Grieving the Experience.

If there’s anything to learn from the first episode of Ugly Betty’s second season, apart from all the fabulous fashion tips, it would be this – you can’t move on until you let go. You can’t go on to see the future, even as it happens before your face, if you keep holding on to the past. As such, you run the risk of missing the best bit. You miss out on getting the present.

It isn’t difficult to realize on hindsight, how harbouring thoughts of what had happened while speculating what might have been can be destructive. The suspicion and doubt eats and it becomes easy to wallow in that emotion. Depression feeds on that and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle.

But the need to grieve cannot be denied. It is the grieving that allows for one to escape the vicious cycle. Nevertheless, the difference between grieving and depression is critical. Grieving accepts the past. It does not deny its reality. It accepts what has happened. It accepts what as inevitable. It mourns for what it is – a tragedy that was experienced. It does not speculate what might have been.

Grieving allows the mourner to process and compartmentalize the experience. Grieving makes the living grow wiser and thus richer. At the end of the grieving, it makes for the statement that an experience has consequently enriched a life. An experience has allowed sensations. An experience has allowed me to embrace life… more.