I was telling my family members, who left the Holdeman Mennonites around the same time I did, that the last time my world turned upside down was when I left the Holdemans. There are similarities.
Like,
Everything that was familiar to us is gone. There’s a lot of uncertainty and grieving. Sometimes we’re not even sure what we’re grieving because it was so much a part of us, it’s hard to see the impact on ourselves.
We struggle to find a new sense of identity, meaning, and figure out what to do with our lives now. We may have lost our job, our social life, and our social habits that were important to us – that defined our sense of self even, and now we must seek to create a new sense of identity.
It feels like we’ve been dumped into some strange new world – one that we always thought would hurt us, and feel awful for us, and maybe even kill us. (In the case of the Holdemans, they told us we would go to hell if we went into the world.) It’s a rather nightmarish reality sometimes, and a sense of hopelessness can threaten us, because this new situation calls for tools and resources we’ve never learned. But we can.
We don’t know if we’ll get out the other side ok, or if our families will still be intact. My family had some pretty tough emotions to work through, and we each had our own problems, so it was hard to help each other out. Hopefully somebody else was having a good day when you were having a bad day so they could support you, but it didn’t always work out that way.
We spend time alone, trying to figure it out, sometimes crying a lot, or feeling mad for no reason, wondering if we’ll ever have a life again, feeling depressed, wondering if it’s not what it looks like, and often turning to creativity to express how we feel.
But things change slowly. We find a way to adapt to the new world, even though we’re still endlessly frustrated by our lack of skills – we’re finding what we need inside of us to create a new reality. We realize it’s not so bad after all – there are some perks in this new world. There are positive benefits we never thought possible. We start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Even if it feels like it will take forever, now we have hope. Our inner strength will lead us on and we’ll make it out the other side.
We all do. It always happens. If we do what we can to make our lives meaningful, we never really truly die. Our lives have made an impact, just by us being here. Strength is not being here perfectly – it is just being here at all.
Remember those other hard times in our lives – we got through those. We can get through these, and gain something beautiful in the process!
Monica Rose Writes 