National Grief Awareness Day is this Tuesday and with it (hopefully) will come an onslaught of conversations, posts, or videos, about grief. I’m 19 years into my relationship with grief and I know a lot and not much at all. It rattles me some days just how fickle my relationship with grief can be. In moments of frustration, I wish it was more compact and that I understood it better. In moments of peace, I wish I didn’t know it at all.

It’s been almost 20 years since I first noticed how changing seasons affect my grief. My mom died in January 2003 and the transition of the season from winter to spring made me sad. It felt like I’d left her in the winter and would never get her back. It may seem silly to anyone who hasn’t lost someone personally, or who isn’t triggered by changing weather patterns, but for those of us who are, it’s subtle but real.

During one of my first therapy sessions way back when, my therapist lovingly stared my way and said, “You need things outside of yourself to help anchor you on bad days.” At the time of her telling me this, my bad days were very, very bad. My hours were consumed with anxiety or depressive thoughts. The idea of cultivating a full roster of actions or safe spaces I could turn to on bad days felt incredibly difficult because I barely had the energy to walk out of the apartment in the first place.

Thinking back on those days, it was the most humbling season of my life. The perfectionist and problem solver in me wanted to be able to sit down for 15 minutes and brainstorm her way to a quick fix. Mental health doesn’t work on quick fixes though. Each day became a challenge and a reminder that the only way out of a bad day was through it and the only way through it was with acceptance and understanding the difference between what I could do and what I wanted to do.

I’ve been taking more baths lately. That can read as applaudable levels of self-care, but personally it’s actually one of my biggest tells. Taking a bath for me has always been calming, but when I’m doing it daily I know it’s a response to a hard season.

Baths become my own version of time out.

I didn’t know where we were going for my birthday. Tyler had planned it all. It was amazing. Not only because it’s really nice to have someone else take on logistics, but because I am huge on birthdays (big days in general) and adding thoughtfulness to make a moment out of them.

A month ahead of my birthday, all I knew were the dates I had to block off on my calendar, that we were going somewhere where I probably wouldn’t have phone service, and that it was COVID-safe.

Every year I approach the holiday season with trepidation. I have this feeling that settles in like I have been here before and have never been here at all. Mostly because each holiday season is different. Yearly my mental health toolkit acquires more tools on how I can cope with the month of December, but it’s any one’s guess if the old tools will work.

The one hack that has never failed me during the winter holidays, death anniversaries, or other hard grief day is this — make plans you can break.

I added a Sara Lee pound cake to our Amazon Fresh order this week. The craving I had was less for cake and more for a connection to my grandma.

The versions of her I got to know have been on my mind a lot these last few weeks.

The first time I noticed that “my holidays” were different from “the holidays” or “their holidays” was May 2003. It was my first Mother’s Day without my mom. In class, we were given the assignment to create Mother’s Day cards to give our moms that weekend. My mom’s death was fresh, she’d been gone 4 months at that point, and saying, “Hey, I don’t think I can do that,” didn’t fit into my 10-year-old lexicon, so I did it.

I was only 11 years old my first holiday season without my mom. As a result of my family and the culture they were raised in, there was no real space made to help guide me through those first holidays. When I was 21 years old and lost my grandma, I had a deeper understanding under my belt of what grief was and what it demanded of me.

During that first holiday season without her in 2014, I tried my best to find solace in places that made sense for me. I’ve always loved to find myself in books. Harry Potter is one of my favorite series for that exact reason - it was life-changing to me to see someone whose grief actually made them both more human and more magical all at once.

While the below reads aren’t necessarily the ones that guided me during my go arounds at the first holidays, it is the list I wish I had.

The anxiety was sitting in my throat, in my stomach and in the back of my eyes. I was choking on the words that would speak into existence what I was thinking - I was anxious because I felt guilty for being happy. I had unshed tears that spoke to the stress of being pulled in opposite directions — I was overwhelmed by the anxiety and sad that I felt this way in the first place. The pit in my stomach, this spoke to the reality that old habits die hard and the strong ties between my anxiety and my body were still there for however faint they’d been recently.

I was a conglomeration of feelings. In my mind was a woman with a shield in front of her face trying her best to ward the worst of this off. I journaled. I spoke positive affirmations at every threat to my happiness. I sought out manageability in all that felt unmanageable. I did what I know helps and then I ran out of things to do.

So, I sat.

Last week I was sitting on the floor with papers and pictures spread out around me. In my mind I could see the playpen my mom used to park in front of the TV just a few feet away from where I was sitting.

As a toddler, I’d bounce along to Barney. Outside of the playpen, I used the floor as my training ground for crawling and learning to walk.

As a kid, I learned about real estate and the importance of Park Place while playing Monopoly with my cousin and aunt on that floor.

Building piles and pushing memories around on this floor to make room for more has always felt normal and like home. Even though last week didn’t look much different, it was. I was trying to find my birth certificate and social security card because coming home here was no longer going to be an easy, viable option. I couldn’t keep splitting myself between two homes because in a few weeks, my boyfriend, my puppy, and I would be hopping on a plane and moving across the country.

I’m reading this book right now that’s taking me to church every time I open it. I’m being asked to look (and I mean really look) at my life and how I grew up. I’m being challenged to relive bad days and respond to them differently than I did when I was a kid. Instead of avoidance as a way of survival, it’s like this book is screaming to me — “you can survive actually feeling now, don’t avoid it.”

I keep wanting to scream back, “Are you sure?” A world where surviving and feeling go hand-in-hand is foreign to me. The idea of feeling the range of feelings that both hard and good days bring to my door is more than I’ve ever asked myself to do. I was so scared to pick up this book because I wasn’t even sure I could survive reading it.