It seems important to note as a followup: When I started conceptualizing this post, I had dealt with ~3 medium-sized grievings in a row (each of which was ~a week of dedicated effortful work to process, and move on to the next grieving).
I had also started the process of ~2-3 major grievings (depending on how you count things).
Medium grieving rough summaries:
giving up on a friendship that had been important to me
giving up my investment in the Coordination Frontier framework (I’m still a bit confused about this
There were also some grieving-adjaecent things I’d consider more like “processing trauma” than like grieving, which also took ~ a week.
Major grieving examples:
leaving a major relationship
changing my relational stance to my local community, and shifting to focus more on x-risk.
changing my conception of what kinds of “community” made sense in the first place
considering whether to work a lot harder on x-risk than I felt comfortable with
I thought I had a handle on minor/medium grievings, and developed a flow that processed it efficiently. My previous experience with friends dying and relationship breakups also hadn’t been that rough for me, so I expected the upcoming major things to take a few month, and for my existing framework to mostly translate to them.
Instead, it’s been over year, and I’m only just recently feeling “okay”, and processed everything to a point where I feel like I’ve returned to (close to) my original baseline.
When I went to write this post a few months ago, I started off with a mindset of “this is a straightforward framework that works for me, which applies at multiple scales.” As I wrote the post, I realized the major grievings were still ongoing and I hadn’t actually fixed them. I rewrote the post a bunch to try and incorporate that. I think in the end I avoided saying anything false… but I think the post still has a bit of a vibe of “grieving is difficult but this Orient/Catharsis framework still feels like a solid core loop underlying it.”
And now my belief is more like “geeze, major grievings are just big fucking deals, I don’t even really know what to do with them really. You can work your way through them somewhat deliberately but holy christ they’re messy and don’t follow much of a schedule. Good luck, idk.
I’m not sure how to rewrite the post to get the Vibe of that right, but wanted to leave this comment to make it more clear.
It seems important to note as a followup: When I started conceptualizing this post, I had dealt with ~3 medium-sized grievings in a row (each of which was ~a week of dedicated effortful work to process, and move on to the next grieving).
I had also started the process of ~2-3 major grievings (depending on how you count things).
Medium grieving rough summaries:
giving up on a friendship that had been important to me
giving up my investment in the Coordination Frontier framework (I’m still a bit confused about this
There were also some grieving-adjaecent things I’d consider more like “processing trauma” than like grieving, which also took ~ a week.
Major grieving examples:
leaving a major relationship
changing my relational stance to my local community, and shifting to focus more on x-risk.
changing my conception of what kinds of “community” made sense in the first place
considering whether to work a lot harder on x-risk than I felt comfortable with
I thought I had a handle on minor/medium grievings, and developed a flow that processed it efficiently. My previous experience with friends dying and relationship breakups also hadn’t been that rough for me, so I expected the upcoming major things to take a few month, and for my existing framework to mostly translate to them.
Instead, it’s been over year, and I’m only just recently feeling “okay”, and processed everything to a point where I feel like I’ve returned to (close to) my original baseline.
When I went to write this post a few months ago, I started off with a mindset of “this is a straightforward framework that works for me, which applies at multiple scales.” As I wrote the post, I realized the major grievings were still ongoing and I hadn’t actually fixed them. I rewrote the post a bunch to try and incorporate that. I think in the end I avoided saying anything false… but I think the post still has a bit of a vibe of “grieving is difficult but this Orient/Catharsis framework still feels like a solid core loop underlying it.”
And now my belief is more like “geeze, major grievings are just big fucking deals, I don’t even really know what to do with them really. You can work your way through them somewhat deliberately but holy christ they’re messy and don’t follow much of a schedule. Good luck, idk.
I’m not sure how to rewrite the post to get the Vibe of that right, but wanted to leave this comment to make it more clear.