Existential gread.
When grief and dread unite.
The phrase “existential dread” has been popping up in my vernacular a lot more recently—I think it must be really having a moment, given the current state of *gestures at everything.* Except something weird is happening: every time I’ve tried to say this phrase over the last 2-3 weeks, “dread” has come out of my mouth with a G in the place of the D.
“You know, I just have this feeling lately of existential gread…” I said to my therapist today, describing my mood lately, realizing I said a made-up word again. “And that has been happening every time I talk about it! I keep saying gread instead of dread.”
“Well, that’s just grief and dread together,” she said matter-of-factly, as if she were reading the definition of this made-up word from Webster’s dictionary as we talked.
Yes.
That’s it, I realized.
That’s exactly it. Grief + dread is exactly the feeling I am experiencing. It’s more complex and layered than just your run-of-the-mill dread and foreboding about the future (of our country, our planet, our lives, my marriage, my rights, my daughter’s rights, the rights of the daughters of my friends… I could go on, but you get the idea). It is also a deep grief over what’s happened already, the damage that’s already been done (in our country, to the world, around the planet, in outer space… I could go on). A life I thought was promised is vanishing before my eyes. Freedoms and rules and things that were given are no longer so certain.
Let me preface this all by saying that I am blessed with what is a very happy and privileged life. I am regularly grounded in the knowledge that I am (right now, at this moment) okay: safe, healthy, and fed. My friends and neighbors are mostly all (right now, at this moment) okay: safe, healthy, and fed. So many people around the world are not. And yet…
The feeling of grief is not new to me. It was spring six years ago when I suddenly realized that I was in love with a woman. I was married to a kind, honest, dependable, funny man at the time. It was 2019 when I realized this truth about myself—that I could no longer stay true to myself and also stay married to this man, the father of my child—and, from there, I crawled through the hardest year of my life. I decided to get divorced and my life exploded: everything I knew shattered into tiny pieces, spewing bits of myself and my family, my past and the future I would no longer have, all the different versions of self that I had clung to. Then I had to sort through the pieces, decide what was worth keeping, and put things back together. And I did. It was slow work and I still have the scars. There are still tender spots that, pressed just right, bring fresh pain, pricking with tears behind my eyes.
I have a friend who’s found herself in a similar position. I’m walking alongside her as her life splatters across the ceilings, cabinets, and carpets. It’s a real mess. There’s nothing but uncertainty, doubt, fear, and endless questions. Answers are hard to come by. I sit with her and nod. “Yes, it’s so painful. I know. I get it. It’s confusing, it’s hard, and I promise it will get better.”
I know it gets better. Time mutes the pain; scar tissue forms. The wounds aren’t so tender after some time.
I lived some of my deepest, darkest moments of grief during the period of time surrounding my divorce. Those were second only to the period after my dad died, 23 years ago. In the months after losing my dad, I fell into a period of true depression. Getting out of bed was impossible some days. Emptiness and hopelessness infused my every muscle fiber, making me heavy and leaden, uninterested in many of the things I used to like (such as getting up and taking a shower every day). A prescription for antidepressants made activities of daily living achievable again, and I thank god for the ability I had back then to benefit from those drugs. They are a necessity for so many people.
The grief of living without my dad still catches me off guard from time to time. Like the grief of my failed marriage, there are still scars. They’re deeper, formed over decades of knowing my dad and being his child when he was still alive on this earth, and then the work of going on without him. Those scars run through the core of my being. I will never get over losing my dad because every day I’m alive is a day I have to go on and live without him. You don’t heal when that constant reminder brings you back to loss, again and again and again. The world keeps turning, so you move with it, to the best of your ability.
Grief brings him back when I catch a scent of his favorite cologne, or see a middle-aged man who resembles him sitting alone at lunch, or hear one of his favorite songs. I think of him when I accomplish great things, or when my daughter hits another milestone. I wish he were still here, living these moments with me, and I will never escape the truth of that missing love. He is gone.
Having lived through and (thus far) survived these events that felt at times as if they would swallow me whole, I feel a steeliness inside of me. My core is resilient. I know now almost for certain that grief will not kill me, and the only way through the grief is by grieving. I go deeper inside myself to find the antidote to the pain, creating space for the emptiness to exist, knowing that sadness and love are so closely connected, I must let them intermingle when the need arises.
That’s the difference between grief and gread, that general feeling I’ve been grappling with lately. Gread, I realize, exists outside of me. This insidious combination of fear and loss is a creation of external circumstances. It’s temporary, like all feelings are, but for me this feeling is triggered by tuning into the world around me: the news, social media, stories of drama, chaos, and uncertainty. I can separate myself from it pretty easily, when I try to. I can shut down my phone, turn off the news, change the literal and metaphorical channel or turn the volume down.
I refocus on the thick puffs of cloud in the perfect blue sky. The ornamental cherry and redbud blooms and tricolor dogwoods are wreaking absolute havoc on my allergies, but DAMN they are painting a beautiful landscape if you stop and look up every once in a while. My daughter is getting taller by the minute. The smattering of pin-prick freckles across the bridge of her nose match her golden hair exactly in the spring evening light. What a gift to watch her grow up, to be annoyed by her, to squeeze her body next to mine (she’s almost past my shoulders now). My wife is a goddamn knockout and also, amazingly, my biggest fan. I don’t know what I did to deserve her but I definitely got the better end of the deal—she is more kind, patient, loving, and on duty in the kitchen than I will ever deserve or be able to reciprocate; somehow, she loves me anyway. I am surrounded by friends and community members who will go on long walks with me to talk things out, who will loudly cheer me on in all my crazy, ambitious endeavors, who will send me nice notes and little gifts, or do none of that and I know they’re still there, overwhelmed as we all are; they are loving me from afar. Either way, it’s okay with me.
I’ve been listening to Anne LaMott’s books on audio as I’m driving around for my errands and meetings and visits to the gym. Her words are solid gold right now (read Almost Everything and Somehow, if you have a time).
One of her quotes that resonated off the gread I feel in the world around me: There is almost nothing outside of you that will help you feel happier in any kind of lasting way. You can’t buy, achieve, or date it. That is the most horrible truth.
Happiness is an inside job. To find our way out of the gread of the current administration/climate/situation, and to deal with it on the daily, we have to turn inward and find what’s good and true. Look closely. It’s there.
