Dear Grief Guide, I Feel Like Alien On Another Planet

A young fatherless daughter feels like grief has made her an alien, and is wondering how to navigate living on "Planet Grief." I read her anonymous letter and then offer her practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through grief.

Dear Grief Guide is a weekly advice podcast where I answer anonymous letters from people feeling lost, stuck, or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

Do you ever feel like an alien among people?

Trying to get back to normal after losing my dad is crazy.

He was a huge part of my life and navigating this new world without him feels like half my brain was removed overnight.

I'm struggling to get moving while everyone else around me is trucking along like nothing happened,

Like he never even existed.

Being around my friends makes me feel like I'm 15 years older than them.

I'm in my late 20s and no one in my age group has been through anything like this.

They're just now starting to lose their grandparents and have no idea what it's like to be in my shoes.

They're making plans for holidays and birthdays while I'm still trying to plan a funeral.

They're ready for me to be normal and fun again,

But I barely feel human.

I have no idea how to act anymore.

In one of my group chats,

A friend freaked out because she found her first gray hair,

Referring to it as a quote-unquote crisis.

I just stared at my phone thinking,

How in hell do I even respond to that?

I'm just sad all the time and I don't have the energy to pretend.

My whole world has been shattered and I'm not the same.

It's like I'm an alien trying to integrate with humans.

I just keep thinking I don't fit in anymore.

Grief Guide,

Please help me.

How long does this feeling last?

Sincerely,

No longer an Earthling.

Hi there,

Alien no longer an Earthling.

I see you.

I feel you in this.

And I gotta tell you right up front,

You're not wrong.

You don't fit in anymore.

And maybe this is counterintuitive and maybe what you want me to say is,

Of course you still fit in,

Of course you're still among people,

Of course you're still among friends and humans and loved ones and all that jazz,

No.

Grief makes you,

Makes each of us who grieves,

A sort of outsider,

A sort of alien,

A sort of outcast looking through life that other people seem to be living through tinted or bubbly glass.

It's like that world is no longer accessible to you anymore and that you've been cast out of it.

I a thousand million percent resonate with that feeling.

I was in college when the biggest of my losses happened,

What I affectionately refer to as the first and the worst,

My mother's death.

Two years before that,

Before she died when I was 19,

My father was in and out of the hospital for two brain aneurysms,

One on either side of his head,

Each threatened to kill him.

And at 19,

Freshman,

Sophomore year in college,

I was reckoning with what it would mean if I got a phone call that my father died.

And I watched him reckon with his mortality and the fact that he might not make it through this.

It was a very scary thing to have happen.

And yet to be going through the motions with all these other students,

Going to classes,

Going to parties,

Forming new friendships,

All the things that you're supposed to quote unquote normally do in college while it was like I was living this double grief life.

And then my mom got sick and then she died.

And that feeling of living a double life got bigger.

It was as if I was now living on an entirely different planet,

Looking back at everyone on earth,

That old life I used to live,

And thinking,

I have no idea how to access that.

I have no idea how to be a part of that.

I do not fit into that world anymore.

That world does not know me.

That world is not of me.

I am not of that world,

For lack of better phrasing.

I had friends who tried to be supportive,

But at 21 years old,

That looks a lot like,

Hey,

Just distract yourself by coming to this party,

Hey,

Have a drink,

Hey,

Ditch studying and come drive around with us.

It was a lot of distraction-oriented coping,

Which is great if you make an F on a test,

A thing that's inconsequential,

A thing that in the grand scheme of things doesn't really matter.

But what I was going through was something that mattered most of all,

And continues to matter to this day,

Is my mother's death.

It has changed the entire trajectory of my life,

And the things that I could use to cope with a bad grade on a test were not the same things I could use to cope with my mother's death.

And yet that's all people my age had to offer me.

And just like you,

I had the people around me going through situations like breakups or getting bad grades on tests or not knowing how to be around their family during the holidays or having a conflict with a teacher or something like that,

And they made them out to be crises.

And all I could think in the same room as them as they were talking about their fears and woes is you have no idea what a real crisis is.

What I am living through right now.

I am in active crisis.

And no one knows.

I remember this happening two later,

Years later,

After my mother's death,

I was serving tables at an upscale restaurant in Chicago,

And this woman chose to yell at me because of all the courses of her and her husband's meal,

There was one course where her dish came a few minutes before her husband's.

And she assumed I wasn't paying attention.

She assumed it was the fault of the restaurant.

I imagine she was making a lot of assumptions.

And I also have no idea what she was going through.

But she chose to yell at me and berate me in a crowded restaurant full of people.

And it was as if that was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

And I just stood there stone-faced with a small smile of acknowledgement on my face.

And in the back of my head,

All I could think was,

You can't scare me.

This isn't a crisis.

My mom died.

That's a crisis?

What you now have,

No longer an Earthling,

Is this perspective,

This awful perspective,

On what makes a crisis and what does not.

On what you are going through versus what others have yet to experience.

And there is a distance in that.

I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that there is a way for your friends to understand your grief and your pain.

There may not be.

The good news is,

If there is good news to be had,

Is that there are communities of people who get what you're going through.

The first thing I'll offer you,

Of course,

Is Life After Loss Academy.

It is led by me,

Early 30s,

Had my loss in my early 20s,

My first big loss,

The first and the worst,

More losses to follow,

Unfortunately,

Sad but true.

There are other members of Life After Loss Academy who are also in their 20s and 30s.

But the cool part,

Too,

Is that there are also people in Life After Loss Academy in their 50s and 60s who remember what it was like to experience loss in their 20s and 30s.

What they needed,

What they wished they had,

What they wished someone had said to them.

And now,

With that wisdom,

They apply that forward.

They pay it forward to the rest of us who are in this community together.

Another resource I'll offer you is The Dinner Party.

It is a grief support group explicitly,

Exclusively for people in their 20s and 30s.

To my knowledge,

It is worldwide.

You can join a table at any time.

And it's sort of like a potluck grief support group where you enter someone's home or community center or a local restaurant.

And there is this baseline level of understanding that even if everyone at the table is a stranger,

When you get there,

Everyone has this baseline of having experienced some sort of devastating loss and it is something I leaned on very heavily in the first few years after my mother's death.

The last resource I'll offer you,

And one of my favorites,

Is Modern Loss.

And this is a blog,

A community,

They put on series of workshops every now and then,

And it is written about what it's like to grieve in our modern age.

It was founded by two people who lost their parents in their early 20s and 30s.

The articles are written by people,

Mostly millennials and younger,

Who know what it's like to experience loss and to grieve in this age where social media and smartphones and technology and AI are floating in the atmosphere of what it looks like to mourn someone we love who's died.

They share advice,

They share wisdom,

Sometimes it's funny,

Which can be a relief when you're grieving.

And they offer opportunities to make connections and form friendships with people who've experienced similar losses.

And one of my favorite things you might like to take part of that Modern Loss does is gift exchanges during the holidays,

During Mother's Day,

And for you,

During Father's Day.

So you get paired with somebody else who is grieving and you can do a gift exchange with them on a holiday that can be really shattering in the aftermath of loss.

When you feel like an alien in a world that used to feel like home,

One of the best things you can do for yourself is find others who have been alienated by grief.

And we are out here.

It doesn't mean ditching your friends,

But it may mean taking a small step back or a big step back or widening your Venn diagram of connections to include maybe one or two circles of people who are grieving just like you are.

To know what it is to lose at that level.

To live life through this lens.

I don't think you're crazy for feeling like an alien,

It is a very normal,

Common experience that grieving people have.

And to your last question,

How long does this last,

I can't tell you.

I do know that the feeling of being an outsider,

Being an outcast,

Standing outside that window,

Looking in,

And having no access to that life anymore,

That softened when another door opened.

When I realized there was another community to join.

Another home with a warm fireplace full of grieving people who understood what it meant another planet that I was now a citizen on.

I don't know that the feeling of being an alien.

My cause of grief ever really goes away.

But it does feel a lot better to be an alien when you're not the only one in the room.

No longer an earthling,

I am sending you so much love and beaming you so much ease and community in whatever form it takes in this season of your life.

Good luck.