Grieve, Rest, and Once Again Rise

There is no cure for one of the oldest and most profound human emotions: grief.

Just as it is certain you will learn to love, laugh, walk, talk, feed yourself, and develop as a human being, so too is the certainty you will die. Before that happens, you’ll suffer loss so crushing that you question everything. Why this? Why now? Why me? Why continue?

Much of whatever resilience I have left this week was spent trying to distill thoughts into something that has meaning and calm for you, my wonderful community of professionals, communicators, and adults with giftedness.

Let’s talk about loss and grief. This is about you, not about me. For you to put some trust and credibility into these words, please know I am past 75 and have handled a triple dose of grief in the past three years, then found ways to once again rise.

Credit StockSnap from Pixabay

All Loss is Different

Death is one kind of loss. As impossible as it seems to go on and figure out who you are without the loved one you have known since birth or without the partner who shared the promise, “for as long as we both shall live,” you learn two things about grief. First, grief is an equal opportunity experience, and nobody is exempt. You don’t see this until you are grieving, and then you see it comes to everyone. Second, grief relief is a cottage industry. Nobody has the cure, template, workbook, master plan, or remedy for you to grieve, rest, and once again rise. There are millions of ways that millions of other humans have tried to heal or move through grief, from laughter, dinner parties, ceremonies, drugs, alcohol, celebrations of life, meditation, and reading to grief groups and coffee with friends. Modern science, history, and literature have no cures, either.

Election loss, job loss, financial loss, and weight loss—all of those come with their own kind of grief or resolve to renew. The good news is that you are still alive and have family, friends, and a community you can love and lift up.

What Have We Learned So Far and How Does This Help You?

Grief can overtake your emotions individually, while people around you are not sure what to say or do—because they have not experienced what you are feeling. We need to talk today about community grief and everyone in the same boat.

Community grief can come with death, such as school shootings, hurricane devastation, a global pandemic, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the January 6 insurrection U.S. Capitol attack. Most of the time, community grief is not about death; instead, it’s a shared disappointment and massive group hug. Your team losing the Super Bowl brings on community grief.

Great loss happened to millions this week, all at the same time when each person who voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—and worked for 107 days as a hopeful, joyful, well-organized community, then saw the total votes of all Americans.

There is simply no other way to say it: this sucks. It is a scary time for many people.

The two most important lessons from long stretches of grief, for you, are these:

1. To go directly to hope and renewal without passing through grief is a grave mistake.
2. Put on your oxygen mask first, then help your travel companions with theirs. That means take some days or weeks to rest, hydrate, go for walks, and reconnect with everyone you think of as your community. Find new ways to unconditionally love yourself and do something nice for someone you love.

Credit 40041855 from Pixabay

I Choose To Serve You. You Are My Community.

Three years ago when I worked through a pony pile of grief (as in there must be a pony in all that shit) I connected with thousands who had communicated with me through decades of consulting with professionals and communicators. Many months, many questions, and many conversations later, these adults helped me see the magic I missed because I wasn’t looking. They showed me that adults, mostly over 40, born with giftedness traits who were also professionals and communicators were actively seeking my experience, wisdom, and one-of-a-kind attention.

Along with a kindred professional in Australia, we co-founded the Community for Gifted Professionals and Communicators as a global movement. It took off because our research showed us it is wanted, and needed, and nobody has figured it out yet.

While still working in recent years through grief on different levels, another community showed up and provided tremendous support, understanding, and a safe place to gather and learn with gifted professionals and communicators. That community is Substack.

Substack is a community of intelligent folks, each with their own publication. Each creator has subscribers and direct relationships—not a mailing list the technology platform thinks is theirs. The relationship with subscribers is intimate, daily, and direct in Substack, plus other writers—Substack publishers, support each other in ways not found with any other culture or technology platform. We are fair traders and recommend each other’s publications to our subscribers, to enhance what you are doing for your community already.

We give each other context and perspective. We keep each other true to the people we have promised to serve and gather. Service above self is the pattern and anyone who shows up as greedy, narcissistic, mean, or idiotic is soon escorted to the exit.

My community is mostly online because that is the path I chose when the time came three years ago to let go and reinvent.

Credit Bob Dmyt from Pixabay

Community Support So Far

I appreciate the Substack authors who kept writing this week, even though creativity, storytelling, and publishing were more of an effort. Maybe you heard from them, too. Here are some gifted professionals and communicators who helped me grieve, rest, and once again rise.

1) John Hamilton, Words and Music, author of the memoir Honest to God (2024)

We have been defeated. We have lost. Many of the social justice causes that we support are likely to come under attack. We will keep our ancestors at our back, and the children we are laboring for in front of our eyes. We will practice joy. We will summon our deepest wisdom to hold the light and be the light — until there is another chance at rebirth. During the Babylonian captivity, what appeared to be the darkness of the tomb was the darkness of the womb. Many things were birthed in this period which made Judaism what it is today. There is a “new thing” being born out there.

2) Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts since 2013.

I will not ask you to feel anything but grief right now. Donald Trump won the election and the consequences will be real and devastating. We face the choice to give up or press forward. The far-right wants us to feel powerless. Extremists are counting on apathy, cynicism, heartbreak, or all of that as their Rocket Fuel. They want us to lose trust in our ability to ever make change. I absolutely refuse to give them that satisfaction. If the work you do makes a difference for just one person and your attention is on their welfare and not your own gain, that matters. Take care of yourself and each other. Find opportunities to take a break and make new connections. Tell people you are with them no matter what is ahead. Do all you can to defend your values and fight back—and be a part of something bigger.

3) Yung Pueblo, Elevate with Yung Pueblo

If you are wondering who your people are, they are the ones who make your heart feel seen and your nervous system feel calm. Yes, it’s that simple.

4) Dan Rather, Steady

It’s also worth remembering that Ideological swings are the norm in American politics.  Though things seem bleak right now, keep in mind that there are always declarations of demise after big wins and big losses. Over the next four years, democratic institutions will be tested, and Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level. Arash Azizi, an Iranian Canadian columnist for The Atlantic, wrote something that should give us hope. “The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.” 

Who Are We In This Community?

I am so glad you decided to join this community and subscribe to this Substack. You are my inspiration and joy, every day. Who are we? Who are you?

We are gifted adults, highly sensitive, and get physically ill (headache, gut ache, nausea) over irresponsibility and injustice. We don’t like to see battered women, abused children, and neglected pets. We have a real problem with stupid and mean humans because there is nothing you can do about it other than remove them from society. Mean and stupid defines terrorists and that’s why most authorities refuse to negotiate with them or give in to their demands.

We are professionals and commit to paths of training, service, and sticking with standards, ethics statements, and practice. We live or die by those ethics codes. We devote time and unbillable hours to mentoring younger professionals and children considering a life of honest work instead of hustling to exploit other humans.

I come from 40 years of serving as the “storyteller for the professions” and that includes your profession. There are more than 1500 professions identified with codes that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) can verify and track, so if you tell me your profession, I can probably tell you the story behind it, how you trained for it, what degrees or licenses you need to practice your profession, certifications accredited for your profession and most importantly—whether your profession is growing, flat, or declining.

We are communicators. We believe in listening, understanding, connecting, and empathy more than we need to write, speak, sing, draw, and play musical instruments. Oh, we live in our craft of communication all day long and appear prolific as storytellers, best-selling authors, movie producers, and creators of all colors. If you measure our days and hours, as we do—all the damn time, to squeeze out the maximum of meaning, we devote a life to connecting with others.