On trust, and grief

Something strange started to happen to me after I experienced a lot of loss, and then started to heal from it.

People trusted me more.  Even children.

Last summer I was sitting drinking tea, looking out the window into the flower bed and field behind my house.  There was a family, taking pictures of themselves in my backyard.  It was kind of bizarre but also cute, so I walked outside, introduced myself, and learned they were thinking about renting my small cottage.  I offered to show them inside my messy house, and we exchanged information.

That summer, my partner and I moved into a new, larger space together with the kids.  And soon after they moved in, they texted me, and told me their 8-year-old son was looking out the window of my old house, and in deep reflection, said

“Lauren seems like someone we can really trust.”

Over time, and doorway conversations when I stopped over to pick up the occasional misrouted package, we all became good friends.

Since then, I’ve had adults, mostly survivors, tell me I’m one of the only people who coregulates them, one of the only people they trust, that I’m the embodiment of a safe person.  And I’m trying to understand it.

What leads us to survive loss and then go on to impact others this way?

I realized I, myself, had signed up for a retreat this winter co-led by a beautiful human who is also a traumatic brain injury survivor.  I remember several months ago, she posted on instagram: “so I’m disabled, and about to take a small group of people into the jungle.”  But instead of worried, I felt reassured by this.  That she knew loss, grief, having her life uprooted; that she understood, firsthand, people who were rebuilding after total devastation.

As a society, we’ve disavowed grief.

There’s something radical about owning your grief and choosing to slowly get to know it, instead of continually numbing, denying, and pretending.  There’s something radical about choosing to allow grief, and trusting that there’s a way to move with it, to coexist with it.

As a society, that’s not usually how we function.

We look down on people who are in pain.  We look away.

And maybe the trust is about finding people who have the internal strength to keep their eyes open.  

In a giddy-up, pick yourself up culture

a permanent compartmentalization

stoic and independent-isolated

how do we expect to survive

when we keep carrying the moments that have torn us, alone?

There’s a kind of authenticity that comes from being present for– and fully acknowledging the ways you have been hurt.  And there’s something life-changing about knowing, and learning to hold the full spectrum of human experience.  As these people go on to heal, they have this tremendous range.  Not just for being with pain, but often an eventual intensification of joy.  

It all leaves me wondering– if some of the people I look up to the most, are the people who do this well, why, as a society, aren’t we celebrating them more?