Coping with Grief Overseas While Working in Healthcare

It's Saturday today and my thoughts are all over the place so I need to pour them all out, well maybe not as orderly as you expect it to be but atleast I may be able to give them (my thoughts ad hoc) a digital home where they can go to and settle.

I started my day through rereading "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl then I did some sit ups, planks and stretches to enliven the sluggish soul in me and reheated my fried brown garlic rice with shrimp and kale for lunch. While writing this, I have my black coffee, mozzarella sticks, blueberries and homemade french toast beside me. Sounds chill right? But this blog post is not about "A day in my life" so I'd cut the rest of the details off to provide a brief and compelling read.(I'll try my best cuz I'm not good at this haha)

Grief. It comes in waves, they say. I could not agree more. But coping with grief while going to work to help sick people who are also grieving their physical and mental condition while being alone abroad is a holy freakin' different level of torment. Every time I look back, I still could not believe how I pulled myself out from that dark ravage and got myself to a much better place mentally and emotionally and for that, I am grateful to God and may I say too that I am proud of myself??

"Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can't flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn't."- Megan Divine

P.S. This may be quite a sensitive and vulnerable topic so I'll leave it to you if you want to continue reading or not. :)

When I flew to Germany, I felt more free yet at the same time, more isolated. My neighborhood was quiet yet my thoughts were very loud. I felt more accomplished but empty as well. Fast forward to a year after my arrival, I felt so lost, demotivated, and in deep anguish. My family and I lost our home. I lost my dog and at the time, I was still grieving the death of my dad more than a decade ago. A year after that, I had to deal with the biggest heartbreak of my life but I do not want to divulge so much information about it. For now, these would do. A few months ago, I lost a very dear friend to cancer. She was just 27 and this broke me but spiritually nourished me as well. All these within 4 years. I felt the kind of grief I can never, in any form, understate.

But instead of numbing the pain, I chose to feel it all and sat with the most uncomfortable emotions I've ever felt in my whole life while carrying the weight of financial responsibility for my family at the same time...alone.

The people I usually was close to know that I love cracking jokes but I was not that person anymore. I became easily irritated, anxious, agitated, emotional, restless and illogical especially that my job as a nurse required me to face people, deal with their difficult times and also their family issues, solve problems which were not even included in my job description like fixing the broken printer, cleaning the patient's room, repairing broken faucets and so much more and these drained all the remaining life in me.

I grieved the version of myself who was carefree, jolly, lively, burning with passion and was kinda ray of sunshine to most people, though not to everybody. That version of me, somehow died temporarily. I lost huge parts of my identity that I associated with my past relationship and the version of myself when I was with my bestfriends in my home country. The nostalgia and homesickness were intensified and negative emotions made their way to dominate my entirety. Language barriers also magnified my struggles. I came to the extent where I questioned myself "Who am I?" because the person I was seeing in front of the mirror was not me. I did not know her anymore. She was like a lost soul whose eyes were a hundred hollow coves and did not know exactly where to go and what to do.

Atleast for me, this was how it felt like. I felt guilty for showing up to my patients and friends yet not being able to give my 100 percent because I was just barely surviving. I was for some time, just in survival mode.

On a lighter note, the value of small things were, during this time, amplified, like just being able to wake up alive and breathe normally. Words like "Thank you" from my patients or their relatives meant so much more to me. They gave me a feeling that there's still some light even during my darkest days. Gestures of kindness from strangers moved me more. Traveling has become more ruminative than just merely slapdash.

More than 4 years later, I'm still in grief but I helped myself to heal and deal with every heartbreak one day at a time. Until one afternoon, I just woke up and decided to gradually revamp my former victim narrative into that of a victor's. I started to bully my problems and downsized them so that they would just have little to no room in my mental space. I started to make way to things that really matter and rekindle the old flame that made me feel alive before.

I started moving my body more, enrolled myself in dance classes, said yes to spontaneous adventures, went back to journaling, prayed more, dated myself more, wrote more, communicated with my family more, spent days off making sure being still and quiet first in the first few hours of the day is a must and reading more while creating funny content at the same time. I started being more responsible on my finances (Well, not everytime but most of the time Haha). I started to work on regaining the old me, but in a much upgraded version. I still have skeletons in my closet, am imperfect, endlessly make mistakes but I am more aligned to my inner self now.

I love this version of myself. But this did not happen overnight. It took a lot of inner work, time, effort and taking the courage to make the constant decision to value, respect, defend, cheer for and love myself more because I could not pour from an empty cup. To make it short, I gave myself the kind of love I lacked and did not get. There's still a lot of things I need to work on like tidying up more but small progress is still progress.

I value meaningful conversations and I walk away from negative energy because I do not have time for it. But I still have bad days like anyone else and I'm still figuring out life like you too but I give myself more grace now. I hope you do too, to yourself.

Believe that days will become much brighter. It may not feel that way now, but trust me, it will get lighter. "Et lux in tenebris lucet". And the light shineth in the darkness. -Viktor Frankl

So let me end this blog post thru a manifestation that you and I can say aloud together. You ready?

"I am loved, healed, respected, understood, valued, forgiven, empowered, at peace, grounded and a magnet for blessings and financial abundance!!" Amen!

If you made it this far, thank you so much and I appreciate you all.

If you resonate with any of my blog posts and would like to support me and this amateur blog thru buying me coffee, kindly feel free to visit my website: https://ko-fi.com/misssmallcreature

Til the next blog post ihr Lieben!