No One Tells You Healing Feels Like Nailing Your Own Coffin Shut

A Meditation on grief.

The Year of the Snake opened with an invitation befitting its creature: to shed old skin. 

The skin it wanted me to shed was the victimhood I had clung to my whole life. It implored to address the grief I had pushed down into myself. The grief I didn’t want to look at because pain always followed. 

No one tells you that healing feels like nailing your own coffin shut. That you learn who you are at the cost of intolerance towards that which you are not. And that all the grief that bubbles up inside you is ancient, and tempest, and needs addressing. 

This year my coffin contained a doll-like shell of myself that was old and broken. It was the persona I had crafted to perfection to survive in an environment with conditional love. Letting this shell go, I experienced all the stages of grief. 

When I was in denial, I learned to use pain as a blade to cut others so they may bleed as I did. Without knowing, my suffering was loud and reverberated into all parts of my life. 

When I was angry, I screamed at the sky asking “why!?” I felt undeserving of the cruelty displayed by those who claimed to love me the most. 

When I was bargaining, I used truth as a way to be callous and perpetuate the cycle of violence. After all, I had not started it, and war was violent. But in the end who was I at war with?

When I was depressed, I lamented the unconditional love, support, and happiness that I felt entitled to. Like a silk blue ribbon slipping through my fingers, I let my childish expectations go. I held a funeral for what I had lost and grieved. 

On the precipice of acceptance is where I lay now. I commune with grief like an old friend when the tide rushes in, letting it take that which no longer serves me. I am no longer afraid as I have sprouted gills.

And now a celebration begins. As I have new skin, tender and untouched. With it, a new mindset of gratitude and grace. This new skin asks: “How much can you love yourself this year?”