Why You’re Terrible At Goodbyes

A friend of my sister’s once told her you must grieve everything. Anytime you have to say goodbye to something, someone or some place, grieve it. When you’re in a transitional phase in life, this can mean a lot of goodbyes. To things like: college, your first job, your apartment, your hometown, another town, another job and before after and in between, relationships. People are in and out of your life before you can blink and get their phone number.

So when you find something in your transitional life transitioning yet again, you have two choices:

Avoid saying goodbye, or face the goodbye.

For a long time, I was an avoider but didn’t realize it. For example, if I broke up with someone, I hurled myself into a new hobby. I trained for a marathon or joined a volleyball team. One time when I moved away from one of my favorite cities in the world, I immersed myself in my new job and tried to ignore the big, city-shaped hole in my heart. I’ve avoided literally saying goodbye, too. I rushed through a quick goodbye conversation with one of my best friends in that city, while on a busy sidewalk in the freezing cold. He handed me a parting gift and I took it, said thanks, and hurried away.

It’s like the fight or flight reflex, and I always flew.

But this is harmful to yourself and others.

When you run away from goodbyes, you prevent yourself from grieving.

And grieving is what allows you to move on.

*Photo Credit: Nadine Heidrich, Creative Commons

If you don’t acknowledge that person, place, or thing is gone, you live in a suspended denial and have a harder time being without that thing than if you had just acknowledged the goodbye in the first place. What you are running away from ends up following you for a long time. How can something really be gone if you’ve never admitted it is?

On the other hand, if you address the goodbye, you open the door to the grieving process.

Facing the goodbye feels harder at first.

But in hindsight you will see you are a healthier person. You won’t be shoving sadness so deep down that it eventually bubbles to the surface at weird and inopportune times. Trust me, you want to avoid those bubbling emotions.

So how do you do this grieving thing when it’s not actual death we’re talking about? I guess it’s different for everyone.

For me, that time I joined a volleyball team I had a couple of friends call me out and tell me I needed to sit in my sadness for at least a few weeks because I was the type that ran from sadness. I had their accountability and I told them I would allow myself to cry when I needed to and I would journal and I would make sure I was conscious of my grieving a couple of nights a week.

This really sucked.

Those journal pages are dark and will probably never be shared, but after those few weeks, I noticed the weight of being sad had begun to lift. I began to see the journal pages reflect hope again. And after a little longer, I even felt joy reappear in an unexpected way.

I think that’s the best part about grieving: if you chip away at it, it’ll make a crack, allowing joy to seep back in.

Why You’re Terrible At Goodbyes is a post from: Storyline Blog