are above grieving when they have to shed their leaves? That the snake isn’t scared while it is molting? That the bulb beneath the ground is worried it won’t blossom again when the weather warms? And yet, the world turns. And yet, newness will arrive in a few months. And yet again, next winter we will experience new death so that, again, we can experience new birth.
When grief comes knocking at your door, please answer. Do not run from it. Do not try to escape. Do not be so frightened that you think the answer is to remove yourself from this world. Surrender to grief’s teachings. It is a friend and a cherished loved one. I, for one, cannot wait to see who you will become once grief is done visiting you. I love you.
