The Lessons I Didn’t Want To Learn

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Contrary to popular belief, Kelly Clarkson wasn’t the first one to coin this phrase, but the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in 1888. Apparently he said, “Out of life’s school of war — what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” The image of life as a “school of war” is a powerful one — it’s true that sometimes life feels like battle, but it’s also true that we are constantly learning from that battle. It is one of the fundamental things about being human that we only grow when we struggle.

My second child, Rosa, was stillborn at full-term two and half years ago. The experience has been the hardest of my life and I continue to feel the impact of that loss. Grief has fundamentally changed me, my relationships and how I live my life. In the last two and a half years, I have learnt a huge amount about myself and the people around me. I’ve learnt about grief, love and the essence of being a human and a mother. These are not lessons I wanted to learn — I would happily discard all my newly-acquired information if it meant that I could un-do what happened to Rosa. But of course I can’t. So here are the lessons I didn’t want to learn:

Feelings aren’t rational, but they are valid

This is something that I have written about before, but it is so important that I wanted to mention it again. It is also a theme that will come up throughout this article.

After Rosa died, I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt, envy and anger. As if that wasn’t enough, I was telling myself off because I knew that a lot of my feelings weren’t “fair” and didn’t make sense. I felt so furious with everyone around me who had a living baby, even though I rationally knew that of course they hadn’t done anything wrong. And I felt so crippled by guilt about what had happened to Rosa, even though I knew I hadn’t acted recklessly. A friend helped me understand that all of this was perfectly normal, because feelings aren’t always supposed to make sense.

This friend also made me see that, just because feelings don’t make sense, doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid. That was the lightbulb moment for me. Up to then, I’d been assuming that if I was feeling something that wasn’t rational, then I was wrong to be feeling it. He made me see that, even though it’s not okay to act in any way, it is absolutely okay to feel any way. That awareness has been so liberating for me because it allows me to feel the feeling without adding the extra layer of frustration that I shouldn’t be feeling it.

Be aware of your grief circles

After Rosa died, I couldn’t bear anyone else showing any emotion about the situation. I felt (and still feel) very strongly that the loss was my loss, not anyone else’s. This is probably most unfair to my husband, because of course it is his loss as well (but, as we saw above, feelings aren’t always rational). I felt that Rosa was part of me, she was my responsibility, and she was mine to grieve. Anyone else expressing sadness felt like they were trying to steal part of the loss (or part of her) from me.

At some point, a few months after she died, when I was frustrated about someone else expressing their own sadness at the situation, my husband said to me, “other people are allowed to feel sad about it too you know.” I pondered this for a while and then consulted my ever-wise best friend. She introduced me to the concept of grief circles. When something terrible happens, there is always someone (or perhaps a couple of people) at the centre of the situation. They are in the first circle. Surrounding them, in the second circle, will usually be the people closest to them — their immediate family. After that, there will be another circle of close friends, and then another circle of more distant friends and family members. (if you want a diagram, just look up grief circles online). The rule is this: support in, dump out. You must provide only support to the people who are on a more inner circle than you, but you can seek support from anyone who is in the same circle as you or on a more outer circle than you.

If someone has been diagnosed with cancer, they are at the centre of the grief circle. They should not receive anything but support from everyone else. It is not appropriate for their parents, siblings or friends to tell that person how upset or worried they are about the situation. Those people can lean on each other for support or reach out to someone in an outer circle, for example their own friends (or a counsellor) who are more removed from the situation. The person at the centre of the situation has enough to deal with, without being burdened by the emotions of anyone else.

This concept helped me enormously. It helped me understand my feelings about Rosa, but it also helped me think about how I should provide support to other people. It made me reflect on a particular situation, many years ago, when I was drunkenly tearful with the mother of a friend of mine who had passed away. I remember her saying to me, “What are you crying about?” I had some kind of notion that my tears would provide her with comfort, showing her how much I cared. Now, all these years later, I can see how deeply annoying it would be to have some half-cut idiot crying about her son, when her grief was infinitely greater than mine. Who on earth was I to be crying about something that had touched my life, but destroyed hers? My feelings were valid, but I shouldn’t have been expressing them to her.

The hierarchy of grief should be a matching tool

If we had to “rank” the severity of a bereavement, most of us would agree that the list goes something like this: children, spouse, siblings, parents, friends. This is known as the hierarchy of grief — a diagram that you can check to see how sh!t your situation is! How high up you are on the hierarchy determines how much sympathy you get from people and how bad you are “allowed” to feel. The hierarchy of grief concept is controversial because it is impossible to know how another person feels and, generally, it is quite unhelpful to compare one person’s experience with another’s. Each person has their own unique experience of grief and it should not be turned into a competition or “one-upmanship”.

I believe that we should all be allowed to feel however we want, regardless of whether those feelings are objectively proportional or rational. However, I also think that we need to be aware of who we seek support from and ensure that we are always holding other people’s experiences in mind.

After Rosa died, somebody directed me to a facebook group for “pregnancy and infant loss.” I understand that many people find these kinds of support groups helpful and I don’t wish to undermine that. However, I have never found any solace from this group and I think the main reason is that the experiences of the people in the group are simply too wide. The experiences of a person who has had a 6 week miscarriage and a person who has lost an infant are so far apart that they exist in difference universes, let alone different facebook groups. Everyone’s feelings are valid, but it isn’t fair to anyone to be lumped into the same catch-all basket.

I don’t think the hierarchy of grief is helpful as a means of comparing one person’s crappy situation to another. However, I do think it can be useful as a way of matching people with the right support. If two people perceive their levels of grief to be very different, this can lead to a situation where nobody’s feelings are properly validated. The person whose grief is on a “lower” level may feel guilty about sharing their feelings with someone whose grief is so much “greater.” And the person on the “higher” level of grief may find it hard to sympathise with someone whose experience they perceive to be much “lesser.” However, if two people perceive themselves to be on the same level of the hierarchy, there can be a huge amount of mutual support.

Real friendships need more than Whatsapp

I think Whatsapp can be absolutely brilliant for friendships. I’ve been an expat for eleven years and Whatsapp means that I can easily keep in touch with friends who live in different countries to me. However, I also think that Whatsapp can also be a destroyer of friendships. It can give us the impression of being in contact with someone, without knowing how they are really doing. We send short, surface-level messages and get a few snippets of information about their life. You know how it goes — “How is work? How are the kids?” “All good thanks, work is busy, kids are doing well.” These kinds of exchanges are so empty that you almost might as well not bother. They don’t do anything to deepen a friendship or make another person feel heard and supported. To have meaningful friendships and relationships, we need to continuously ask each other how we are feeling. It isn’t enough to exchange meaningless “life updates” every few weeks or months.

I think Whatsapp can be useful as one tool in a friendship. It can be a way to stay in contact in between times when you are able to meet in person, or speak on the phone, and share your true thoughts and feelings about everything happening in your lives. Real friendships are built on times when we can be together and laugh, cry, confess, reminise and complain. Real friendships require time and effort, but the rewards that they reap are boundless. Whatsapp has made us lazy — we dash off a few quick messages and think this is enough to sustain a friendship.

Before Rosa died, I hadn’t thought much about any of this. I would message my friends every so often, see them whenever I could and that was that. However, since Rosa died, it has become much more important to me to have meaningful friendships. To be close to someone, I need to share my feelings with them and I need them to do the same with me. I need to get beyond the surface-level, small-talk, highlight-reel rubbish and discuss how we really feel about things in a frank and honest way. I’ve realised that occasional messages on a Whatsapp group asking “how everyone is doing” are simply not enough.

It’s okay not to be happy for other people

How many times have you said “I’m so happy for you” without really meaning it? Probably a lot. I know I have.

It’s easy to be happy for other people if the thing that they have is something that you already have, or something that you don’t want. But somebody else getting something that you want, or that perhaps you have lost, can be very painful, and can bring up feelings of jealousy, anger and resentment.

Despite the fact that it is completely normal not to feel happy for others in certain circumstances, I don’t think that our culture acknowledges or accepts this. We are expected to be happy for other people at all times. When someone announces an engagement, pregnancy or promotion, the only acceptable response is “Congratulations” followed by all sorts of exclamation marks and emojis. Anyone who does not manage to keep a lid on their feelings of jealousy or resentment is immediately vilified. People say things like “they’re just jealous” or “it’s because they’re not happy in their own life” as though these are criticisms. What if those things are true, but we tried to show some understanding and sympathy towards those people, rather than writing them off as unkind and selfish?

Our culture places responsibility on the person receiving another’s good news to mask their own feelings and express only happiness. However, I believe that we should be placing some responsibility on the person sharing the news. I still find it hard to receive pregnancy and birth announcements. They raise lots of complicated feelings for me — Why does everyone else get to assume things will be okay? Why did it work out for them and not me? I find it much easier to be happy for people if I feel that they are holding me in mind. If I feel that someone, despite their own happiness, has made space to remember what I’ve been through and how their announcement might affect me, I find it much easier to find space to feel happy for them in spite of my other feelings. Simply, if I feel like I matter to someone, I am much more able to be happy for them.

Two (conflicting) things can be true at the same time

This is another lesson that my wonderful best friend has taught me and it is something that I continuously apply to my life.

After Rosa died, I found that I was often feeling lots of different things all at once and they were often conflicting. This was particularly the case once I was pregnant again with our third baby. I was happy to be pregnant again, but I was still terribly sad about losing Rosa and, of course, terrified that I would lose the next baby as well. At that point, I didn’t really understand how I could feel all these opposing things at once. I think this is made more difficult by our culture, which doesn’t really encourage or understand the complexity of multiple feelings. I remember a conversation with a former colleague who expressed surprise when I told her how much I was struggling. She said, “But I thought you’d be happy now that you’re pregnant again.” As if I could only feel one thing at a time.

When I spoke to my best friend about this, she said, “But two things can be true at the same time. You can be happy about the new baby and, at the same time, sad about losing Rosa.” Writing this down now, it seems blindingly obvious, but at the time it felt revolutionary. I have found this concept so useful in so many ways. It helped me formulate my thoughts about the earlier section on being happy for other people. Society’s expectation is that we must feel only happy for other people, otherwise we are not nice/kind/a good friend. In fact, it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to feel all kinds of conflicting things at once — this might include happiness for other people, but can often include jealously, resentment or sadness. And all of those feelings are valid — we don’t have to pick one and push away the others.

The idea of two conflicting things being true at the same time can be applied to almost any area of life: I love my children and I don’t feel like looking after them today. I have lots of people around me and I feel lonely. I think X is a nice person and I was hurt by what she said the other day.

……

I’m definitely not a member of the “at least” club — you know, “something bad happened to you, but at least you learnt something from it.” I don’t find it comforting or helpful to look for silver linings to a thoroughly awful black cloud. However, I think that there are lessons to be learnt from nearly every bad situation and we can choose whether we take that lesson or not. Learning something doesn’t make the bad situation better, it is simply a by-product that may help us face the next bad situation with a little more strength.

To use Nietzsche’s analogy, if life is a school of war, we can’t choose our lessons but we can choose whether to pay attention in class.