I'M BACK!!!

I'm officially back from whatever dark and dreary place I decided to take myself the last few weeks. I am learning that within grief many opportunities exist to go into isolation; a place from where I have returned. I don't know what others of you have experienced in your own grief processes, but I'm learning there are times I just want to be surrounded by safe and comforting people, while other times where all I want to do is run away and hide out from the world. As an introvert I believe that time alone can be quite refreshing and energizing. However a difference exists between being alone to refresh and regroup, and isolation.

I wonder how many people know they are walking into isolation as it happens? I sure didn't. I wish I would have know, but then again, the experience of the isolation, although not one to be re experienced, served a very interesting and beneficial purpose with where I'm at right now. The interesting piece about isolation is that we can go there will still being surrounded by other, this was partially my experience. Although I saw and interacted with other people, I was still isolating myself. I was really in "hide-out mode."

Being interdependent is not my default. Although independence has always been my default, I am learning that independence isn't actually helpful in the degrees to which I used it. And I'm learning that I wasn't really independent at all, I merely lived under a false sense of independence, what I've come to call the "illusion of independence." So independence doesn't provide the adequate and necessary benefits anymore. I'm learning to be more interdependent....So when faced with a time of intense grief, hopelessness, and ultimately attack...what did I choose - not interdependence. I went back to my default; a default that for the first time didn't even come close to feeling like the solution. My illusion of Independence for the firs time really wasn't even an illusion, it didn't work at all. Without independence, and without wanting to reach out to others, isolation fell, and it fell hard. I shut myself out; overtly and covertly I went into hiding.

The grieving was harder on me in isolation. I felt the intensity of hopelessness and sadness and despair. I'm not convinced that we're meant to feel such hopelessness and despair, especially for those of us that are believers. Part of one of my models coming out here - people don't want to be alone, they don't want to be isolated....so what happens. How do people who were created to, but who also desire to connect, attach, and be in community get to places of being alone and isolated? You'd think it would be easier to go after what you were created to be; a relational being.

I don't have all the answers, I wont even begin to let you think I do, but I am wondering and questioning what role grief might play in all of this. If I'm beginning to understand grief correctly, then what I'm learning is that actually people don't tend to naturally grieve every loss they experience. I'm also learning that people have many more loses than they might readily admit!!!! Not because they want to lie about loses or be in conscious denial, but because they don't always consciously equate the loses in their lives as things that need to be grieved. I know that for me grief was something I strongly associated with death and not much else. I wonder how many other people are like that too??? So if people aren't acknowledging loss can it over time push them into a more isolated state? Idk, that could be quite off the wall thinking.

If you asked me 6 months ago if I had grief-work to do I probably would have laughed at you. Yet here I am in the middle of grief. I can't lie, I wish it was over. It's tough work to be sure!! However, I did have a payoff a few weeks ago as well, so I know there are more payoffs that will need to be experienced. I may have set myself back a few steps by going into isolation, this is possible, but God has already used it to show me some very important things about myself, and about the people who care about me most. I wouldn't be in this mess if it wasn't for people (myself included in that statement), but I for sure will not be able to get through this grieving process without people, without being relational and interdependent.