The Crow

I’ve tried to push you down,
I’ve tried to cut you out,
You rattle in your cage,
You rattle in my cage.

I’ve tried to drown you out,
Drink ‘till I don’t hear your sound,
The song’s still the same.
The song’s still the same.

My Beautiful Crow,
With all those black feathers,
Perched deep in my soul,
Won’t let me, let you go.

Crow – Bear’s Den

Grief has been my closest companion these past couple of months. I can’t quite put into words how the reverberating sadness has haunted me. It’s been a time that I’ve found hard to express accurately. Language can be so limiting when it comes to emotions, but I guess I don’t really need words to explain it. You will no doubt be familiar with the feeling of intense loss. 

It’s so painfully human, and yet none of us know how to deal with it. We don’t know what to say when someone around us has lost someone. We don’t know how to come to terms with the finality of loss, whether we are grieving someone who is living or not. We skirt around it, we push it down, we fight the tears and try to remain “strong.” To not feel the overwhelming waves of emotion that threaten to drown us if we so much as even think about acknowledging them.

We think that if we ignore the sadness, it will go away. The irony is, the sadness and grief stay with us longer if we try to push them down. Emotions are simply ‘energy in motion,’ and if we don’t allow ourselves to feel, the energy literally has nowhere to go and so stays stagnant within our bodies. It manifests in unexpected physical, as well as mental and emotional ways. I have experienced these facts first hand. After breaking up with my first love, I repressed my grief for almost three years. When the deeply buried feelings finally hit, which they inevitably do, the lie I had fed myself about coping and being “fine” shattered and the tidal wave of grief and loss took me out for a good year. And I mean took. Me. Out. I was a broken woman. The aftermath was far worse for having ignored the pain for such a long time.

Society, however, tells us to do exactly what I did. To lie to ourselves about how we feel, and carry the pain. Don’t look at it! Don’t cry. Be strong! Don’t lose face. Repress your natural instincts. God forbid someone smells your weakness. What a fucking lie we’ve been fed. To hold back what makes us human. To push down our natural response to life’s most challenging experiences. We are made to feel like failures for feeling what is, in all actuality, a deeply appropriate response to what we have experienced.

Society’s version of “strength” is, at its best, resilience. It asks us to carry around our pain like a dead weight, like Atlas holding up the heavens. It is not to be underestimated, but ultimately it is a form of resistance. It’s exhausting. It’s a battle we fight against our ourselves and our natural instincts.  

The problem I found with denying one particular emotion, is that I was telling myself it’s not okay to feel what I was feeling. I was telling myself that I was wrong. This meant I began to lose trust in self, which in turn eroded my confidence. We can’t deny emotions we don’t want and then think we can fully experience the ones we do. We actually end up unable to feel even the more desirable ones because we have shut down our emotional centre – our heart. This was another side effect for me. Not only did I not feel sadness, I was unable to feel love or joy to the capacity which I had before. I was left numb.

For me, it took much more strength to be vulnerable, to show up in my truest expression of self, however painful that was. Strength, for me, was found in the acceptance of sorrow. I found that healing and growth could only happen when I sat with the hurt. When I acknowledged it rather than trying to run away from it. The ego wants to keep us safe from all of those painful emotions, to try and make us believe we’re “above” them and consequently, prevents us from healing. If we left a physical wound unaddressed, it would fester. It’s no different when dealing with an emotional wound.  

Crows, shrouded in black feathers, invite you into the darkness associated with grief. These birds have long been associated with death, harbingers of the most feared news. They have such mythical connotations, and for me, symbolise flight between worlds. In Max Porter’s book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, a crow makes its home with a family whose mother had just passed away. The crow refuses to leave the family alone until they work through their grief. Only when they have transmuted the pain, will the crow leave them alone.

Just as we see referenced in that book, I’m learning that there’s no skip button, no fast forward, no magic cure when it comes to trying to process grief. I’m learning that it bubbles up from the subconscious, and it will caw like a crow that rattles in a cage regardless of whether you want to face it or not. As Freud beautifully puts it, ‘feelings buried alive never die.’ It is only by taking the time to listen, by sitting with the discomfort, that we can allow those crows to eventually take flight.

So, I’ll take this time to grieve, and sit with the crows awhile 🖤