What Could Have Been: Grief and Mental Illness

“Grief never ends. But it changes. It is a passage not a place. Grief is not a sense of weakness or lack of faith. It is the price of love.” Author unknown

I am writing this is the week of a new moon. A time of beginnings, a time of endings, and a time of darkness. This is the final post in this month’s theme of emotional healing and mental illness. It is not possible to move on the path of recovery without grieving what was lost in due to having a mental illness. Grief represents a constellation of emotions, such as frustration, anger, hurt, and hopelessness. As adults we often struggle with accepting our grief, let alone creating room for it to heal. It is so easy to push our feelings away, trying to rationalize ourselves away from the pain we feel. But grief is a natural response to loss and is meant to be experienced fully.

Grief represents the feelings that come from a loss. It could be a loss of a significant person but also loss of a place, a job, or an aspect of ourselves (such as our hopes and dreams). There is no timeline on grieving. Sometimes grief is short but often grief can last years (even a lifetime).

I like the words from the above quote, “It is a passage not a place.” Grief is a journey, and grief ebbs and flows in your life. What we lose to mental illness, could be things we love or aspire to have in our lives. This post is focused on the grief of having a mental illness and its impact on our lives. It is important to contemplate that our episodes also contribute to our resilience, developing strengths, capacities and gifts that we share with the world. It is a given to me that things we struggle with can make us stronger. However, this argument can’t be used to deny grief, to stop our emotional process, or to make us “move on with life.” This is a contradiction of grief: it causes us to suffer and also creates strength within us.