The Grief Of Growth

What is grief, if not love persevering? 
Vision, WandaVision

I am yet to see any episode of WandaVision, but I fell in love with that line when I heard it. I am very familiar with that emotion, and most times, grief is associated with losing people or things. We grieve the death of loved ones, we grieve the people who left us (or the ones we left) and we grieve the ones that are never coming back. But what about the person we were or we thought we were going to be and that is going to be my focus today.   

Source: Pinterest

Growth is a very gritty thing, it is the by-product of being uncomfortable with our former selves. It is shedding and moving away from our past selves into a different and hopefully better version. Now that I think of it, we grow into a better version of ourselves but again, we can choose not to, except for biological growth which needs no permission from us, but we can be stunted if we can't provide the requisite for growth. Growth, as I am learning, doesn't have to be linear, that is climbing higher. Growth can be either going deeper and having stronger roots or wider by reaching and connecting with more people.

Growth in any form has one side effect, and I am going to put it this way, to grow is to die. For anything to grow, something has to die or be transformed into something new, which also can be interpreted as loss or death. Some things die very natural deaths that we really can't do anything about and for others, we have to put them to death ourselves and more often than not, those are the things we grieve. We grieve friendships we have to let go of, we grieve the lofty ideas of ourselves that is no longer true, we grieve our innocence, we grieve the childhood we can't go back to. We grieve the memories of the happy days we can no longer have. We understand we need to grow, we need to become better, we need to be different and become more suited for the world we find ourselves in. As we leave our cocoons and become majestic butterflies, we grieve the caterpillars we used to be.

Source: Pinterest

We grieve the persons we can never be, we hold on to those memories until we have to let them go. We learn to forgive ourselves for all that could have, but never was. But sometimes we believe that grief is not good, that the loss is not supposed to happen, so we suffer. We suffer because we refuse to come to terms with grief. We suffer because we have been taught, or we choose to believe grieving is wrong. But what is the proof we love, that we were and that we would be? How do we remind ourselves that we were not always like this, what is that intangible evidence of growth if not grief? Even with the fact that growth brings about pain and loss, even if we sometimes grieve because of growing, we still have to continue growing.

The truth is this, growth is rewarding. And if you find yourself grieving for any reason during the process, do not forget that it is a part of it. So allow it, allow yourself to grieve for the small girl that never got to publish her book, for the friends she lost along the way and for everything she didn't become. But remember, you don't have to be stuck in grief.

Do have a beautiful week.

Until next time,

The Estherian.