on grief burnout, compliance and triggers
I have multiple drafts sitting in my draft folder, all things I’ve written over the last few weeks and never posted. And even now, I find myself not overly motivated to create content.
My friend, and fellow bereaved mom, has lovingly coined it ‘grief burnout’. She says “Grief burnout is the feeling one gets after a series of holidays, triggers, special days or anniversaries pile up on one another. feelings of burnout may include being checked out, numb, exhaustion or irritability.”
And have I found a better word to describe it? I keep writing in my journal that it feels like burnout but it’s not burnout. It’s not that I’m not motivated to do things, or don’t want to do the things I am doing. I’m just… tired.
Life is moving on, moving forward, entering new stages, and I feel like things are changing so fast I can’t keep up. I felt the same way when the calendar year changed from the year Paris was born to the next, when I got sent home from the hospital shortly after recieving an entirely new body part.
Some things I talk about, others I haven’t. We’ve had job changes, changes in the day to day expressions of what family looks like, I haven’t talked to my doctors in a few months just because I’m so damn healthy. This is what we’ve been working towards, what we trained for, and yet when it happened it still managed to land me flat on my face.
Current political conversations have managed to be that trigger back into the past, too. Somehow my name is being tossed around in converstions about reproduction rights and what is currently happening in the US. Because I was born with a genetic disease, because I had an organ transplant, because I accessed reproductive healthcare to save my life when I was pregnant. Its the emotional labor of the current climate, even when I am not actively involved in what is happening.
When I got my IUD for the first time, I was 19, and it was the day Trump was elected president. I remember watching it on the hospital TV, knowing what was about to happen, and thinking that if I lived anywhere else, if I lived there, I might not be able to do this right now. I feel the same way now, looking back, seeing where they are now and where I was then. I say it over and over, if I had lived in the US I would not have gotten a liver transplant. And now if I had lived in the US, Paris and I would both be dead.
It’s a humbling thought, and it drove me to writing pages and pages in my journal about compliance. Compliance is thrown around a lot in the medical space. I’ve had friends tell me if they didn’t comply with what their doctors wanted, they cuold have been refused treatment and ultimately died. And maybe you’ve heard the song going around, first during the freedom convoy and again with Roe v. Wade: “We will not comply.” And for someone who based so much of their life on complying, and complying meaning surviving, and being in compliance was equal with being good, this idea sits heavy on my heart. Is it still compliance when the choice, made in the best interest of self and others, is one made of free will? There are times I’ve complied, and equally as many where I haven’t, and its curious to note my self worth and how ‘good enough’ i felt decreased when I felt I was out of compliance. As a teenager in the medical system, when I was out of compliance with the guidelines for my current medical state, I remember feeling as though I was treated differently. And when I googled compliance the first thing that came up was children. Which reminds me of the link between infantalizing adults with disabilities or those within the medical system, and the stronghold of ableism.
Which brings me back to grief, and how my body physically aches with grief for all we are going through. Individually, collectively, as a society and a country and a world. Back when Covid first began, someone said it’s ok to feel grief, it means you’re paying attention. And I feel a similar way now. There is grief, which builds, and melts into a collective puddle called grief, becoming intertwined, and this collective mess of grief leads to grief burnout.
I don’t have answers yet. I don’t yet know how to live in a world full of grief and near constant triggers. Right now it looks like giving myself permission to not ‘be on’ all the time, to create when I feel like creating and rest when I feel like resting. Soaking in sunshine and planting my feet on the grass and lots of hot baths. And reminding myself grief doesn’t mean being weak, it means being human. Grief is a result of having loved deeply.
