Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Full Drawers
by Jo Winkowitsch

Note: To try to eliminate confusion, any mention in this article referring to Drawers means “boxlike compartments in furniture that can be pulled out and pushed in”.

I have a confession to make. Now maybe you are not into confessions, or maybe you just think it is strange that a person who most of you do not know would want to confess something here on these pages. But here goes…
I have drawers that I put my mail and magazines and clutter into.
Lots of them.
Oh, not just one drawer. Or two. I have multiple drawers, in multiple rooms. I have drawers for papers and magazines and mail in my kitchen, dining room, bedroom, utility room and office. I even bought a hutch a year ago with big drawers, just so I could hide my paper things when guests came over.
Now those of you who are “Tsk, tsking”… you can just as well stop reading and turn your attention to another interesting blog, because this one is not for you. This post is for those, like me, who have been known to hide, stuff, walk around and try to ignore things which can and should be uncovered, dealt with, noticed and sorted.
So, are you wondering why am I confessing this is a problem for me?
Well, there is a good grief analogy here in these lines. Grief and losses cause an onslaught of things, like a full mailbox, day after day to come crashing into our lives. To keep doing life, we may look for a way to store it, instead of dealing with it as it comes. If you have to do this for a time, do it. But eventually you’ll run out of places to hide it away.
Sometimes, when I am busy throwing stuff into those drawers I run into a problem. They are too full of things I need to sort out. Although some might say to “Just get rid of it all!” (which might appear easier)… I know I will miss out if I just dump everything. Would that be a simpler and quicker solution than sorting? Yes. But I make myself work at making the time and energy so that I can throw away the junk and keep the good stuff. There are treasures in those drawers.

Many of us stuff our feelings away when we are faced with the difficult emotions associated with grief. Sometimes we put happy and sad and angry and confused into our little piles and try to hide them away from the people in our lives. We might even try to hide them away from ourselves, because we are overwhelmed with life and this is a choice we make so we can cope with it. So we attempt to tidy up the counters of our lives, but giving the appearance of everything being in its place. But it’s not.. It’s not helpful to just keep finding new places to put the mess in.
We may need a reminder that those emotional drawers can only hold so much before they will hold no more. Sometimes we need to hear the crack of a drawer filled to overflowing which is threatening to break if we try to stuff one more thing into it. Sometimes we need to take the time to sit down and sort out what we’ve put there and still need to deal with. Sometimes we need to feel what we have tried not to feel.
It might be tempting to throw it all away. You, like me, might have even tried to do that a time or two. It doesn’t work, long term. More than likely you will miss the things you haphazardly threw out, or you’ll be forced to deal with the bills & correspondence at some point.
Hopefully, you have discovered, as I have, that we lose when we resort to stuffing emotions in order to give the appearance of being “okay”. We lose when we randomly try to get rid of emotions that might be sad or heavy, or seem worthless at the time. It is to our benefit if we contemplate what we feel and why. Then we can make good choices about what to do with our feelings. Doing something with our feelings is similar to doing something with the things in the drawers… We handle and touch them and acknowledge them as ours. We take out what the drawers hold and commit to not just find another drawer to stuff our emotions in. But it could be painful, and that might make us want to keep stuffing the emotions away.
Does it help to know that in the process of feeling and dealing with our losses we are given gifts along with the pain? We can learn how to celebrate what we can, while mourning what cannot be changed. We can learn to appreciate and notice what we have, and who we have in our life. We can come closer to being content in whatever situation we are in, as we look at what we can change and where we want to go in life, as we examine our choices. We can allow ourselves times of being a beautiful mess as we are in the process of the sorting and feeling and throwing away and keeping.
Many of the furniture drawers are still full at my house, both in reality and figuratively. But I, like many of you, am forced to do something with the ‘mail’ that grief has given me. I can deal with it now or later… the choice is mine. And time will help me, as long as I do not neglect the duty of being responsible to sort and feel and read my mail. If I get behind, I will have a more difficult time getting caught up.
Do you have drawers full of things you need to look at and sort? Is it overwhelming for you to think about starting such a task? Do you need a friend to do that with? We all may be surprised to find willing helpers standing by if we dare to ask for help. The truth is, many of our friends and family want to help, but don’t know what to do. All it might take is a request on our part to find encouragement as someone cares or tries to understand what we are going through as we spread our “mess” out on the table. Find someone who will help you. Though it may be a difficult task, the benefits are worth it, and you do not need to do it alone.