Grieving your parents in your 20's
- Sad Girl
- Sep 23, 2024
- 0 min read
Updated: Sep 26, 2024
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Losing a parent at any age is horrible and soul destroying but losing both while you're still emerging into adulthood is something I still can't comprehend. It's been just over two years since my dad has passed and eleven months since my Mum, cancer stole them away in a brutal but quick battle that left me and my family completely traumatised and to be truthful I'm not even sure I've started the grieving process, what even is the grieving process?
Nobody can prepare you for this, and it's a living nightmare trying to navigate your life when the most important people aren't in it anymore. But what I have learnt, is that there are no right or wrong things to do. I still text my dad, and I still think my Mum is at home watching TV, crocheting rugrat characters. It's okay to be a little bit in denial some days, you don’t need to come to terms with this straight away, or ever if you don't want to! I know my parents have died and I know how destroyed I am because of it, but if thinking they're on holiday helps me today then let me! Denial isn't always a bad thing, it can help.
The truth is, is that nobody can prepare you for this. It's like being in a parallel universe, nothing is the same, friends, family, and even we aren't the same. Our parents were the glue that held everyone together and when they die, we die a little bit with them too, so it's hard when we must glue the pieces back to where they were before, which is impossible because when you go through something like this we do change as people.
It's not okay that they won't see us get married, or have kids, or get a promotion at work, or fall in love, it’s not fair that we have to watch others have those moments, and it's okay to be jealous and sad about that, I am every day.
I miss laughing and crying with them and just hanging out and talking about nothing with them. If we're lucky to have good parents, they'll be your best friends and nothing will compare, and that’s the hardest thing about this.
I still question everything I do, and I constantly feel like I'm getting scammed, even by the dentist! (which is probably true) but who can I ask about this stuff? because at the end of the day, no matter how old we are we're still just kids who need our parents.
I'm still Trying to work through this grief so I don't have many answers, but I feel sad today, like the "If I start crying I won't be able to stop" type of sad, and so I like to distract myself with anything I can, like playing Sims, or going for a drive, stuff like that can help me through days like this. If you're in the same boat as me try something as simple as rewatching a show you've seen hundreds of times, do anything to distract yourself and if you can't, just try again tomorrow. The best thing to do if you can, is being around people, my sisters help me so much! It's comforting talking about this with someone who's in the thick of it with you and you can help each other. That’s the thing about grief, we're all just trying to figure it out!
Thanks for reading my first blog! I hope it's not all over the place, I'm still learning! If you are going through something similar and want to message me, I'm here, I know how crap this is.
Sad Girl
xoxoxox
When I was 20 years old, I had a mental breakdown that led me into getting admitted to hospital about week later. I was struggling silently with anxiety and depression for years, and I had loads of different, harmful coping mechanisms that I would do to handle it and push it down which only made things worse for me!
Because depression and anxiety don’t go away if you ignore it, they become bigger, meaner and uglier until it completely engulfs you, and then before you know it, you’re not talking to your family, you stop speaking to your friends, you’re anxious about everything, you’re quieter, you feel lonely, the list goes on! And when the sadness doesn’t feel so loud anymore you become numb, then you neglect even more things that feel impossible to do like wanting to shower, or brushing your teeth, or cleaning your room, and even looking in the mirror! Depression makes us blind to the things that help us function, and I still struggle with these things in my day-to-day life.
It’s a vicious cycle when I come out of a depressive fog, because it makes me even more depressed when I see how messy my room has gotten! And it’s always my room, it always looks like a crime scene, and I get so overwhelmed with it that it puts me back in that blind haze I was in, so in turn it just keeps getting worse. Our bedrooms are our most vulnerable spaces, it’s where we nest, dream, and get naked, and when we get depressed some of us spend a lot of time in them.
When I was in hospital, my bedroom was constantly in the back of my mind, I couldn’t even walk to my door, or sleep in my bed, and I was terrified of my dad or anyone in my family uncovering my big dirty secret.
If you’re looking around your room right now and are overwhelmed with the mess, please know that it didn’t get that way because you’re lazy or dirty, this could be a symptom of depression and it’s not your fault it get likes it, it’s more common than you think! My Mum was the same as me, it’s just something that happens that makes us feel like shit! it’s not the end of the world, it’s just mess and it can be cleaned. Besides you have more important things going on inside you that need more attention. Brain first, room later, however just because we are going through depression doesn’t mean we don’t deserve a clean space.
Trigger warning - this is what mine looked like before I went into hospital.
It’s bad. I know, I’m debating whether to even show this to tell you the truth, but if yours is the same or worse or not as bad, it could make you feel a little better, it would have made me feel better! Because this picture encompasses everything I was feeling back then, and this is how depression can look sometimes. I took a picture in the hopes that it would motivate me into cleaning it, spoiler alert it didn’t! But I will say my room has never been this bad since, so small wins.
We have extremely low motivation when we’re in this head space, so it makes it so much harder to know where to start or when we want to clean it, and that’s when asking for support really is important if you can ask for it. I couldn’t at the time, I was too scared and ashamed, still am sometimes, but I didn’t need to be! Because it’s not impossible, and it can be done, however I know how hard it can be to do that.
It feels taboo that I’m even going to attempt to write about depression let alone the mess that it makes because it’s so personal to everyone. It feels like this big ugly secret, and that if we say it out loud the ground will swallow us up and Bloody Mary will appear. She won’t, she’s not real, but depression is very real! and even though having depression is unique to everyone and it doesn’t fit in a “one size fits all” box we can all agree that it’s a plague on our lives and that it takes and takes so much from us, until we’re just shells of the people we once were. Sounds depressing, I know! But It’s because it literally is.
So, when I was in hospital, my dad and my sisters went into my room, and they were stunned. They didn’t realise how bad it got, and although it was an emotional experience for them, they cleaned it, and even gave me a bedroom makeover! When my dad told me this I was mortified and destroyed! We had a big fight, and I was so embarrassed, I felt so exposed and ashamed. They did the most nicest and most kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me, and I was devastated, but they changed my life and I am so grateful for them, and grateful for what they did for me, and even to this day, they have no judgement when I ask for help sometimes, and I realise how lucky I am for my sisters and how lucky I was for my Dad.
If you want to start cleaning your room and you don’t want to ask anyone, start doing little things each day to clean it, and eventually you’ll get to a place when you might feel comfortable asking for help from a friend, and if not just keep doing those baby steps and eventually it will get easier. I still get so overwhelmed when my room gets messy, but I do those small steps and it does help me, and when it’s clean, a weight will be lifted off your shoulders, it won’t cure your depression, but it will lessen that anxiety you feel when you are surrounded by chaos.
It’s so easy to think that nobody cares for you when you’re depressed, but people in your life do care, and they do want to help you! Messy rooms can come and go, it’s our minds that need cleaning and a mental makeover.
Thanks for reading this post, I hope that it can help you if you’re going through the same thing, because it’s incredibly difficult to go through this alone! Now that you've seen my messy room, show me yours, theres no shame here.
Sad Girl
Xoxox
Anxiety in any form is one of the most debilitating things you can experience because it affects our day to day lives. It’s like a shadow that constantly whispers in our ears about all the things that could happen to us. Have a spot on your bum? Probably cancer, want to go to the shops? Probably get mugged. Want to go on a date? Might get murdered. The torment is never ending, and we have no choice but to obsesses over it until we feel better, which we rarely do.
I struggle with health anxiety daily, and it’s gotten worse since losing my parents to cancer. I constantly feel like everyone around me is dying and that I have some secret disease I don’t know about! So anything that feels a little off about me whether it be a spot or a rash or anything to do with my asthma, I will then spend hours scrolling through google looking at signs and symptoms, desperate to find anything that will validate how I feel.
However, google is not our friend and it can make things ten times worse. I’m addicted to googling and self-diagnosing anything that comes my way and once I start obsessing over it there is no stopping me, it’s like an itch you can’t scratch, I won’t sleep or eat till I have the answers I want or until someone physically slaps me round the face. They call it cyberchondria. Google it. It’s health anxiety created by internet searches, and it can make you slowly go insane. Google will always show you the most tragic result of anything, and it’s always an incurable disease or a rare cancer with no survival rate, but that is because those searches are the most clicked on, hence why those are the results that are shown to us the most! But we don’t care about that now, the damage has already been done and we’re halfway through a panic attack, on the phone to 111 or screaming at the pharmacist (regrettably I’ve done both) health anxiety is not fun, and it can take over your life very quickly.
My anxiety around my health got so bad once, I couldn’t sleep in my room or be on my own, I was having panic attacks every day and constantly wanting to go to A&E, my dad didn’t know what was wrong with me. The only way I would be somewhat calm, was if he watched over me when I slept and bless his soul he did (thank you dad) it all got too much though and I was sent to hospital, which I loved the idea of at the time as I felt safe that doctors were around me 24/7 it was honestly my dream, but that quickly wore off.
I’ve not been as bad with health anxiety and panic attacks since then and I have some little things that have helped me and that might help you if you’re going through the same thing.
Firstly, don’t look anything up on google if you can help it, ask someone else to look, preferably someone who knows that you suffer with anxiety and have a tendency to get anxious if you look anything up. I ask my sister, and she’ll just tell me the most basic, most non offensive result and she’ll keep doing it till I’m okay.
Secondly, try not to read too much into the side effects of medications if you can help it, and if you can’t help it, get someone else to do it for you! You can always tell your therapist or psychiatrist that side effects scare you and they can navigate the best way to treat you.
And thirdly, if you feel yourself start to go into doctor google mode, put your phone down and do something else, anything else! Play a game, colour, or talk to someone and let them know what you’re worried about. I treat google like giving up cigarettes, I must limit myself or I just drive myself into a frenzy! But sometimes it’s impossible to ignore and that’s where medication can truly help if you’re lucky to get your hands on some, I know some people think medication is the devil and that it doesn’t solve anything but they’re also the people who don’t stay up all night rocking back and forth scared of a heat rash! Medication helps, and I’d be a wreck without it.
Everyone gets anxious about their health, it’s just how humans work now, and is it really any surprise why? We’re constantly getting told as a society that everything we love or do will give us cancer or get us killed! Sometimes I feel like life would be easier if people just wrote articles saying that It’s not a death sentence if you forget to put suncream on in the morning and that the grim reaper won’t magically appear if you have a Big Mac once in a while! They say never meet your idols; I say never read click bait articles about things you enjoy and consume! If I had a penny for every article I’ve read about the dangers of Diet Coke I’d be a millionaire, let us live in peace!
If only it was as easy as just ignoring it! it isn’t though because once the seed is planted it just grows and grows like a big, anxious beanstalk, and the only way you can cut it down is if you have help. Having a panic attack, no matter the reason, is a terrifying and physical experience. It can make you feel like your throat is closing up, you can experience shortness of breath, you can have heart palpitations the list goes on, most people have panic attacks when they’re on their own so it can make it even more scary!
I know how hard it is to ask for help when going through this, especially with health anxiety because we genuinely do think we are dying, the number of times I was screaming in the middle of A&E you’d think I was dying! So, it’s hard to trust doctors when they give us a clean bill of health because by the time we pluck up the courage to visit one we are already certain what we have is life threatning and probably cancer and no second, third or fourth opinion will change our mind. The only way to truly trust anyone and yourself again is to ask for help, even talking about it out loud to a friend can help, getting these feelings off your chest can lift a massive weight off your shoulders. Health anxiety is a lot more common than you think, and everyone goes through it differently. You are not alone!
Thank you for reading this post, anxiety is so stressful to deal with, and i've struggled this week so it feels good to get this off my chest! If you're going through the same thing and don't know what to do, please talk to someone and see about getting help, and of course you can always message me as I love hearing from you.
Sad Girl
xoxox
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