I'm just old enough now to be considered to have some real life experience, so let's pretend I do. Lemme share with you some things I've learned the hard way over the last decade or so.
First, there are never enough tears to shed. Crying is not defeat, it's not a sign of weakness, it's not something you really should reserve as a weapon of last resort. Crying is literally one of the tools our mind and body has, whether you believe that is because God gave it to us or because our distant ancestors randomly developed it, to deal with the fact that we are, in fact, finite beings dealing with thoughts and emotions that exist in a near infinite quantity, variety, and intensity. Cry often, if you can. If you have your time to cry when it's safe to do so, you may have the strength to hold back tears when it's not safe.
Second, sometimes we just can't cry for the "right" things. There are so many tragedies that occur in this world, in our lives, in the news, in countries we've never seen nor ever will, and even in our own back yards. There is a constant barrage of things to cry about, legitimately heartbreaking things, and especially right now, when we seem to be surrounded by horrible things, day in and day out, it's sometimes just too much to cry about; the tears won't come. I have a little trick that I do when I realize that I can't cry about what bothers me now: I go back and cry about things that I cried about before but never really changed.
In the last decade, I have lost my father, two friends, and a cat that had been in my family, that I'd known, for well over half my life at the time (it's now almost exactly half my life, as she died at age 18, and I'm now 36). On top of that, I lost so much of myself, so much of what I had hoped for. I'm not gonna bore you with a full inventory, but, in my experience, by the time you're an "adult," you've cried enough that you can remember something to cry about. And crying about something old, at least for me, helps me process the emotions of what I feel like I should be crying about today.
There are tools I use to cry about old things. Songs, sometimes old videos, sometimes random audio files, pictures, etc. If you've known me for a long time, you may know some of these song titles, and you may even know why they break my heart, and despite that, why I still listen to them from time to time:
"Letters from War"
"His Theme"
"Christmas Shoes"
"Happy Birthday" (not that one, this one's a rap song)
"Cinderella"
"Butterfly Kisses"
Third, the pain of grief doesn't actually go away; you just learn to live with it. That sounds like a bad thing, but in a way, it's like whoever or whatever you lost is still with you, even in their absence. You'll never fully know the size or shape of the hole you'll leave behind in the lives of people who you've affected, hopefully the people you love. But when you lose them, you'll know the exact size, shape, location, depth, and searing pain of the hole they left behind. It's less like a wound that will scar over and eventually heal, and closer to cobblestone; the hole from a missing stone is always there, but you learn to tread carefully around it, until you sometimes just need to sit down next to the hole and remember what was lost, and why it hurts so much to have lost it.
Finally, pretend to be the person you want to be. This is probably one of the most frustrating and annoying pieces of advice that I've ever gathered, and take it with a massive grain of salt, but if you use it this one way, it can help a lot: when you're in a situation and you're not sure what to do, ask yourself what that person, the person you want to be, would do, and then do it, or as close to it as you can manage without harming yourself or anyone around you. The person I want to be is kind, caring, and willing to help others know they're not alone. Which is why I'm writing all this BS for you to read.
If you bothered reading all of this, do me one solid favor: sometime within the next day, do something for yourself that you wouldn't have otherwise; give yourself a kindness that you would have otherwise been denied. Doesn't need to be huge, maybe it's just making yourself a cup of tea you haven't had in a long time because drinking the same few flavors for the last month has just gotten too boring, or maybe it's changing into clean, dry clothes when you'd normally just tough it out, or something else equally mundane. Just, do something kind for yourself. I believe that every act of kindness we perform, even for ourselves, brings more kindness into the world, and makes it a tiny bit better than it would have been otherwise as a result.
Anyway, I've wasted enough of your time for tonight. God Bless if you'll let Him, and have an otherwise great day.
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