Recently, I have been pondering the purpose and who the audience is at Epiblogger. While this is a professional blog I don’t know that I ever intended this to be entirely for professional bloggers. However, I think I started to assume that it was and I have felt like I was in a bit of a rut regarding my writing, especially in a didactic sense. Today, I am taking off my teacher hat and maybe we can all sit down and have a cheery chat about grief.
The idea of grief came up when someone on my personal twitter account tweeted that their mom was on her last few days. I was shocked. I don’t personally know this person, so I have no connection except that I received that tweet. When Twitter ask What Are You Doing? I think I imagined that was superficial. Like when someones asks How are you? and you say Good even if you are having the worst day of your life. You certainly don’t answer Twitter and say—I’m watching my mother die. Or do you?
Up until the launch of Epiblogger, I have been primarily a personal blogger and I have come up against the problem of writing grief. Now is the time where I should say, if you were curious, that I am not a psychologist nor do I have any professional experience with grief counselling. But, I like most people have experienced grief in a few different forms and I had to decide if and how to share it.
I think most of us would recognize the 5 Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance)—at least when we aren’t grieving. Technically, I have been blogging for just over three years now and I have had opportunities to share celebration and grief. I got married, finished university, found jobs, adopted pets and many things to celebrate. But I have also grieved the death of pets (two 18 year old cats and a 17 year old dog) and, at times, I have grieved the status of society, faith, the planet and probably a few other things.
Now this is where I don’t have any clinical knowledge, but I am just going to go with my thoughts. But I would imagine that there are different types of grief. Or at least, we could distinguish differences. Such as the difference between mourning the death of a loved one and mourning the environmental affects we have had on our planet. I think there is a difference there, but I could be wrong.
The great thing about blogging is that it gives a room for a voice. I believe that when we encounter some type of relational/personal grief than that’s the time for a blog to shine, that’s the time when we need a space where we feel comfortable to talk and for me my blog is the perfect place. I would say, at this point, no matter where we are in the 5 Steps, that we should write out exactly how we feel. Whether we are angry or depressed or whatever, we should just be writing/talking/expressing.
Generally, I don’t censor myself, but grief that is outside of me is often a tough thing to communicate. For instance, if you noticed, I included that I have grieved faith. Well that’s a little jam-packed gem of information, isn’t it? I mean that in both in a personal and universal sense. Without going into an extremely long story, faith has always been a rocky place for me. A couple months ago I watched a documentary that held a very abusive view of a several world religions and so I went straight to my blog, I was so upset, that I wrote an angry rant that, in the end, really didn’t reflect how I actually felt because I wasn’t angry, but sad and it brought back a lot of memories of hurt. After a day of it being online, I pulled it off (the one and only time I have done that) and took a week to re-write the article thoughtfully and the response was very favourable. What I learned that day is that I write very poor rants and now I know that when I am grieving something that isn’t immediate (in the sense that death is) I need to take time to realize where I am at and think about whether it’s a good time to publish anything.
More than anything, I am really interested how you approach grief online? I know a lot of you may not have a personal blog, but there are lots of ways to express yourself. Would you tweet grief? Or blog it? Or Facebook it? Or what woudl you do? Generally, grief takes me more than 140 characters, but for some it might be all that you are comfortable to share.
Photo by Jessica
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2 Comments
I find that when grief is caused by outside sources it is much easier to bring it to the web. But when the grief is bound inside of you it becomes much more difficult to broadcast it over the internet, let alone share the pain with someone else.
A while ago I see now that I was in stage 4, depression. At this time I thought about posting about it numerous times but could never seem to find the courage to expose myself to that extent. In the last year I have thankfully moved into the fifth stage, acceptance, and have now felt a more desperate need to share what I went through, even if only in a small way. I have yet found a place to do this. Are there places on the internet to aid those that just need a place to connect in times of need? To know that there are others that know what they are going through? I don’t know. But, I would like to share a poem that I wrote at my lowest point.
Darkness Come
The Darkness is creeping
Always following
I feel its shadow hovering over me
Intense pain within me, drawing it closer
I fight it off
Struggle
It slowly gains power against me
I’m reeling
My heart tries to fight back
The Darkness is sinking its claws slowly into me
Poison spreading
Converting
A new struggle
Pulling now instead of pushing
Inviting it to come and cover completely
Come Darkness and consume me
Replace the pain that called to you
Darkness Come
Thanks for that. I am glad you could share here, at the very least. I am not sure if there are specific communities online, but I know that something like Facebook or Myspace—where you have friends—is often a good start. Or something as simple as posting on Craigslist. There are many communities and I think it makes sense to start in the places you know.