Today’s gender is: Grief. 

Scorpio season feels like the natural season for grief. Halloween/Samhain, when the veil is thin and our beloved dead come back to say hello, can be spooky, but what’s even spookier is when we deny our own shadow or even our past selves that are no longer. Denying their existence only makes them stronger. I like to think that ghosts work in the same way. 

There is so much to grieve this year. Heading into the Fall, watching the trees in the northern hemisphere shake free their verdant vibrancy and come back to their bare bones, just branches, signals to our bodies that we must do the same. Remember what’s underneath all that life— death is coming for us all. Every day we get closer to our last breath. 

Each year I find a new level of serenity and peace in that statement. One day closer. I am reminded of my humanity, and of the circular nature of grief. Yes, it is wise to grieve while you’re here. Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin according to Buddhist tradition. When we honor one, we honor the other. But, this year specifically, as I grieve the loss of my marriage and my home and a whole future I had planned, I’m reminded of how when we are grieving, a portal opens to grief of the past. It’s never just about any one thing, is it? 

A dear friend called me out of the blue last night and we talked for an hour. This is a rare occasion for me to actually answer, being the introvert I am. But I was just doom-scrolling and shaming myself for staying inside on a Saturday night in Mexico City, so I picked up. This friend and I have so much in common- from neurodivergence to our family structure, to gender identity. And as I told her about the grief I’m feeling on every level, the grief that is penetrating my mind, body and soul, I was reminded that I’m not just grieving everything that has happened in this past year. And I noticed something- a different kind of healing that is unveiling itself, because I am grieving differently, more openly, than ever before. 

When I was two my parents divorced. I was four when my mom remarried. The day I met him, I slammed the door in his face— he terrified me immediately and would continue to do so for the next twenty years. When I was 13, my grandfather killed himself. We were close. All of this abandonment and mistreatment left me deeply grieving by the time puberty hit, not to mention the fact that I’d been transferred to a new school district in the middle of 7th grade, two months before Poppy took his life. I fell into a depression, deeply grieving not just Poppy, but the world view I’d had that if I was good enough, if I tried hard enough, bad things would not happen to me.

With that belief shattered, I didn’t know where to turn for comfort. My mom and stepdad chastised me for my grief, couldn’t understand why I was moping all the time. They mocked me repeatedly by faux-threatening to call the “crisis team”. I had no idea what that meant then. In retrospect, I wish they would have called for help. I wish they would have sought out a therapist for me. But we were working class Christians who didn’t believe in paying someone to tell us what was wrong with us. So was Poppy, as it happens. Didn’t work out so well for him, but I digress. 

That summer they put me in volleyball camp. I did everything I could to prove to them I wanted to be better. I wanted to be healthy, happy, smiling, caring for my siblings. I turned to my bible every morning. I prayed every morning and night. I threw myself into bible studies and youth group, searching for a place to put this overwhelming grief. It only grew, but now it was growing in a dark, damp closet somewhere deep within me, like black mold of the soul. I did my best to tend to it on my own, locked away in my room, occasionally with my youth group leaders or close friends who tried to understand. I felt deeply alone. 

This is how I learned to grieve. This is how I learned to push people away and deal with it on my own. That imprint doesn’t really go away. That grief I was carrying, still lives within me. The black mold comes back from time to time and I have to fight it off with bleach and sunlight. Luckily, I know now to ask for help. I sought a therapist when I was 18, away at school, distancing myself from a toxic family. That helped. I started talking to my trusted extended family about the secrets I kept for my parents- the abuse, the neglect, the forced childcare, the physical harm, the lies I’d been asked to hold. I opened up the dark closet where the mold was multiplying and suddenly it started to die down.

When grief gets triggered in me, the trauma response to close up the closet comes back with full force. The fear is that the people around me will tell me to close that closet, and get back to work. The entire world we live in supports that model (ahem, capitalism! There’s no time to lie in bed and be sad! Get. Back. To. Work!!!!) But years of evidence that the open-closet, sunlight and bleach method works, compels me to lean into the sunshine, to sit on the park bench in the light of day, with tears streaming down my face. And a smile cracks open my mouth. Because this is honoring the grief, honoring the destruction and the creation that come from grief. And by honoring the dark, you can appreciate the light. By allowing myself to move through this darkness completely, holding the hands of my dear friends and chosen family, allows me to relax into the knowing that this is all part of the human experience. Their witnessing, your witnessing in reading these very words, reminds me that these experiences are not any less valuable than Joy or Happiness or Contentedness. This is the bitter leaf of Life, and bitter is a taste we can experience, is it not? 

Like black coffee and burnt toast. Like raw collard greens straight from the farmer’s market into my mouth. Like oil stains on my grandfather’s hands after a long day at work. Like the smell of diesel and the thrum of a five cylinder engine running on four cylinders and doing a fine job for a forty year old car. This is the stuff of life. This is the refining fire I choose to walk through because I know there is value at the bottom of the barrel. 

I will not look away. I will not flinch when I am asked to continue on. And I will not bury the grief nor let it fester in the back closet. The call of the artist is to reflect the human experience, is it not? Is not grief an integral part of the human experience?

Mary Welch reminds me that the difference between grief and depression is movement. I am moving through it. I am writing about it. Chani Nicholas reminds me that grief is not linear, and when I am going through it, it doesn’t mean I am backsliding in my progress toward healing. It means I’m at a growth edge, that I am discovering something new about the tragedy of life, which means there is more to discover about the joys of life, as well. This life is the art project. This life, this moment, is the very thing that I’ve been waiting for. And while only I can save me, the journey toward salvation/redemption/healing can be less lonely by holding a friend’s hand or describing the texture and taste of that first flood of grief. 

Thanks for holding my hand while you read this. I feel you. I appreciate you.