Unattended Grief
Our task is not to wipe away, but to get right and find peace.
Living in San Francisco is never boring. One unexpected discovery of having young and attractive friends in this city is that I’m only ever two or three degrees of separation from people who are companionately screwing each other.
It’s true they are hooking up, but more in the spirit of two friends with a shared enthusiasm for the same activity—like old men who like chess and might casually stroll to the park on a Sunday afternoon and say: “Care for a quick game?”
What I love about tech is the constant rebirth and reinvention. Every few years we burn this entire place down and start anew. (For people who are new or pivoting into the industry: you’re not behind.) Silicon Valley is filled with people who embody this ethos. It’s the same fluidity underpinning Burning Man and Jazz Age parties on Governor’s Island. You get to dress up and reinvent yourself.
Reinvention is central to the Silicon Valley ethos. But we can’t wish away our scars. We have to wear them where they land. Our history—what we’ve endured, lost along the way, or inherited from others—cannot change. Our task is not to wipe away a difficult history and start fresh, but to get right and find peace with it.
A grief counselor tells me bison run toward the storm:
Bison will turn into a snow storm rather than drifting with the wind because they instinctively know that walking into the storm will get them out of the weather quicker. Their massive heads serve as a type of snowplow; by swinging their head to and fro, the animal can sweep away deep snow to find forage below.
We all have to face grief. We can’t remove loss or emotion from life, but we can put ourselves in a position where they don’t control us. Whether we choose to run toward the storm or run away from it, we all have to go through it.
The professional advice I’m getting for $300/hour can be summarized by: “Go right through it, reframe the experience, and come out the other side.”
Emotions are the “check engine” light alerting us when something may be off.
Growing up, I suppressed my feelings because I implicitly believed they were dangerous, that they would lead me astray and careen me into the deep woods if I let myself feel. I love
’s thoughts on the topic.Crudely paraphrased, I thought:
Feelings were inefficient, that they’d distract me from my goals and make me less effective, rather than guide me towards what is good and right for me.
Feelings would scare off other people, rather than steer me towards the people who are right for me (i.e., with whom I am comfortable and values-aligned).
Bad feelings were bad, that I should strive to feel happy all the time, rather than interpret emotions as data. They are signals of what might be misaligned, the “check engine” light alerting us when something may be off.
I’ve since practiced accessing the raw emotions in my body, identifying where I physically feel them instead of disassociating. These days, I’m able to metabolize emotions better.
Don’t get me wrong. It still hurts like hell, every time.
When death visits a few times too early, I feel half a world away from innocence, collapsing on the floor like the world is ending and the sun will never rise again. But the sun will continue to rise and set whether we win in the tournament or lose in the first round. The earth will continue to spin.
I just have the mental resiliency and emotional curiosity to get myself through it faster.
I know now that my heart will never really break, despite how badly it tries to escape from my body. I know that I will face a thousand hard reminders and more, and fight and struggle through them and I will come out okay on the other side. I will peel myself off the floor even if some days, most days, it f*king sucks.
To be unwilling to feel is to resist life-level processing.
None of us will get out of this alive, so why not experience it? I distrust anyone who believes the driving force of life is rationality.1 Reason alone lends itself to emotional color-blindness. Our choices may be saner, giving us a more even-keeled emotional experience.2 But what we gain in steadiness we lose in vulnerability: nothing feels more human than seeing someone in the throes of Shakespearean torment, overturning the pretense of everyday life to reveal the love, lust, elation, grief, and need underneath.
It’s all going to end some day. So go in! Get weird! Feel those feelings!
We’ll get through it.
Feelings are one voice in the congress of our decision-making. Feelings alone shouldn’t dictate action because they’re fundamentally unaccountable.
Actually, some of the most emotionally muted (suppressed) people in my life are the ones who make the most irrational (emotional) decisions. My guess is it all comes out, whether we think we (our purely rational minds) are in control or not!