Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye

What details of your life could you pay more attention to?

It’s interesting that this question came up today. I know exactly what details I could pay more attention to. And that is simply, how I feel. I talk a lot about how I’m much more on top of my mental health now than I was in years past. And I really am, but sometimes I also do a good job of suppressing my emotions.

I mentioned recently that I was triggered by something that brought up fresh memories of my miscarriage from three years ago. Back when it happened, I only took one day off work to deal with the physical side effects, but I didn’t take time to truly grieve. I went back to my job as a teacher and got busy again. Then grad school started and I did my best to keep the emotions pushed down. There would be tears every now and then as I thought about it, but I never allowed myself to cry the soul-emptying cry that I needed to. At my last therapy appointment, she told me it’s time for me to do that.

I knew I wanted to take a day off work at some point for that purpose, but until today, I hadn’t done that. As with most triggers, the feeling that was brought up didn’t last. I’ve been on this Taylor Swift musical journey and when I posted about my miscarriage on Threads and how I haven’t yet fully processed the emotions from it, many of the people who follow me for my Taylor Swift posts told me about the song “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” on her Midnights album. I didn’t skip ahead to that song and honestly, I kind of forgot about it. Until last night.

The song came up as I was trying to power through the Midnights album. It has lyrics like:

“Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye

You were bigger than the whole sky

You were more than just a short time

And I’ve got a lot to pine about.

I’ve got a lot to live without

I’m never gonna meet what could’ve been, would’ve been, should’ve been you”

“Every single thing to come has turned to ash”

“‘Cause it’s all over now”

“Not meant to be”

It brought on a flood of tears last night, and knowing that I have another therapy appointment tonight, I decided that today was the day to take the day off and grieve.

This morning, on the couch with my dogs, I listened to the song on repeat and just cried. And cried. And at one point, I pulled out my journal and wrote everything I was thinking as I listened to the song. There’s a line in the song that asks if a force took “you” away because I didn’t pray. I wrote about how I did pray. There was never a child who was prayed for more. My stream of consciousness filled six pages in my journal.

And eventually the tears ran out and I closed my journal. I laid down after that and took a really long nap.

My eyes are pretty swollen, red, and a little bit sore. But I was able to type those lyrics above without tearing up. And I think that’s the littlest sign that I did what I needed to do. Of course, I don’t think I will never feel upset by this again, or that I will never shed another tear about it, but I’ve completed a big step of the process. One that I should have taken all those years ago, but didn’t. Because it was too hard and too painful. The grief was too intense, so I ignored it and pretended it wasn’t there. I intentionally didn’t pay attention to it.

But I need to stop doing that. Not just about this, but about anything else that comes up that is difficult for whatever reason. I can do hard things. I need to always remember that and recognize when it’s necessary to put in the hard work and get those things done.

I may or may not skip over this song in the future when it comes up. Many Swifties said it’s an immediate skip for them. We’ll see how it goes when it happens. It might not immediately make me cry like it did last night and this morning, but even if it does, I’m going to let it do whatever it does. I won’t ignore my feelings anymore. I’ll be sure to pay attention now.