I met a girl on the Fourth of July.
Twenty-two. Already divorced. Married just a few months before her husband disappeared. He just upped and left her.
She told me the whole story. And the entire time, she was reaching for gratitude. Even though I could sense the raw heartbreak just below the surface.
She talked about what she learned. About how fortunate she is in her life, generally. What she never said, not once, was that she was sad, or angry, or anything other than grateful.
There was no room for it. No room for the anger. No room for the grief of building a life around someone, and having them leave. No room for mourning the future she thought she was walking into, the one that became something else entirely while she was still standing in the doorway.
Just gratitude. Fast. Bright. Airtight.
And I recognized it. Because I’ve done it too.
After she finished, I asked if I could share something it took me decades to learn. To take it if it landed, and leave it if it didn’t.
That I always used gratitude. Went to the silver lining. If any experience I had could have been worse, I made myself be grateful. And every experience could have been worse. So I never let myself feel the anger, or the sadness, or the grief that the reality of what happened asked for.
And those feelings stayed in my body. I could feel them just under the surface. This darkness. This heaviness. And I started to believe it was part of me.
And in a sense it was. It was the part of my experience, of my feelings, that I didn’t allow space for. Stuck inside. Waiting their turn.
Here is the thing about the popular reframe, life isn’t happening to you, life is happening for you. It can be one of the most reorienting things you ever let yourself believe.
But it has a shadow.
The reframe can help you meet your life. Or it can help you skip it.
The genuine version comes after. After you’ve felt the loss. After you’ve let it be as heavy as it actually was. The meaning rises up after you’ve passed through the grief, and the anger, and the disappointment. It doesn’t replace them.
The bypass version comes first. It arrives before the feeling, and its whole job is to make sure the feeling never lands.
That’s the tell. Whether there’s room for the full, nuanced experience.
Gratitude that includes it all can hold both. This broke me and I can see what it gave me. Both true. Both in the room.
Gratitude that replaces it only has room for one. Always the bright one. The one that lets you keep moving. The one that doesn’t ask you to stop and feel how deep the water actually is.
It looks like health. It sounds like growth. From the inside, it feels like rising above.
But grief is slow and feral. Unpredictable and alive. And bypass is fast. And anything that gets you out of the hard feeling that quickly is worth being suspicious of.
You don’t have to choose between gratitude and everything else. That’s the lie buried in the reframe. That if you’re grateful, you’re done.
You’re not. You can be grateful for what something taught you and still grieve what it cost you. You can believe life is happening for you and still let yourself fall apart about it first.
The reframe isn’t the problem. The timing is.
Feel it first. Let it be heavy. Let there be room for all of it.
The perspective can only be found on the other side of the messy emotions.
