Five Things I’ve Discovered After Years Of Blogging My Pain
When Grandma passed a few months ago, I had a series of “what’s the point?” moments. I genuinely started to wonder what the point of this platform really is. Considering that we are only temporarily on this planet, what are any of us really striving for?
It took me weeks to move through this, because life suddenly felt backwards in more ways than one. It wasn’t just in losing her, it was in how she was lost and the way that everyone fell apart as it happened. It was darker than I could’ve imagined, and I didn’t have the slightest clue as to how to move forward.
What am I doing here? Why am I still blogging? What am I trying to prove? These questions pressed at me until I could barely stand it. What’s the freaking point of it all?
I journaled about this until my fingers were angry with me, and I tried to blog only to get one paragraph in and have the words simply stop, or turn to a frustrated rant. And it wasn’t until I wrote out the entire situation as a blog post that the words finally started to flow.
I wrote to you guys about the confusion, the anger, and the empty pain that came with having her memorial, standing at her grave, and cleaning out her apartment. I bawled as I described the gut-wrenching pain that came with enduring two very different realities at once; a reality in which my grandmother is gone, and one in which certain family members seemingly pretend she’s still alive to avoid processing the grief. And, at the end of this blog post that will never see the light of day, do you know what I discovered?
1. Writing Gives My Pain Shape.
There’s a difference between blogging my pain and journaling it. In blogging, I am processing my pain through my art, which somehow allows me to step outside the emotion long enough to understand it. Journaling helps me to feel the pain, but blogging is forcing me to shape it.
2. Art Creates Emotional Distance
As I splash my pain across these pages, just as an artist would with a painting, I feel like I’m creating a barrier that has me feeling a little safer. If what I’m going through is a story, I can change the narrative. I can zoom out. I can search for meaning. I can decide thatt this moment is shaping me instead of simply destroying me.
3. Hard Thoughts Need An Audience, Even If No One Reads Them
Suddenly, I’m no longer trapped in my own perspective. I’m now reading my life the way an outsider would, considering every angle and every person involved. Somehow, writing creates empathy where pain alone often cannot.
4. The Pain Becomes Less Consuming When It Becomes Useful
Blogging allowed me to gather up the pain into something tangible. Instead of letting it sink deeper into me, I placed it onto the page and sorted through it piece by piece, like a puzzle.
5. Some Blog Posts Are Never Meant To Be Seen
How unreal is it that something no one will ever read, something I’ve basically thrown away, could help me processing so much?
For weeks, I kept asking myself, “What is the point?” And honestly, I still don’t have a clean, polished answer. But I do think part of the point is this: to be fully awake to our lives as we are living them… to simply notice, process, document, and make meaning of it all before we are gone. And, this is exactly what I intend to keep doing.
See you,
Amy