Both//And

Both can be true.

In the same breath, you can feel both resilience and fragility, hope and despair, anger and gentle longing, numbness and hypersensitivity, connection and suspicion, and so on.

At the origin of my grief, a sheer beat after my mom was killed, I felt two incredibly intense and contradictory emotions: absolute relief that my mom was now safer than she had been in decades and that my dad could no longer hurt me, and fury-filled, grievous devastation that she was dead only because of the wicked hands of my father. I could not find a way to allow these emotions to co-exist, peacefully and willfully, as they demanded. Instead, I fought the relief I had felt, convinced that it was inappropriate to feel anything beyond rage and grief. I turned against myself, tormented by thoughts that these “positive” emotions were indicative of my selfishness, weakness, and greed. I believed that I was failing as a daughter, as an advocate for my mom, and as a griever because of these moments when other feelings lived in adjacency with the grief. This became increasingly problematic as life pushed on and bits of joy began to return to me. I couldn’t help but divide my emotions into clear-cut, explicit categories of right and wrong, loyal and disloyal. I believed that grief demanded celibacy from joy, that to honor my mother, I had to stay inside the agreed-upon emotions of sorrow and rage, and when I inevitably couldn’t, I was failing. Relief felt like betrayal, joy like treason. The slightest hint of lightness or pleasure made me question my devotion to her.

This is a laborious, unattainable way to live, to think that my mom’s honor and legacy was hinged upon my ability to be bereft, broken. To despise the parts of me that stumbled upon joy along the way.

So, I have come to accept that two (or more) emotions, no matter how opposite, can and will sync. This did not come to me with peace, gentleness; instead, it came as weariness—wisdom born from the sheer impossibility of maintaining war within myself. I had been splitting every feeling in two: love or betrayal, devotion or freedom, despair or joy. But grief, I learned, does not live in binaries. It sprawls. It bleeds through its own borders. It is both/and, always. And the moment I stopped policing the various contradictions that I felt, the ache shifted. It didn’t vanish, but it softened, as if it were a wound, tightly encased in gauze, finally given air.

Holding contradictions, faithfully and gently, is the crux of healing.

Further along, I was faced with another large, world-shaking contradiction: My mom did everything she could to protect me within the bounds of her capacity, but she failed many times to keep me safe, supported, and beaconed. For so long, I denied this; I held no fault against her because it would be the greatest betrayal for her daughter to reflect on her humanity that was stolen from her. But by not allowing both of these things to be true, her imperfect motherhood, I thwarted the processing of my trauma. It was like trying to complete a puzzle with some pieces that had no divots, no curves, just these seamless, perfect pieces that did not fit.

It was not until I could sit with both truths in my palms, her heroic attempts and her disappointing failures, without judgment of myself or her, that I could have the proper and healthy perspective required for recovery. It was then that I could sift through the puzzle pieces and find the suitable ones, carved to match the imagery forming before me.

Both can, and will always, be true. Accepting and honoring that truth, without critique or questioning, will revolutionize your healing and offer a tremendous sense of relief. And relief feels like palpable, substantial hope in the midst of grief.