side effects of rewriting

reading time 2 minutes

In grief, sometimes you’ll feel stuck.

What if, instead of seeing the idea of being stuck as a negative, we think of it as being anchored for a period of time. Which sounds okay, doesn’t it? Anchoring yourself in the silence, in meditation, in the remembering? In grief, the rewiring process that goes on deep inside you sometimes requires a serious shutdown—a rebooting of sorts.

Readjusting to life after unimaginable loss is an ongoing process. There are no stages or timetables. Sometimes you’ll feel like rewriting. Sometimes you’ll just feel like dropping your anchor and sitting for a while, staring at the sea, the sky, or at nothing at all.

After experiencing abnormal loss, we migrate through grief in our own uniquely normal way. And it will vary in intensity from day to day, year to year, decade to decade. And, you might continue to fluctuate between feeling stuck and rewriting.

Since we’ll be forever readjusting, let’s lean into the idea of rewriting. Why? Because it’s good for you. It helps you navigate through your grief. (Notice I said through. You can’t go around it, you have to go through it.)

Rewriting (jotting notes, memories, writing letters—even if you don’t send them, journaling, making lists, etc.) can be done anywhere, anytime, even while you’re anchored for a period of time. Sometimes, it’s out of the silence that the best rewriting comes. And other things start to happen as well. Off the top of my head, I came up with these ten side effects of rewriting.

While rewriting, you’re also…

1. Revising your hopes and dreams. 
2. Reminding yourself, after yet another setback, to just start over. 
3. Resetting yourself back to breathing again.
4. Reconnecting to your new self, your life, your relationships.
5. Relearning how to live again without your child—yet with them. 
6. Rethinking how you want to live now, what you want to do next. 
7. Reinventing who you are, and who you want to be…in time. 
8. Recreating your routines, new ones in which you may or may not end up sitting at the table across from that empty chair. 
9. Realizing that somehow, though you thought it wasn’t possible, you are learning to balance the past (then) with the present (now). 
10. Reconstructing new meaning, a new focus, one in which your deceased loved one is incorporated, commemorated, perhaps your reason to live, your mission.  

Do you have any rewriting examples or ideas you’ve tried? Or maybe some tips and/or side effects you’d like to share? Leave me a comment.