From-sophieandrover-that-i-don-t-deserve-to-feel-j

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From sophieandrover: that I don’t deserve to feel joy or happiness, and that I am a burden to most people. I struggle to feel like I am going to get through life, and how to find hope in a season of intense grief.

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You so do deserve to feel joy. To feel happiness.
Sometimes we have to go through the struggle to appreciate all that is around us. To know we truly are not alone.
I promise. You are not alone. You are deeply and completely loved.
Can you think of one thing you are grateful for?
Focus on that and know that gratitude and fear cannot coexist.
Hold on. You are loved.

sophie - the way you describe the season you’re in “intense grief” is a good way to frame a lot of this. When you’re drowning, it’s hard to imagine how you’re ever going to swim or “get through life”. When you feel down, it usually surfaces all of the fears and insecurities we lock away. And it suffocates our hope in life and our hope that we could ever see the other side of this darkness.

Honestly, it sounds par for the course - there is something about feeling your way through the grief. Grief isn’t something you can force yourself out of. Burying the pain doesn’t make it disappear.

It also feels really hard to think about expecting yourself to battle deep-seated pain in this season. When you’re low, it’s hard to expect yourself to be heroic.

There’s something to this season though that can be beautiful. It’s easy to be angry at the winter for stripping the trees of their beauty. And to meditate on that anger and disappointment and just wait it out for the spring. But there’s also a unique kind of beauty that you can experience and appreciate in the winter. You can see deeper into a thicket than you ever could. You can see through the trees to the clouds. There is a beautiful kind of silence in the winter air. There are unique things to each season that if we can capture, we can appreciate.

There is something to a season where you can only see the next step in front of you and no further. We just got out of a mini season like that. I hated it at first. I have high expectations on myself and resent it when I have to slow down. But there was something I was able to grab hold of in the middle of the season…the permission to NOT strive. The permission to crash at the end of the night, drink a beer, not expect myself to be superhuman. There was an acceptance that I let settle in my soul. And critically…there was the hyper focus on soul care. I felt myself eroding with the daily onslaught, and I knew that if I didn’t do SOMETHING to build my reserves back up, the season would drag on.

For you, I wonder what beauty you can find in this winter you’re in? And I wonder what’s critical to sustaining or refilling your reserves?

Either way, if I had to offer you one word: grace…have grace on yourself, friend. You’re not SUPPOSED to be the same in this kind of season. Grace.

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thank you for sharing this and let my say, you are not alone in this. we all have suffered from grief, we all go
through struggles and our own issues. in my past and still now i feel so often, always like a burden.
that i don’t deserve my friends. that i don’t deserve something good. still struggling, so i can relate
to your post a lot. griev is part of life, and life is hard more often that we like. but also
you are not alone my friend. you matter most ! you are loved and you deserve that.
its often hard to see good things out there, but they are there. life is beautiful , life is blooming.
think of the good things in life, do things you love with people you love. feel hugged