As **** as it is, learning how to deal with loss is a major part of life and growing up. It will never be an enjoyable experience. But I'll tell you my most positive take away that I found helpful.
Loss enables you to grow in ways that you could not without that experience. Being that everything is relative, the darker moments allow you to gain an entirely new perspective and appreciation for the moments where you feel joy, and a balanced middle where you can feel neither happy or sad but just content.
Before this year, if you had been asked to define what "sadness" meant to you, I don't think you would define it with the extremity that you may use today. This is because your depth as a person has increased.
Think of someone who has never had a bad thing happen to them in their life, literally. Imagine if then one day, their pet died. How would they know to deal with this? It would be entirely shattering for them, being literally the worst thing that has *ever* happened to them.
Now compare this to yourself. Having experienced this horrible depth of loss that you have now, would losing a pet compare? Hell no. As bad an experience as that is, it's a walk in the park compared to what you've been through now.
In this way, you are a stronger person than you were before. You will never see the day-to-day annoyances of the past as anywhere near as serious or life shattering as you may have before today.
And in the same way, the next time you feel happy will bring a wave of gratefulness that exceeds any appreciation you held for feeling happy before. This is your new perspective at work.
Moments of pure happiness or joy or love extend your possible scale of positive emotion on one side, and abject moments of grief, terror and shame extend the scale on the negative side of things; the experience of these new heights and lows are what allow you to stretch yourself.
I know when you're feeling the worst things you've ever felt, and your brain is telling you everything is done and over and hopeless, it's hard to realise this. But it's the truth, and I hope you pull through man.
Some days, you'll feel the same ol' tug of hopelessness. I feel it nearly every day still tbh. Just remember it's a tool you can use - in my case, when I feel that way, I think of the people that helped me through my heartbreak. In thinking of them I feel grateful, so I compare that feeling of gratefulness to the feeling of hopeless sadness, and I realise just how much I appreciate that feeling of gratefulness. It is so. much. better. than feeling despair. And then I appreciate those people all the more.
