Episode Description:
In this episode of "What If? For Authors," Claire Taylor tackles the deeply emotional topic of grieving. Drawing from her experience as an Enneagram coach and her personal journey through grief, Claire explores how to manage an author career while dealing with significant loss. Whether you're in the midst of grief or supporting someone who is, this episode provides a compassionate and realistic approach to navigating these challenging times.
Key Takeaways:
Avoiding Unnecessary Suffering: Learn why it's essential to fully experience grief rather than avoiding or suppressing it.
Importance of Support: Recognize the value of asking for help and surrounding yourself with supportive people during the grieving process.
Transformation Through Grief: Understand that grief changes you and that your writing process and projects may need to adapt to your new self.
Taking a Break: It's okay to pause your writing to focus on healing; your career can continue once you're ready.
Complex Emotions: Embrace the wide range of emotions, including gratitude, that coexist with grief, and learn how to navigate them.
Links mentioned:
Why Listen? If you're an author dealing with grief or supporting someone who is, this episode offers a thoughtful and empathetic perspective on balancing an author career with the profound emotions of loss. This episode is a must-listen for any author seeking to understand and navigate grief while maintaining their creative path.
Join the Conversation: Have a question or fear you'd like me to explore? Reach out to me at contact@ffs.media.
Access the transcript for this episode here.
Happy Writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram Certified Coach for authors as well as a humor and mystery writer myself. You can check out my latest book, Sustain Your Author Career, on basically any online retailer. Just Google that title and it'll pop up.
Fair warning about today's episode. It's probably going to bring up some big emotions for you. That's certainly not something to be scared of because when we bring up big emotions, it usually means that they were sitting inside of us waiting for a door to open for them to escape. , so it's good to get those big emotions out.
I don't want to attach a negative connotation to feeling deeply emotional or even crying. I think both of those are beautiful, but like, if you're about to head into an important meeting, maybe wait until after to listen to this episode.
I'm a little sniffly right now because writing out the notes for today's episode, , certainly brought me to tears. , [00:01:00] and that's because today's episode asks the question that I hear from authors a lot of, what if I'm grieving? How do you manage an author career while you have a hole in your chest where your heart used to be?
At least that's what my grief feels like. It feels like I'm sort of like a Looney Tune cartoon, and someone just shot a cannonball through my chest, and I have this big hole left behind that you can see right through, and then I'm walking around as if there's not a big hole there, and then people are asking me dumb questions like, How are you?
And I just want to scream, Do you not see the fucking hole?
So yeah, we're talking about grief and being a writer today. If you find that you can still write words just fine when you're grieving, or writing is even a great haven for you as you go through the difficult process, then fantastic. I will say one thing though. If you're using writing as a way of avoiding your grief, not [00:02:00] just taking much needed breaks from the grief, but avoiding addressing it at all.
Then you're in for a world of hurt later. Don't try to outright your grief. Don't try to busy it away. That way lies all sorts of medical emergencies. And I'm not saying that lightly. Avoiding grief and trying to stave it off, it kills people. You can't have that much pain inside your body without it affecting your breathing, digestion, brain function, sleep.
I only say that because I've seen authors take this approach as if it's somehow, like, more noble than letting the grief get them down. But it's, it's not. Don't fool yourself, y'all. It's a sign that you're scared to be in grief, not that you're tough and are able to conquer grief somehow. The only healthy way out of grieving, Is through it.
And I know grief feels like the ultimate suffering and a lot of ways it is, but sitting with it is also a way of honoring the [00:03:00] people, pets, and places we've lost. We can learn ways to be in that pain until we rebuild around it. It may take a whole lot of supportive people, but if that's what it takes, then start building that support.
You probably already have some that you haven't called in yet. Maybe it's time to call it in.
For those who don't tend to get a lot of words written when you're grieving, the rest of this episode is for you.
I've sort of alluded to my own grieving here, which I'm still very much in as I record this. I thought maybe I should wait to be on the other side before talking about it. But then I realized that, well, it would be a while, but also I wouldn't particularly want someone who's on the other side and prone to like the rosy hindsight, which we all are once we're on the other side of tough things.
Um, but I wouldn't want that to be the person talking to me about grief. So in my experience and from everything that I've read, which is a lot, when I, when I'm up [00:04:00] against something tough, I read about it incessantly, but grief is an emotion. Of the trenches and it seeks out others who are in the trenches with it.
There's a real comfort to finding other people who are grieving when you are.
My grieving is about losing my dog Penny a couple of months ago. Well, the grief is actually bigger than that because I lost my dog Sanga a little over a year before Penny and losing Penny brought Sanga's loss back up. Of course, grief isn't really that compartmentalized generally. So dog loss isn't like losing a child or sibling.
I would guess I haven't lost either of those, but all grief is a little different from other grief, but it's also so much the same.
I adopted Penny when she was seven weeks old. She was my sidekick through the hardest times in my life when I felt so lonely that I didn't want to be around anymore. She was what got me through until [00:05:00] more promising things came around. She was the only constant I had for a really long time, and wherever she was, was home for me.
I had to make the call to say goodbye to her after 15 years together. It was the most loving act I could do for her, and it ripped my heart out of my chest.
If you're familiar with the term soul dog, she was that for me. But her health was deteriorating fast and I didn't want her to have to go back to the emergency bed again because she hated that. Anyway, the house is completely silent now, and if grief had a sound to it, it's silence.
In the last year and a half, I went from writing books with two perfect dogs sleeping at my feet to being completely alone in silence as I write.
Back at the end of 2022, when Senga was dying from cancer, I posed this question to myself and it turned out to be an important one. [00:06:00] How can I grieve without causing myself unnecessary suffering? There's the essential suffering of loss, but I've also seen people do a lot of things that cause additional suffering.
Like trying to pretend they're not grieving, trying to hurry it along. and trying to do all the things they were doing before as if nothing has changed.
But I think this might be the key question to follow if we're going to play out the question of what if I'm grieving. I think we want to ask, how can I grieve without adding additional suffering?
So enough about my own grief, which is clearly really heavy today. Mondays are always like this for me, recording on a Monday, especially after a weekend where I get a bunch of socializing and the, the contrast of that connection to the silence I wake up to is pretty astounding. Pretty breathtaking. Yes, I'm still married.
Uh, but John likes to get up and go to a yoga class at 6 AM lately. So he's up way earlier than I care to be, but [00:07:00] Fridays and Mondays are the hardest for me. Friday's because I take those days off and most people don't. So. All the grief that I accidentally overlooked from the busy week is like, hello there.
And then Monday's for the reason I just explained. I don't know. I wonder if anyone else has found this to be true. Let me know if you have. Anyway, onto the helpful stuff. I knew I was going to need some backup when the time came for Penny to pass on, so I ordered a stack of books about grief. Might as well learn my way through it, right?
So my favorite book so far, and I have more to read, I haven't read the whole stack yet, but my favorite one is called The Grieving Brain by Mary Frances O'Connor. Highly recommend.
It takes a neuroscientific approach to what's happening in us when we grieve, and she talks with experts and breaks down some fascinating studies about grief.
You I find it to be a great basis for the rest of our discussion today. So the first distinction she makes is between grief and grieving. [00:08:00] Grieving is essentially a relearning process. It's when your brain is trying to remap the world without your loved one in it. That process takes a while, and it's full of jolts when you think you hear them coming in the house, or you get excited to see them, and then remember that you can't see them anymore.
I mean, it's just the gut punch after gut punch. I can't tell you how many times I've heard Penny's nails on the tile floor since she passed, or like, felt her sleeping on my legs at night when she wasn't there. That kind of shit is part of the grieving process. What's happening is that our brain map is having to update.
It keeps track of where and when we last saw things. So our conscious mind isn't overwhelmed by all the information. It's what helps you find your phone, right? When was the last time I saw it? Where did I see it? So, it maps the dimensions of space, the where, and time, the when, [00:09:00] but it also maps the dimension of closeness with regard to our loved ones.
How strong is the attachment with them at a point in time, in other words.
When we lose someone, our brain map keeps trying to place them, and all we get back is error codes. If you spent a long time mapping this person into your life, then it's going to take a lot of new information to map them out. Hence why we end up in the grieving process for so long, months, years. Our brains are relearning how to map the world without our loved one in it.
I've taken to saying ouch every time one of these gut kicks hits me. I find vocalizing the pain helps me give it the credit it's owed. Grieving physically hurts like a motherfucker. It just does.
So O'Connor defines grief differently from grieving. Grief is the emotion of loss, and while the grieving process [00:10:00] runs its course, and we eventually stop expecting to see the person or pet that we lost, we don't ever stop feeling grief when a memory of them comes up. We may also feel love and joy when we think of that person, but the emotion of grief will be mixed in there too.
It may be the only emotion we can feel sometimes when we think of them.
We'll always harbor a wish in our hearts that we could touch our loved ones again. If you find yourself wishing that wasn't the case, I asked you to consider the alternative. You stop missing them. They stop mattering to you. Who actually wants that?
The grief is where the love is. And we don't want to stop loving them, do we? So we have to accept that the grief will be part of it forever.
From what I've read and my own experience, grieving feels like wearing a weighted blanket around. That's the physical experience of it. And somehow that blanket is also like [00:11:00] draped over all of your internal organs too, just weighing you down from the inside. You don't ever take off the blanket, but you build up the muscles you need to carry it around and get your, get back to the rest of your life.
And this is where we look directly at our relationship with writing. So this is a podcast for authors, so you knew I was going to bring it back eventually. Now it can feel impossible to continue working on your manuscript when the grief is fresh and you're still in the grieving process. My advice is to avoid pushing through.
Seriously, call in every favor you have. Ask the publisher how far back you can push the deadline. If they're inflexible to your grief, fuck them, frankly. Fuck them. Let that relationship die. But most likely, some human being on the other side will know grief intimately and extend compassion to you. So now is the time to [00:12:00] ask for it.
I know it's hard to ask, but you owe it to yourself to do it.
The biggest skill you can develop in grief. Is asking for help, support, and favors, call in all the favors. Some people will not understand. And those people either haven't been touched deeply by loss or they were, but they didn't allow themselves the grace to face it. And now they're resentful to those who do allow themselves that space.
Either way, screw them. And I can't say that enough. Okay. Screw them. If they're not going to show up for you, screw them. Grief can gift us fantastic perspective if we let it.
What's most likely to happen when you start asking for help, support, and favors from folks is that you discover that almost everyone is eager to support you. The outpouring of love you'll feel from this can go a [00:13:00] long way toward getting you through each day in the thick of the grieving. This is your chance to see who shows up and who doesn't.
This is an opportunity for real clarity in a time when you're deeply plugged into the importance of love and connection and how nothing else in life really matters outside of that.
I'll never forget the friends who sent me cookies, gift certificates for food delivery, who checked up on me, asked what burdens they could carry for me, and just generally made sure I had someone to talk to when I needed it. I'll never forget the friends who didn't shy away when I wanted to talk about the loss and cry.
Those people, I'll remember them for the rest of my life. That clarity that we can gain through grief, it's profound if we lean into it. I will also remember those few, granted few people who made my grief feel like a burden to [00:14:00] them or who acted frustrated when I didn't hit a deadline I'd set prior to the loss.
I don't hold grudges, but I also don't forget that shit. So if you're not grieving right now, So, take this as an opportunity to ask yourself, how do you want to show up for people who are grieving? Because it's not just me who won't forget who was there and who wasn't.
Okay. So that brings me to my first bit of real advice for if you're an author who suddenly finds themselves grieving. The writing can wait. That's my advice. It can wait. And a lot of the times it can never be completed. And that's okay too. If you just never finish a manuscript, think about how many authors have unfinished manuscripts.
It's okay. It happens. This is the reality of it. If ever there were a good excuse, this is it.
The problem is that if we're midway through writing a book, when the loss [00:15:00] takes place, the person who started writing the book is not the same person who is then asked to finish it. We transform into new versions of ourselves when we grieve. It's a necessary process. We let go of things we used to think were important and we just don't care about them anymore.
Our values change, our worldview changes. That can make a manuscript that felt perfectly important suddenly feel like a complete waste of time. And what do you do about that? Maybe there's nothing to do. Maybe you just can't finish that book, or maybe you can't finish it the way you started it. And once you're feeling more recalibrated to the world, you may need to scrap the whole thing and write it in a way that makes sense to who you are today.
All of that is allowed. None of that is the quote, wrong way to write a book or to be an author.
So it's okay if that's what you need to do. Do it. You'll be [00:16:00] happier with the end product if you allow yourself to break some rules you had about how books, quote, should work. You don't work the same. So there's a good chance your writing process will look a little different from before. If you try to force your writing process and the plans for your book to be the same even though you've been forever changed by grief, you're really getting into that unnecessary suffering territory.
Trying to force it. So just as an example, I started planning and drafting the first Alice Lux space adventures book, Lucky Stars, before Senga was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So at that point I had planned on writing a fun and raunchy space jaunt that explored vulnerability. That wasn't the book or the series that I published though.
Senga was dying throughout most of 2022, which ran concurrently to when many folks started re emerging after the pandemic. So all of us are carrying general grief [00:17:00] from that time, whether we admit it or not. Maybe we lost someone we loved to COVID or, but maybe not. We still lost relationships though, didn't we?
Some people went a very different ideological direction from what we expected of them. And that's a loss right there, a loss of relationship, especially if they show a complete lack of care for a demographic that you belong to.
Then think about even just all the restaurants you loved that shuttered forever. And the time we lost. And how things we took for granted in our lives are simply changed forever now. Everywhere there's loss, there's grief. So Each of us are carrying it around with us out of those years, to some extent.
And some people still can't leave the house because they're immunocompromised. And just because the rest of us are sick of staying at home doesn't mean it's entirely safe or even responsible for us to be out and about. And in doing so, we're spreading illnesses that make it even more unsafe for others [00:18:00] to leave their house.
It's a mess, basically. And on top of that, my dog was dying. So how in God's name was I supposed to write the same book then that I planned back in 2019? I was changing too much. I had already changed too much.
So I started thinking about the trope in sci fi where someone's home planet is destroyed. And I related to that pretty strongly. Long story short, the first four books of that series are out now and they're about grief. That's, that's what they're about, more or less. They're about how to go on when your home no longer exists.
And people are asking me when the fifth one will come out, and I just, I don't know. Because I can't write it yet. I'm still too in grief about Penny to write it. I wrote the last one through my grief of losing Senga, and it just about killed me. So yeah, writing comedy when you feel like garbage is a real trial, I tell ya.
[00:19:00] Anyway, my point is that as you change, the kindest thing you can do for yourself is to allow your book to change too. Let the series take a new direction if you have to. Take your readers on your journey. Let them meet the new you. Let them see the new depth of your soul.
That is, If you can write new words at all. If you can't, that's okay. And don't worry, cause you'll be back. Eventually you'll want to write again. It might just be in a different genre, or it might take a couple of years. I know that's scary to think about, especially if your royalties are your livelihood.
That's why I'm saying, You need to get ready to call in every favor you have. Move home, move in with a friend, cut back on expenses. Ask someone who works with ads and does well with ads, if they'll take yours over for a while to get your backlist working for you, call in the favors. You can figure out what it is you can do in the [00:20:00] meantime, and then find people who will pay you to do that.
So it may not be writing. It could be crocheting hats, cleaning houses. Sometimes people in grief really like cleaning. Yeah, I don't know. If it's not you, it's not you. But if it is you, that's an option. You could design book covers if that's a skill you have or whatever. And if you're in a position where you don't have to write to pay your bills, then I suggest you consider taking the opportunity to not write.
Use that time to think, to heal, to rebuild, to get to know yourself all over again. And, of course, if writing is a comfort, feel free, but if it's not, forcing that is the unnecessary suffering pattern.
Other unnecessary suffering during grief includes feeling guilty for needing help, feeling ashamed that you're still not functioning the way you and capitalism would like you to, getting angry at yourself for not having it together, and so [00:21:00] on and so forth. There's really no reason to get down on yourself if you're grieving.
You're just grieving. It's that simple.
What if your only human responsibility in grief is to grieve? What if your judgment about the time it takes isn't beneficial in any way? What would that look like? What would that feel like?
As far as Enneagram is concerned, if you're not well connected to your heart center, then hold on to your butt. If you're grieving, you're about to be way connected to your heart center. There's nowhere to hide from emotions.
So this can be really overwhelming for folks who haven't built many tools for emotional regulation, but I promise that emotions pass. That's what they're designed to do, to come in and then leave. If you just let them show up, do what they need to do, they will leave. , you move through [00:22:00] emotions, you don't get stuck in them.
And if you are stuck in them, go talk to a therapist who can help you through them, because they're just made to come and go. you're gonna be overcome with grief like you've never experienced, right? You, I mean, depending on what the loss is, you may be completely overwhelmed. And you've never experienced anything like this.
And you may cry for an entire day straight without a break. Maybe you can somehow pause to get some water in you so you don't dehydrate, but maybe that's it. And if that's what happens, then that's what needed to happen. Okay? There's still no need for judgment in that case. There is a caveat here. So there's a difference between grief and depression.
So if you find yourself becoming depressed and having hopeless thoughts, then there's no reason to ride that out. Seek some professional help. But if you just need to fall apart and cry until you can't cry anymore, there's not necessarily anything abnormal [00:23:00] about that. Crying's not a danger to our health.
And I say that as someone who's recently cried so hard, my nose bled. , even still, crying is an amazing tool that helps us regulate our nervous system. It completes stress cycles, and there's nothing more stressful to the human body, mind, and heart than losing a loved one. I mean, literally nothing.
That's it. That's the most stressful thing we can go through. I used to hate crying and I tried to control it. Now though, I really see the power in it. I see the healthy benefits of it. A good cry can get me out of rumination on the loss and help me remember what I still have left. It can complete that stress cycle so that I can move on to what's left in my life.
In other words, crying can help us travel the road from grief to gratitude. So those emotions are two sides of the same coin. One is focusing on what is not here anymore, and the other is focusing on what [00:24:00] is here. What we've lost causes us grief, and a moment of remembering what we still have stirs gratitude.
Genuine gratitude is a balm for grief like nothing else. It's not forgetting what we've lost, because we'll never forget that, right? Instead, it's the decision to shift our attention. You don't have to force gratitude though, but in those little cloud breaks between the storms, you're welcome to look for it.
There's no shame in looking for it. It's not giving up to go look for gratitude in your grief. It's not forgetting about the person. When you have the opportunity to shift your attention to what's left. I recommend that you take it. Grief is a past oriented emotion. Gratitude is a present oriented emotion.
And faith is a future oriented emotion. But they all work together on the same continuum, if you let them. And they're all [00:25:00] available to you in every present moment. So we grieve what we've lost. What's in the past and is no longer with us. I mean, it is with us, but you know, in any physical term, we feel gratitude for what we still have in the present.
What is with us right now. And we have faith in what the future holds for us. The things we don't yet have. So sometimes remembering that there's still a big future ahead of us can loosen the grip of the past on us when we need a break. And now this is when we need a break. Don't use the future to escape into so you avoid the grieving.
And don't avoid the grieving like, well, I, I need to be in the present moment all the time. I can't be stuck in the past yet. You're going to be in the past a little bit. You're grieving. Come on. It's okay. No one's giving you a grade here. When we allow our heart center to stay open, we realize our capacity to hold many emotions at once.
It's complicated, but our heart is big enough for it. So like on a blue sky [00:26:00] day, you're outside. There's trees, there's birds, the sky is blue, the weather is perfect. You may feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the world while simultaneously aching for your loved one, who you wish you could share this moment with.
What I find exquisite. And what I love about it is that we're able to hold all of these seemingly opposite emotions at once, and it doesn't make any of them less real or less important. It just makes the blues of the clear sky more vivid for us.
If you're wondering what will happen to your author career if you're grieving, here's my reassurance. Your author career will still be there on the other side of grief if you want it to be, and you'll probably still want it. I haven't seen anyone not want it yet, but you will come back changed, and so will your writing.
You'll have all new stories to tell [00:27:00] and a new way of telling them and readers will likely be in awe of how much emotional depth you're returning with. It's such a gift to give them. But you may need to hit pause on writing during the height of the transformation and the height of your grieving. And this is a gift you give yourself and one you deserve.
It's our birthright, frankly, to be able to hit pause and grieve. So call in the support, call in the favors, call in the goddamn cavalry. This is what the cavalry is for. People will show up for you and that's what you need. So find connection and understanding in others who are familiar with grief and take the time you need, not the time you think you should need, the time you need to heal.
Grief can be complicated when it involves someone we had a strained relationship with, which is basically every human, you know, pets excluded, , to some degree. So I really hope that [00:28:00] you give yourself grace to be messy and to let whatever emotions need to come up, come up. I hope you'll allow yourself to ask for the help you need to call friends in the middle of the night.
They'll show up. You'd be surprised. Ask someone to find you a good grief counselor and schedule your first appointment for you, right? Except all those meals people want to bring you and be okay with some of it going to waste if you can't get to it or it just tastes like shit. That's okay.
And if you haven't been hit by grief yet, which many people have not, go ahead and practice the skills you'll need for it now. Okay. So build support for yourself, show up for other people, practice asking for help when you need it. Tell the people you love that you love them and show them in as many ways as possible, and that's about all we can do to prepare.
So at the end of the day, that's what matters. Being with people, connecting with humans, [00:29:00] feeling, showing, receiving love from others. The writing is nice, but we're here for each other. Your ability to write can disappear and come back later, it usually does, because writing is your human need to connect expressed through writing.
And your need to connect will never disappear. You may just need a different kind of connection for a while. There's no point. And resisting that transition in that natural flow.
So that's it for this episode. I'm tapped. I'm exhausted. I'm probably going to go light a candle on my little doggy altar. , right now I'm thinking of all the people out there who are grieving at this very moment, and I'm sending you the courage to heal. Through these sound waves, if that's possible. If it's possible, I will, I will do it.
And I'm doing my best to try. If you want to reach me, you can email me at, , contact at FFS dot media. I'm Claire Taylor. Thank you for joining me. And I hope you'll return [00:30:00] for next week's episode of What If for Authors.