Hi friends! I can’t believe it’s only been five months since I started on Substack, with my “What Have I Got to Lose?” newsletter about trying Ozempic so I could lose weight for health reasons. I’m still wending my way through the bog of health and weight, though now without the help of drugs: my husband and I have been on the AIP diet for a week. Since I can’t have regular sugar, chocolate, or dairy, I’ve been gradually losing weight. To be honest, we’re claiming September 9th as our start date, but we extended the whole milk we both use in our black English tea for as long as possible, just in the mornings. The rest of the day, we switched to other kinds of tea, and now we’re full AIP. And yes, it sucks.
A few things I’ve learned: having a medjool date after a meal helps satisfy my dessert craving; I don’t actually like many types of tea other than strong black with milk; coconut brown sugar is delicious; I can’t go to the regular grocery store these days because all the chocolate and ice cream beg me to buy them and eat them in the car; and I can do this ridiculously restrictive diet for 30-90 days, but I can’t think about my body all the time while doing so.
Thus the change in this newsletter. I completely understand if you choose to unsubscribe because you were interested in weight and health issues, not grief and loss issues. For me, the two are connected, because everyone I know with a chronic illness grieves the more energetic, relatively pain-free body they used to have. Everyone I know who has put on weight since their younger years grieves that younger body, which they probably didn’t appreciate even then because they always felt they “could stand to lose five pounds.” And everyone I know, regardless of the weight or health of their body, has experienced loss.
Maybe you haven’t lost a person who’s close to you, but perhaps you’ve lost a pet, a friendship, the little town you grew up in that’s become a suburb, a career you loved, a marriage. Maybe your loss affected your identity, making the ground shift underneath you, especially when someone new asked basic questions. Maybe your loss was so long ago that you feel like you should be “over it already,” in which case you might find the analogy in this short video useful. One of my greatest losses was having to move away from the horse farm where I grew up when I was 10. I’ve written about it for the last 45 years.
I’m a poet and creative nonfiction writer (creative nonfiction just being true writing that uses some of the tools of poetry and fiction, and which includes memoir, personal essays, lyric essays, and more), and after various losses, including my mother, my career, and my sister, I finally decided to delve into the mysteries of grief more deeply. And what I discovered was that I’m not the only one to resist the standard cliches our culture spouts: just get over it, time heals all wounds, accept reality and move on, go through the stages and you’ll be done… There are professionals, from therapists to coaches, who focus on facing grief creatively. In fact, many of them believe creativity itself is key in processing grief and re-forming your identity after a loss.
I’m currently in a fairly demanding course on the very topic of grief and creativity, and I’ve been figuring out how I want to provide grief support within my own sphere of creative writing. I know there will be workshops, classes, and individual mentoring, but I’m still working out the details. I’ll let you know when I get the first options set up. In the meantime, I’m learning—and like most writers, I learn through writing. That’s what you’ll see here.
p.s. Please share your favorite tea taken without milk in the comments! Fancy, loose leaf, caffeinated or otherwise.
This gives me a lot to consider. Thanks for writing.
You are a warrior! I will buy Medjools. You tried cardamom w your tea?