I probably have had more mental health therapy than most people. So I feel like I have become the local “Lucy” from the Peanuts. For just 5 cents I can spill out some therapy to just about anyone or maybe it is more like that warm and fuzzy feeling we had in the 90’s when we watched Oprah on TV after school. 

I can use the “Oprah lingo” but I am not really professionally qualified to provide therapy. I do feel, however, like I am qualified as someone who has suffered and endured my fair share of heartache. But who hasn’t? Aren’t we all uniquely qualified with the wisdom of our lived experience? 

Don’t we all have that one friend who you always call when you need to know how they got through a situation similar to yours? Whether it is selling a car or finding a good dentist or planning that trip to Disney…we know who has walked in those shoes and we seek out their wisdom. So while I know I am not Oprah, I do have some giveaways from my favorite gifts of grief. I have been busy being a widowy widow widowing through the last year with a qualified mental health professional. 

One of my favorite therapy lessons this year was the idea of “holding space” for feelings. One day recently, I was in session with my amazing therapist. And I said something like this when she asked how my week had been prior, “Well I am worried about my kid with some heavy grief issues lately so I canceled the little vacation I was planning for myself after the holidays. Oh, and my first attempt at “dating” isn’t working out because I was too much for him. And you know I already knew that would happen because my story is just too much. But as of today, I am overall pretty good!”

She used her best therapist tone of voice and said, “Whoa, can we just pause and hold space for these things? Like one at a time?” And then we made a connection between what I said and what I was really feeling and I let my hard stuff fill up the space between us. We don’t always want to hold the space for the big feelings because they are painful. But in holding the space with my therapist, and many of you do this for your friends, we let those feelings teach us something about ourselves. Learning something deeper about who we are and how we got here. And that is how healing and growth and change can begin to take hold in our lives.

Through the “sitting in it” kind of space that professional counseling provides me, I have discovered that taking up space has been hard for me this year. I have this subliminal aversion to being a “burden” with this story of suicide and mental illness and trauma and loss. I feel like my story walks into the room before me and like the blue Care Bear, sends out teary clouds of sadness to everyone around me. I am uncomfortable with the worried tone in the “how are you” greetings from friends and family. 

In this self discovery, I realized I have not always been my authentic self. I have made myself smaller in some relationships and in some spaces just someone who is “totally fine” in an effort to blend in. I think I try to protect myself and everyone around me from this horrifically huge pain. This is part of my challenge to building my identity in this new space.

I see it and hear it with my kids too. Sometimes it looks like avoiding being home when they can be weightlessly free of this story with college roommates or high school friends. Even the act of being together in the emptiness Erik left in our family, in the same room at the same time has been strained. Honestly, we struggle to sit at the same table for a whole meal. We don’t know how to hold that much space for our collective grief so we kind of orbit around each other’s individual grief. I have to radically accept how broken we are right now while having faith that we will heal our collective heart someday.  

So that is what I have been working on while the rest of you have been struggling through dry January. I am trying to hold space for the feelings so I can find purpose in this pain. I have even moved to the center of the bed to take up physical space left behind by that warm Swedish giant who snored next to me for 26 years. Just that small ritual of scooting to the middle of the bed each night is brutally teaching me it is okay to take up space. 

There is a shelf in the closet that still has Erik’s towel from the morning he died and some of his “closet things” and I am working on the courage to use that space for other material things. Because the space he holds in my heart is bigger than that shelf. Hold space for yourself and for your friends. And take up the space you need to be true to yourself. You get a car! And you get a car! Ha ha, not really. But that will be 5 cents please.