Not Everyone Can Hold It: On grief, spiritual bypassing

On grief, spiritual bypassing, and the sacred intelligence of what happens when you stop performing okayness

There is a particular kind of loneliness in being too real for the room.

I don't mean dramatic. I don't mean difficult. I mean the kind of real that happens when grief stops waiting for a convenient time. When the crying starts and doesn't stop, when your body won't perform okayness for another hour, when you literally cannot lift your energy to meet the room you've walked into.

And someone looks at you, uncomfortable, and tries to shift you back.

Find the silver lining. Look on the bright side. Have you tried gratitude?

What I've come to understand…slowly, through my own hard seasons…is that this pulling isn't cruelty. Most of the time, it's fear. Fear of darkness that won't resolve on schedule. Fear of grief that isn't heading anywhere recognizable. Fear that has everything to do with the other person and very little to do with you.

But understanding that doesn't make it less lonely. And it doesn't make their discomfort your problem to solve.

Not everyone has the capacity to hold space for you when you've stopped performing okayness. I mean that plainly, without bitterness. It's just true. There is a kind of grief that arrives when those you thought close to you are unable to hold, witness the authentic you, without the performance.

Some people will stay. And some will go. Because they genuinely don't know what to do with grief that doesn't resolve on a convenient timeline. Their leaving isn't always a reflection of your worth. It's a reflection of their capacity. There's a real difference between those two things, even when it doesn't feel like it.

The grief, for its part, doesn't care either way. It comes anyway. It has its own intelligence, its own timeline, its own way of knowing what needs to be felt before anything can release. It doesn't wait for a room that's ready for it.

Here is what I know from my own experience, and from years of sitting with people in their hardest places:

When you interrupt the grief process — when you perform okayness before it's complete — the grief doesn't disappear. It waits. It goes underground. It stores itself in the body and comes out sideways: as irritability, as numbness, as a vague persistent sense that something is wrong you can't quite name.

Because the body knows. It always knows.

What grief actually needs is to move. It has a shape and a direction, even if it doesn't have a clear destination. But if you interrupt it every time it becomes uncomfortable for the people around you, you're not healing. You're managing. And there is a real cost to that…one that tends to come due later, and with interest.

I want to push back on something that gets said — explicitly and implicitly — in a lot of spiritual spaces.

High vibrational does not mean happy. It does not mean elevated, light, positive, unbothered. And when we teach that…or absorb it… we create a hierarchy of emotional experience where joy is spiritual and grief is a detour. Something to move through as quickly as possible so we can get back to the good stuff.

The darkest stretch of last year taught me something different.

The darkness, fully entered, fully allowed… 

that is some of the highest vibrational work I have ever done. Not because it felt good. Because it asked me to be completely honest. Completely present. Completely myself. No performance. No management. No editing. Just the full truth of what was moving through me.

The tenderness I brought to my own process in that time. The patience, the refusal to rush — that was the work. That was the healing. Not the getting-through-it. The being-in-it.

One of the reasons we perform okayness isn't only about other people. It's that we've internalized the discomfort too. We've been taught to be uncomfortable with our own darkness. To pathologize it, bypass it, get out of it as fast as possible.

And so when we're in it, there's this internal voice that sounds a lot like the people who got uncomfortable and left. Telling us we should be further along. That something is wrong. That we need to fix this.

The work I had to do was learning to be a different kind of witness to myself than the ones I'd been given.

To say: this is allowed. This is moving. I trust this process, not because I could see where it was going, but because I had enough experience with my own body and my own grief to know it was taking me somewhere. And honestly in this level of grief, I had the humbling experience of not having a choice this time.

For the people who couldn't hold it — I don't want to leave this in a place of blame.

They were operating from their own unprocessed grief. Their own relationship with darkness. Their own discomfort with the parts of human experience that don't fit neatly into a before-and-after arc. When someone hands you a silver lining before you're ready, they're usually trying to help. They're just helping from a place of their own fear.

You don't have to be angry about that. You also don't have to accept it as your own.

Part of trusting your own process is learning to protect the space you're in. To say, I'm not ready to be okay yet. And I'm not going to pretend I am. That's not pessimism. That's integrity. There is a difference and nuance to moving through the world in a dramatic way and then there is authenticity… I can still laugh and experience pleasure and fun during those times of darkness, but if you truly want to know ‘how I am doing’ be prepared for the real answer. 

If you are in a dark place right now.  If you're in the middle of something that isn't resolving on anyone else's schedule, if the people around you are uncomfortable with it…

You don't have to come back to the light before you're ready.

The darkness knows what it's doing. Whatever is moving through you, the grief, the unraveling, the part that can't perform anymore — it has intelligence. It has direction.

Trust the process that's moving through you. It is taking you somewhere.

— Natalie

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